Stuart Blume

Stuart Blume
University of Amsterdam | UVA · Department of Anthropology

About

131
Publications
11,417
Reads
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2,254
Citations
Introduction
vaccine policies and politics, and their transformation through the past four decades
Skills and Expertise

Publications

Publications (131)
Article
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-means-of-ingress/202403/brain-implants-what-can-we-expect
Article
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/a-means-of-ingress/202312/embracing-an-adhd-identity
Article
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-means-of-ingress/202309/thinking-outside-the-box-in-public-health
Article
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-means-of-ingress/202306/new-hope-for-people-with-no-sense-of-smell
Article
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/a-means-of-ingress/202304/progress-in-medicine-balancing-between-hope-and-hype
Article
https://www.socialeurope.eu/pandemic-preparedness-new-vaccines-are-not-enough
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-means-of-ingress/202302/how-do-science-skepticism-and-reliance-on-tech-coexist
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/means-ingress/202210/vaccines-dont-need-be-limited-infectious-diseases
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/means-ingress/202208/learning-long-covid
Article
the end of an epidemic is not a mirror image of its beginning https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/means-ingress/202206/how-will-we-know-when-the-pandemic-is-over
Article
https://socialeurope.eu/covid-19-and-the-deserving-vulnerable
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https://socialeurope.eu/ukrainian-refugees-and-vaccination-challenges
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/means-ingress/202203/what-exactly-are-side-effects
Article
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/means-ingress/202201/preparing-the-next-generation-covid-19-vaccines
Book
Full-text available
Globally, there has been a move away from national public sector vaccine development over the past thirty years. Immunization and States: The Politics of Making Vaccines explores vaccine geopolitics, analysing why and how this move happened, before looking at the ramifications in the context of COVID-19. This unique book uses eight country studies...
Article
This article discusses the strategies and trajectories deployed by the Forum for the Advancement of Immunization Research (FAIR) to rehabilitate Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), at a time when Sabin’s oral polio vaccine (OPV) had come to dominate the global polio vaccine market. FAIR was an international coalition of scientists and instituti...
Article
As COVID-19 vaccination gathers steam, though not everywhere, the fact that not everyone is wholly convinced of the benefits of vaccination is widely publicised. How to understand these doubts, anxieties, or downright refusals? It is nothing new. In the 1970s and 1980s, newly formed groups critical of vaccination became very visible on internet. Be...
Article
Full-text available
How do unpleasant post-vaccination symptoms become recognized as vaccine ‘side effects'? In this paper, we argue that it is not necessarily the logical outcome of scientific verification that it is said to be. The paper draws on an ethnographic study carried out in a small town, El Carmen de Bolivar, on Colombia's Caribbean coast from February thro...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past 20 or 30 years vast sums of money have gone into ‘global health’. The money has funded vast initiatives largely focused on infectious disease control, as well as university centres and research projects. The numerous and varied definitions of global health share a normative element. Global health implies an egalitarian approach, treat...
Chapter
One of the most striking changes which medicine has undergone in the course of the twentieth century is in its technologies. Government policies of the late 1970s and early 1980s had begun to problematize medicine’s reliance on new technologies and the nature of those technologies. Mounted both from within the medical profession itself as well as b...
Article
It is commonly argued that the decision to introduce a new vaccine is properly based on objective and measurable criteria, including disease burden and efficacy of the vaccine. Moreover, new vaccines are to be introduced rapidly and globally: delay is difficult to justify. Historical studies of new vaccine introductions paint a rather different and...
Article
Inspired by advances in immunology, in the 1970s scientists began to study the possibilities of mobilizing the human immune system against intruders other than pathogenic viruses and bacteria. In 1972 the suggestion was first made that it might be possible to provoke immunity to narcotic dependence. Because molecules of narcotics such as heroin and...
Article
Full-text available
We assessed the development, nutritional status, and complementary feeding of 12- to 23-month-old children from Cuenca, Ecuador in 2013. Ecuador, an upper-middle-income country, developed a child policy in accordance with World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. We collected cross-sectional survey data. Child development was assessed using the I...
Chapter
A century ago, state institutes of public health played an important role in the production of sera and vaccines. In The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries they continued to do so until after World War II. Focusing in particular on The Netherlands, this chapter examines their withdrawal from vaccine production in the past 20 years. In the 1...
Article
Full-text available
Most studies of parenting children with Down syndrome (DS) have been conducted in industrialized countries. They suggest that sensitive communication on the part of professionals, and social support, can lead to acceptance and positive adjustments in the family. This study examined the impact of a diagnosis of DS on Ecuadorian families, in particul...
Article
Full-text available
Despite a growing number of anthropological studies of deaf communities, little attention has been paid to how socioeconomic and cultural factors influence the experiences and the concerns of hearing parents of deaf and hearing-impaired (DHI) children. This study draws on interviews with parents (and some grandparents) of DHI children in Ecuador, a...
Book
Vaccines have helped mankind to tackle the dire threat of infectious disease for more than 100 years. They have become key tools of public health and scientists have been charged with developing themas quickly as possible to combat the emergence of new diseases such as Zika, sars and ‘swine flu’. But why are a growing numbers of parents all over th...
Article
In this book scholars from across the globe investigate changes in ‘society’ and ‘nation’ over time through the lens of immunisation. Such an analysis unmasks the idea of vaccination as a simple health technology and makes visible the social and political complexities in which vaccination programmes are embedded. The collection of essays gives a co...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, the concept of “experiential knowledge” has increasingly been used to characterize the distinctive contribution patients make to decision-making in the health field. Even though it seems well-nigh impossible to characterize it precisely, there is no doubting its significance for decision-making contexts ranging from the individual...
Article
Full-text available
We analyzed an attempt to develop and clinically test a pneumococcal conjugate vaccine for the developing world, undertaken by public health institutions from the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland: the Dutch Nordic Consortium (DNC), between 1990 and 2000. Our review shows that the premature termination of the project was due less to...
Article
Full-text available
Estudio cualitativo exploratorio con enfoque fenomenológico que estudió en 10 Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes Sordos / HipoAcústicos (NNA-S/HA) las relaciones de convivencia con la familia, los profesionales de salud, los maestros, los amigos, la comunidad sorda; las cualidades de resiliencia de los NNA-S/HA encontró que las madres aunque tienen altos...
Article
Full-text available
In accordance with the social model of disability, this study proceeded from the assumption that parents’ experiences of a child’s hearing impairment reflect the circumstances of their lives rather than anything innate in the impairment itself. Few studies have explored the influence both of culture and social structure and of families’ economic an...
Article
Full-text available
Faced with government pressure to transform themselves into research institutions, Ecuador’s universities confront a major challenge. Based on a review of the English language literature, this paper attempts to pull together some of the things that can be learned from the experiences of other universities, in other countries, that have been require...
Chapter
Most parents-to-be hope for, and expect, a ‘normal’ baby: perfectly formed, with all its organs, limbs, muscles, and senses, and equipped to follow a normal process of growth and development. Advances in prenatal genetic testing, embryo selection, and assisted reproductive technologies seem to bring the possibility of a ‘designer baby’ within reach...
Article
What is the "conventional sense" of disability, and how do the questions addressed in this special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values (STHV) differ from those inspired by Donna Haraway and the cyborg? In industrialized societies, the medical profession has authority over the determination of who should count as disabled while "assistive t...
Article
The 1950s and 1960s were a ‘golden age’ of medical progress: an era of high expectations, widespread faith, and life-saving innovations. In the 1970s, as it gradually became clear that medicine's technological advance also contributed to the rising costs of health care, policy makers began to question the ways in which new technologies diffused. So...
Article
At the beginning of the 1960s, it was clear that a vaccine against measles would soon be available. Although measles was (and remains) a killer disease in the developing world, in the United States and Western Europe this was no longer so. Many parents and many medical practitioners considered measles an inevitable stage of a child's development. D...
Article
ColgroveJames, State of immunity: the politics of vaccination in twentieth-century America, Berkeley, University of California Press, and New York, Milbank Memorial Fund, 2006, pp. xiii, 332, illus., £29.00, $39.95 (hardback 978-0-520-24749-3). - Volume 52 Issue 2 - Stuart Blume
Conference Paper
the lecture starts: 'The question ‘How are you? ’doesn’t sound like a very difficult one. We’ve all been asked it countless times. It isn’t as though one needs highly specialised knowledge in order to answer it. To answer ‘I’ve no idea’, as one might if asked to explain string theory for example, would be pretty strange. The difficulty comes from h...
Article
Based on a case-study of the introduction of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine in the Netherlands two decades ago, using documentary and archival sources, this paper examines the way evidence is used in policymaking. Starting from the question of 'what counts as evidence', two central claims are developed. First, the decision to introduce MMR was...
Article
The author argues that a "narrowing down" in the scope of HTA that occurred at the end of the 1970s was paralleled by developments in bioethics at the same time. Both disciplines responded to changes in the institutional and political field in which they operated. Over the past 20 years, decision making in the health field has changed again. To rem...
Book
Part ethnography and part historical study, The Artificial Ear is based on interviews with researchers who were pivotal in the early development and implementation of the new technology necessary for cochlear implants. Through an analysis of the scientific and clinical literature, Stuart Blume reconstructs the history of artificial hearing from its...
Article
“An effective AIDS vaccine could be found as early as 2012, saving 6 million lives if the world is willing to put £10 bn a year into a new programme, the chancellor, Gordon Brown, said in a speech last night in Tanzania”. Faith in biomedical science; the conviction that new vaccines will be translated into lives saved; belief in the necessity of gl...
Article
In the context of global vaccine politics 'vaccine independence' has been defined as the assumption of financial responsibility for vaccine procurement. This paper suggests 'the possibility of vaccine choice' as an alternative meaning for the term. How far does local competence in vaccine development and production provide that possibility? Coupled...
Article
Over the last two or three decades, growing numbers of parents in the industrialized world are choosing not to have their children vaccinated. In trying to explain why this is occurring, public health commentators refer to the activities of an anti-vaccination 'movement'. In the light of three decades of research on (new) social movements, what sen...
Chapter
For half a century the Randomized Controlled Trial has been taken as a ‘gold standard’ in establishing the value of a new drug or other technology.1 Its introduction epitomized the hope of rationalizing medical practice, constantly reiterated by journal editors and textbook writers over the years.2 And yet, despite all the statistical sophisticatio...
Article
Over the past two decades pharmaceutical industry interest in the development of vaccines against infectious diseases has grown. At the same time various partnerships and mechanisms have been established in order to reconcile the interests of private industry with the needs of public health systems (especially in the developing world). The general...
Article
The turn of the millennium has been marked by a large-scale mobilisation of resources for immunisation programmes in developing countries. The resources have been generated by public and private sector parties collaborating in the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). GAVI was formed in response to deteriorating immunisation coverag...
Chapter
Users have become an integral part of technology studies. The essays in this volume look at the creative capacity of users to shape technology in all phases, from design to implementation. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, including a feminist focus on users and use (in place of the traditional emphasis on men and machines), concepts from...
Article
Kirk Jeffrey, Machines in our hearts: the cardiac pacemaker, the implantable defibrillator, and American health care, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. xiii, 370, illus., £33.00 (hardback 0-8018-6579-4) - Volume 47 Issue 3 - Stuart Blume
Research
Full-text available
The Report is built up as follows. In the first chapter we discuss the concept of ‘patient perspective’, and how – and why – it needs to be the starting point of research. How can this be done? How can innovative research be stimulated and can the science bearing on health and illness be ‘changed’? These abstract questions are discussed in Chapter...
Article
Full-text available
In a growing number of countries, health technology assessment (HTA) has come to be seen as a vital component in policy making. Even though the assessment of the social, political, and ethical aspects of health technology is listed as one of its main objectives, in practice, the integration of such dimensions into HTA remains limited. Recent social...
Chapter
The conduction of a phase I trial especially with incurable cancer involves a psychological burden for both sides: the patients and the staff as well. In addition the trial in progress is a multi-disciplinary, multi-national, multi-institutional study, outside of the traditional medical structure. The effectiveness of the team functioning is variab...
Article
The rivalry between Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, the U.S. scientists who each developed an efficient polio vaccine, is legendary. In a Science & Society Essay, [Blume and Geesink,][1]. examine the pressures that prompted the United States to switch from the Salk inactivated polio vaccine to the Sabin live-attenuated oral vaccine in the 1960s. This...
Article
This article deals with the author’s experiences in studying cochlear implantation over a period of some years. While no overt controversy surrounded the device or the practices associated with it in the Netherlands when this work started (as was the case elsewhere), studying its introduction became complex. Following others, the research strategy...
Article
The cochlear implant, an electronic device by means of which some totally deaf people can be provided with a form of hearing, has been increasingly used since the early 1980s. The mass media have typically presented it as an example of the remarkable success of modern technological medicine. In France and The Netherlands, the countries on which thi...
Article
This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages which a prolonged period at a foreign university, as part of his or her research training, offers the doctoral student. Despite increased interest in student mobility at the postgraduate level, little research on actual experiences of sojourns abroad among doctoral students has been conducted....
Article
Current interest in early warning can be understood as a natural response to the regularity with which health service planners have been overwhelmed by new technology. Planning the rational introduction of a new technology should be facilitated by advance warning of its imminent arrival on the market. Current approaches to early warning tend to rel...
Article
Development of the cochlear implant, discussed in this article, depended vitally on deaf people being persuaded to undergo implantation. Media ''reconstruction'' of the device as the ''bionic ear'' was typically encouraged by implant pioneers. Unexpectedly however a ''counter-rhetoric'' based on a very different understanding of deafness emerged. W...
Article
Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.
Article
Each group involved in the development of a new medical technology constantly assesses the value of the emergent technique in terms of the group's own specific goals and conventions. The history of infrared thermography demonstrates the social nature of this assessment process.
Conference Paper
Looking back over their professional lives, eminent scientists often contrast current laboratory practices with those of their own early years. 'In those days,' they tell us, 'it was usual to build one's own equipment. Today no on starts work without the most advanced equipment money can buy.' This essay takes this observation as its starting point...
Article
The process of technological change in obsterics must be understood as contingent on the exigencies of the professional project, rather than in terms simply of improvement or dehumanization of care. Transformation in the procedures by which the female pelvis and the fetal head have been measured illustrate this point. The development of new measure...
Chapter
Modern social sciences have been committed to the improvement of public policy. However, doubts have arisen about the possibility and desirability of a policy-oriented social science. In this book, leading specialists in the field analyse both the development and failings of policy-oriented social science. In contrast to other writings on the subje...

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