
Paul H MasonMacquarie University · Department of Anthropology
Paul H Mason
B.Biomed.Sci. Hons(Sci) Grad.Cert.Arts(Anth) PhD
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124
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Introduction
Anthropologist - Conservationist - Educator.
Prior to moving back to anthropology research and teaching, I was head coordinator for the Masters of Conservation Education, a joint initiative of the Taronga Conservation Society Australia and the University of Sydney that ran from 2019-2022.
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Publications
Publications (124)
Evidence from studies of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA extracted from Neanderthal fossils and humans points to fascinating hypotheses concerning the types of interbreeding that occurred between these two species. Humans and Neanderthals share a small percentage of nuclear DNA. However, humans and Neanderthals do not possess the same mitochondrial D...
Degeneracy is a word with two meanings. The popular usage of the word denotes deviance and decay. In scientific discourse, degeneracy refers to the idea that different pathways can lead to the same output. In the biological sciences, the concept of degeneracy has been ignored for a few key reasons. Firstly, the word "degenerate" in popular culture...
Le Brésil est un pays caractérisé par d‘importants contrastes entre la pauvreté et la richesse, la beauté et la pollution, les 'bidonvilles‘ et les 'gratte-ciel(s)‘. Dans le monde en voie de développement, le Brésil est considéré comme un exemple de ce qui peut arriver autre part lorsque l‘urbanisation est probable. La population urbaine augmente b...
Why animal communication displays are so complex and how they have evolved are active foci of research with a long and rich history. Progress towards an evolutionary analysis of signal complexity, however, has been constrained by a lack of hypotheses to explain similarities and/or differences in signalling systems across taxa. To address this, we a...
Stigma and isolation are common in people with tuberculosis (TB). Social isolation contributes to reduced health outcomes and TB treatment adherence. Stigma and the drivers of isolation in people with Drug-Resistant (DR)-TB may include modifiable advice and practices of family and Health Care Workers (HCW). This study aimed to understand the driver...
Empathy is the ability to experience affective and cognitive states of another person, whilst maintaining a distinct self, in order to understand the other. It is a multidimensional phenomenon, ranging from vicarious distress to near complete understanding, with many shades in between. As an almost universal and integral human construct, empathy ha...
Multidrug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) has a substantial impact on individuals and communities globally, including lengthy, expensive and burdensome therapy with high rates of treatment failure and death. Strategies to prevent disease are well established for those who acquire latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) after exposure to drug susceptib...
Background:
Biobanks provide an important foundation for genomic and personalised medicine. In order to enhance their scientific power and scope, they are increasingly becoming part of national or international networks. Public trust is essential in fostering public engagement, encouraging donation to, and facilitating public funding for biobanks....
Background:
In-hospital logistic management barriers (LMB) are considered to be important risk factors for delays in TB diagnosis and treatment initiation (TB-dt), which perpetuates TB transmission and the development of TB morbidity and mortality. We assessed the contribution of hospital auxiliary workers (HAWs) and 24-h TB laboratory services us...
Environmental education and ecotourism - Fernando Ramírez and Josefina Santana, (2019). Environmental education and ecotourism. Springer - Paul H. Mason
The Eco-Certified Child: Citizenship and education for sustainability and environment - Malin Ideland, (2019). The Eco-Certified Child: Citizenship and education for sustainability and environment, Palgrave Macmillan. - Paul H. Mason
Background
Mozambique is one of the countries with the deadly implementation gaps in the tuberculosis (TB) care and services delivery. In-hospital delays in TB diagnosis and treatment, transmission and mortality still persist, in part, due to poor-quality of TB care cascade.
Objective
We aimed to assess, from the healthcare workers’ (HCW) perspect...
Introduction Treatment of latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) plays a substantial role in the prevention of drug-susceptible tuberculosis (TB). However, clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of preventive therapy for presumed multidrug-resistant (MDR) LTBI are lacking. This trial aims to evaluate the efficacy of the antibiotic levofloxacin in p...
Biobanks provide an important foundation for genomic and personalised medicine. In order to enhance their scientific power and scope, they are increasingly becoming part of national or international networks. Public trust is essential in fostering public engagement, encouraging donation to, and facilitating public funding for biobanks. Globalisatio...
Background Biobanks provide an important foundation for genomic and personalised medicine. In order to enhance their scientific power and scope, they are increasingly becoming part of national or international networks. Public trust is essential in fostering public engagement, encouraging donation to, and facilitating public funding for biobanks. G...
Background: Biobanks provide an important foundation for genomic and personalised medicine. In order to enhance their scientific power and scope, they are increasingly becoming part of national or international networks. Public trust is essential in fostering public engagement, encouraging donation to, and facilitating public funding for biobanks....
Background
Biobanks provide an important foundation for genomic and personalised medicine. In order to enhance their scientific power and scope, they are increasingly becoming part of national or international networks. Public trust is essential in fostering public engagement, encouraging donation to, and facilitating public funding for biobanks. G...
A monocausal bacteriological understanding of infectious disease orients tuberculosis control efforts towards antimicrobial interventions. A bias towards technological solutions can leave multistranded public health and social interventions largely neglected. In the context of globalising biomedical approaches to infectious disease control, this et...
Eduardo J. Gómez, Geopolitics in Health: Confronting Obesity, Aids, And Tuberculosis in the Emerging BRICS Economies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), pp. xiii + 304, $54.75, paperback, ISBN: 9781421423616. - Volume 62 Issue 4 - Paul H. Mason
Over the last two decades attempts to control the problem of tuberculosis have become increasingly more complex, as counties adopt and adapt to evolving global TB strategies, particularly those of the WHO. In this time significant increased funding has also increased apace; diagnostic possibilities have evolved; and greater attention is being paid...
Looking to nature for medicine is nothing new – we have been doing it for tens of thousands of years
and although modern pharmaceutical science has come a long way from those ancient roots, nature
is and will always be an important source of useful compounds and inspiration. Dismissing
nature in this regard is a huge mistake as evolution is the gre...
Biobanks are increasingly being linked together into global networks in order to maximise their capacity to identify causes of and treatments for disease. While there is great optimism about the potential of these biobank networks to contribute to personalised and data-driven medicine, there are also ethical concerns about, among other things, risk...
In this Symposium on the Ethics and Epistemology of Big Data, we present four perspectives on the ways in which the rapid growth in size of research databanks-i.e. their shift into the realm of "big data"-has changed their moral, socio-political, and epistemic status. While there is clearly something different about "big data" databanks, we encoura...
The availability of diverse sources of data related to health and illness from various types of modern communication technology presents the possibility of augmenting medical knowledge, clinical care, and the patient experience. New forms of data collection and analysis will undoubtedly transform epidemiology, public health, and clinical practice,...
The case outlined below is the basis for the In That Case section of the "Ethics and Epistemology of Big Data" symposium. Jordan receives reports from two separate personal genomic tests that provide intriguing data about ancestry and worrying but ambiguous data about the potential risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. What began as a personal cu...
The irreducibility of nocebo effects and treatment side effects warrants context-driven, culturally sensitive approaches that recognize the psychogenicity of social relations not just in rhetoric but deeply embedded within diagnostic and treatment algorithms. Taking the nocebo and placebo more seriously in clinical practice will help medical doctor...
Biomedical innovation and translation are increasingly emphasizing research using “big data.” The hope is that big data methods will both speed up research and make its results more applicable to “real-world” patients and health services. While big data research has been embraced by scientists, politicians, industry, and the public, numerous ethica...
Tuberculosis (TB) remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and the burdens of this disease continue to track prior disadvantage. In order to galvanise a coordinated global response, WHO has recently launched the End TB Campaign that aims to eliminate TB by 2050. Key to this is the introduction of population screening programmes...
The process of globalization is commonly espoused as a means for promoting global health. Efforts to "go global" can, however, easily go awry as a result of lack of attention to local social, economic, and political contexts and/or as a result of commercial and political imperatives that allow local populations to be exploited. Critical analysis of...
The insomnia illness experience can be conceptualised as a form of biographical disruption. Using a critical interpretive phenomenological lens 51 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with patients from specialist sleep and psychology clinics (n = 22) and the general community (n = 29). Patients’ narratives revealed key phases of thei...
Ageing is a poorly understood process of human development mired by a scientific approach that struggles to piece together distributed variable factors involved in ongoing transformations of living systems. Reconfiguring existing research paradigms, we review the concept of ‘degeneracy’, which has divergent popular and technical definitions. The te...
RECIPROCITY-BUILDING AND THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION IN TUBERCULOSIS RESEARCH - P. H. Mason, A. Roy, P. Singh
Albertet al. [1] advocate for a multipronged approach in rolling out new diagnostic technology for tuberculosis (TB), stating “diagnostic tests alone, if not implemented with a comprehensive package of accompanying tools and within the context of a strengthened health system, may fail to demonstrate the expected benefit”. This is a lesson learned f...
This chapter addresses the representational politics of endemicity, arguing provocatively that viruses don’t kill people—people kill people. In pursuit of this claim, the authors develop a framework derived from historical studies of public health and from contemporary research in Structural One Health to argue that endemicity is not a natural phen...
Festivals bring people together in affirmations of community. This article looks at two festivals in coastal locations in Indonesia and Brazil with a close inspection of performances of fight-dancing included within both festivals. The improvisatory or choreographed organization of the fight-dancing performances echoes the manner in which the festi...
Objective:
This opinion piece encourages mental health researchers and clinicians to engage with mental health issues among tuberculosis patients in the Asia-Pacific region in a culturally appropriate and ethical manner. The diversity of cultural contexts and the high burden of tuberculosis throughout the Asia-Pacific presents significant challeng...
Educational children's book about tuberculosis in Spanish
An educational children's book about tuberculosis in Romanian. Translated by Oana Ion and illustrated by Amelia Darmawan.
An educational children's book about tuberculosis in Swahili translated with the kind and generous assistance of Beatrice Malingoti, Aldin K. Mutembei, Lwijisyo Mwaipungu, and Issa Sabi from Tanzania.
An educational children's book about tuberculosis in Italian.
An educational children's book about tuberculosis translated into German by Christiane Klinner.
An educational book about tuberculosis for children published in Turkish
Educational Children's book about tuberculosis translated into Indonesian
Educational children's book about tuberculosis translated into Khmer by Rothsophal Nguon.
Educational children's book about tuberculosis in Javanese.
An educational children's book about tuberculosis in Mauritian Creole.
Educational children's book about tuberculosis translated into Bengali by Nova Ahmed.
Educational children's book about tuberculosis in Tamil translated by Jayashree Janardhan.
Educational children's book about tuberculosis translated into Hindi by Viren Joseph & Pavithra Joseph.
Educational children's book about tuberculosis translated into Kannada by
Pavithra Joseph & Gladys Noel.
Children's book about tuberculosis translated into Telugu by Suresh Kosaraju
Educational children's book translated into Polish by Bartłomiej Kołodziejczyk and Borys Wróbel.
Educational children's book about tuberculosis translated into Thai by Kamontip Rasri Klosen and Wibool Piyawattanametha
Educational children's book about tuberculosis translated into Malayalam by Lakshmi Menon and Parvathy Gopinathan.
An educational children's book about tuberculosis translated into Swedish by Dylan Möller.
An educational children's book about tuberculosis translated into Marshallese by Caleb Klipowicz, Melanie Carbine, and Sheldon Riklon, MD
With attention to the experiences, agency, and rights of tuberculosis (TB) patients, this symposium on TB and ethics brings together a range of different voices from the social sciences and humanities. To develop fresh insights and new approaches to TB care and prevention, it is important to incorporate diverse perspectives from outside the strictl...
Fighting arts have their own beauty, internal philosophy, and are connected to cultural worlds in meaningful and important ways. Combining approaches from ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology, performance theory and anthropology, the distinguishing feature of this book is that it highlights the centrality of the pluripotent art form of pencak silat amo...
Overall, this collection is very effective. It does not break much new conceptual ground, but it does highlight the diversity of children's experiences, the diversity of efforts to improve their situations and the diversity of ways in which young people sought to assert control over their lives.
Overall, this collection is very effective. It does not break much new conceptual ground, but it does highlight the diversity of children's experiences, the diversity of efforts to improve their situations and the diversity of ways in which young people sought to assert control over their lives.
Les innovations du domaine biomédical ont peu de chances de fournir des mesures de lutte contre la tuberculose (TB) à la fois efficaces et éthiques sans recherché complémentaire en sciences sociales. Cependant, le grand intérêt vis-à-vis du travail interdisciplinaire est souvent entravé par des différences de langage et de concepts spécifiques à ch...
Rhodes John , The End of Plagues: The Global Battle Against Infectious Disease (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. xxii, 235, $27.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-137-27852-4. - Volume 59 Issue 4 - Paul H. Mason
Background
Tuberculosis (TB) treatment is lengthy and psychologically demanding. Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) is a useful model for conceptualising human behaviour in response to stress. SCT situates behavioural, environmental, and personal factors in a relationship of reciprocal determinism. Understanding a patient's experience requires not only...
What is considered typical and usual is guided by the cultural framework a person is accustomed to. In the brain sciences, it can easily be forgotten that “normal” and “normality” are not rock solid concepts. Simply acknowledging that “normal” does not have an objective existence is insufficient without also changing scientific practices accordingl...
Background
Tuberculosis (TB) treatment is lengthy and psychologically demanding. Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) is a useful model for conceptualising human behaviour in response to stress. SCT situates behavioural, environmental, and personal factors in a relationship of reciprocal determinism. Understanding a patient’s experience requires not only...
Medical research increasingly relies on collections of donated human tissue, such as DNA samples, blood samples and solid organs and tissues. These collections of donated samples—referred to as “biobanks”, “biorepositories” or “tissue banks”—can be used in basic science experiments, population studies, or towards the refinement and personalisation...
Tuberculosis (TB) researchers and clinicians, by virtue of the social disease they study, are drawn into an engagement with ways of understanding illness that extend beyond the strictly biomedical model. Primers on social science concepts directly relevant to TB, however, are lacking. The particularities of TB disease mean that certain social scien...
Often relegated to the methods section of genetic research articles, the term “degeneracy” is regularly misunderstood and its theoretical significance widely understated. Degeneracy describes the ability of different structures to be conditionally interchangeable in their contribution to system functions. Frequently mislabeled redundancy, degenerac...
The Remedy by Thomas Goetz and Experiment Eleven by Peter Pringle exist like bookends to a landmark period in the history of tuberculosis (TB). The Remedy starts with the dawning of the germ theory, and Experiment Eleven covers the blossoming of the antibiotic era. Goetz revolves his story around Robert Koch (1843-1910) and Pringle centres on Alber...
Questions
Questions (11)
Answer this question any way you see relevant. How is 'normal' defined in your field? How does your discipline approach the question "what is normal?" How is normality rolled out among your peers in your area of expertise? How is the concept of normality used in your particular specialisation? What do scholars in your research area have to say about normality?
@australiananthropology are hosting an instagram #aasengagedanthropology public anthropology competition with votes closing in a couple of days. If you like fun education and enjoy a giggle, Head on over to their instagram page to check out the entries and hopefully like and comment on my video:
Research and Data analysis on large data sets holds great promise. What have been some of the major findings using big data research in recent years?
Submit a response (500-800 words) to the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (JBI) for inclusion in the 13(1) issue to be published in March 2016:
I recently reviewed Margaret Lock's latest book, The Alzheimer Conundrum, and her anti-reductionist arguments are well-worn theoretical critiques in anthropology. I would like to see more people from biomedical science engage with her research. How much should medical anthropologists publish in anthropology journals, and how much should they reach out to audiences reading medical and science journals?
The WHO have just released an action framework for TB elimination in low-incidence countries. Tuberculosis elimination requires more than case finding and treatment, but also requires the identification and treatment of latent tuberculosis infection. I'm interested in what people see as some of the challenges in various cultural settings as TB elimination is balanced with the protection and promotion of human rights, ethics and equity.
When did 'entanglement' become such a popular word in the social sciences and humanities? What features of this word make it such a pervasive term in contemporary anthropology in particular?