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“To eat is human, to digest, divine”: Mark Twain’s characterization of dining seems just to most of us. Yet had he considered food allergies, he would need to have added a postscript. While digesting certain foods is conducive to heavenly pleasures for some, it can mean hellish agony to others. Twain shall be forgiven. Indeed, paediatrician Clemens von Pirquet only coined the term allergy four years before Twain’s passing, namely in 1906; closely followed by Nobel Prize winner and physiologist Charles Richet’s introduction of the term anaphylaxis. Enter Matthew Smith, more than a century later, who joins his former advisor Mark Jackson (Allergy: A History of a Modern Malady and Asthma: The Biography) in exploring the history of allergies. And indeed, Smith commends an illuminating in-depth look at the tumultuous history of one of the more divisive members of the allergy family.

This article focuses on the social and cultural aspects of the unprecedented and unparalleled proliferation of food-related allergies and intolerances. It thus aims to contribute to filling the theoretical lacunae in the current sociological approach to this fairly recent phenomenon. The article’s framework is divided into four segments. First, the rise in food allergies is placed within the field of the social history and medicalization of allergies, and seeks to understand the phenomenon in the context of the industrialized modern world. The following section discusses how and why lay experts are increasingly dominating the food allergy-related discourse. Drawing on recent empirical data, it is further shown how food allergies rise along with a population’s affluence and education. Third, the idiosyncrasies of food allergies and intolerances are addressed with respect to food consumption and its changing social implications. It is argued that individualization places less pressure on individuals to conform to broader social norms of food refusal, which offers the sufferers with a newly acquired sense of control over a random, scientified, and confounding food availability and provides a medium to covertly convey their educational and socioeconomic background. Lastly, the health belief model is applied in order to suggest a further potential explanation for the current increase in self-reported food allergies and intolerances.

This paper attempts to increase our understanding of communities and how they may foster a healthy and particularly caring environment. In doing so, it will shed light on broader issues in the study of human ageing and cohabitation. Can we learn from cultures that seem to age ‘successfully’? Can we merge their healthy lifestyles with our Western and highly medicalised care systems? Above all, how do successful communities work and how can they last? These questions speak to a set of further considerations that ought to be placed in a much broader context of public health and medical history. The changes in the sociomedical landscapes we are witnessing in today’s modern societies urge us to examine the role of community care in relation to health. This article further aims to explore the relationship between community and care and how these concepts heavily depend on the socio-political and cultural-moral context. I begin with examples of communities in which cohabitation arrangements have an astonishingly positive influence on their members’ health. This is followed by a discussion of the key factors which appear to contribute to a community’s resilience and vitality and I address research which suggests that social support and a caring environment may even decelerate the biological ageing process. In contrast, I will then consider how the shift from institutionalised medicine and care to more community and home-based approaches are in conflict with the social realities of those facing chronic and age-related diseases and how the split between the two seems unbridgeable.

This article reports an ethnographic study of the handover routines in Germany's first dementia village, with a central focus on how care is balanced between domestic intimacy and institutional detachment. The term 'professionalised intimacy' is used for the vivid interplay between comfort and intimacy that renders the interaction between care workers and residents far more complex than previous theories have articulated. Because of the intimacy involved in community building, however, the promise of personalised care must clash with the bureaucratic structures of an official institution, potentially depriving the care workers of their public, respected identity in the process. The study further suggests that most care workers, in fact, support this division between domestic intimacy and institutional detachment. Even if they subscribe to a dementia village's philosophy of personalised care, their medical training and enculturation has endowed them with a habitus compatible with the modern health profession, with incentives on achieving quantifiable health goals. The dementia village is thus illustrated as a pioneering health care experiment that negotiates rivalling discourses of intimacy, professionalisation, and medicalisation.

Digital health encompasses a wide range of novel digital technologies related to health and medicine. Such technologies rely on recent advances in the collection and analysis of ever increasing amounts of data from both patients and healthy citizens. Along with new opportunities, however, come new ethical and policy challenges. These range from the need to adapt current evidence-based standards, to issues of privacy, oversight, accountability and public trust as well as national and international data governance and management. This review illustrates key issues and challenges facing the rapidly unfolding digital health paradigm and reflects on the impact of big data in medical research and clinical practice both internationally and in Switzerland. It concludes by emphasising five conditions that will be crucial to fulfil in order to foster innovation and fair benefit sharing in digital health., Swiss Medical Weekly, 148, ISSN:1424-7860, ISSN:1424-3997

We explored the characteristics and motivations of people who, having obtained their genetic or genomic data from Direct-To-Consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT) companies, voluntarily decide to share them on the publicly accessible web platform openSNP. The study is the first attempt to describe open data sharing activities undertaken by individuals without institutional oversight. In the paper we provide a detailed overview of the distribution of the demographic characteristics and motivations of people engaged in genetic or genomic open data sharing. The geographical distribution of the respondents showed the USA as dominant. There was no significant gender divide, the age distribution was broad, educational background varied and respondents with and without children were equally represented. Health, even though prominent, was not the respondents' primary or only motivation to be tested. As to their motivations to openly share their data, 86.05% indicated wanting to learn about themselves as relevant, followed by contributing to the advancement of medical research (80.30%), improving the predictability of genetic testing (76.02%) and considering it fun to explore genotype and phenotype data (75.51%). Whereas most respondents were well aware of the privacy risks of their involvement in open genetic data sharing and considered the possibility of direct, personal repercussions troubling, they estimated the risk of this happening to be negligible. Our findings highlight the diversity of DTC-GT consumers who decide to openly share their data. Instead of focusing exclusively on health-related aspects of genetic testing and data sharing, our study emphasizes the importance of taking into account benefits and risks that stretch beyond the health spectrum. Our results thus lend further support to the call for a broader and multi-faceted conceptualization of genomic utility., PLoS ONE, 12 (5), ISSN:1932-6203