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Instead of diminishing with the spectacular advancement of medical expertise in the country , unqualified biomedical practice in India has been strengthened by the growth of the pharmaceutical production in the twenty first century. In public health discourse, the view that the informal health practitioners have to be punished and abolished has been countered by the recommendation that they could be trained and incorporated in primary health care where public health amenities are inadequate. The quality of care provided by the informal health care practitioners has also been subject to clinical assessment based on standardized patient vignettes. Based on a sociological approach, this paper examines the time line of chronically ill patients under lived conditions to arrive at an understanding of the role of informal health practitioners in long term treatment and highlights the setbacks. This paper draws on 253 household surveys from two villages in Madhya Pradesh, in depth interviews with four unqualified practitioners in the area, twenty five unstructured interviews of chronic patients, twenty five structured interviews on the cases of untimely death and FGDs with health workers in 2021. Informal health care practitioners offer consultation cum dispensing of medicines and are the primary source of biomedical care in the remote study area without any public transport. But they are 'for profit' economic actors who are ill-equipped to handle chronic diseases. What sets them aside from the qualified private doctors in the town is their social obligation to balance their profit motive with the ethics of proximity and neighborly ties with the villagers amidst whom they reside. These features of the market and community place the informal health care practitioners at the cusp of economy and society and defy simple binaries that they are either crooks or assets. • Unqualified health practitioners provide medical care in India where none is available. • Assessing their practices, clientele and exact role is crucial to health care policy. • One point standardized patient vignettes are used to assess their quality of care. • Their treatment of chronically and severely ill patients over time also has to be examined. • They are 'for profit' economic actors, but embedded in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among men who have sex with men and transgender women in Tanzania, this article explores the various types of work that may go into enrolment into PrEP programming and using pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). PrEP protects against HIV acquisition and is widely touted as an essential tool in 'ending AIDS by 2030'. While taking PrEP has often been portrayed as 'just taking a pill a day' in public health campaigns, a striking observation during fieldwork was that enrolling in PrEP programming and adhering to PrEP involved a wide range of tasks. Inspired by this fieldwork experience and the literature on sociology of work, more specifically illness work and patient work, we started to think of these tasks as work. This paper identifies the range of tasks that PrEP users in Dar es Salaam had to perform as part of their enrolment and usage of PrEP. We provide a description of these tasks, organised into three categories of work that we refer to as (a) readying work, (b) user work, and (c) social navigation work that jointly make up what we propose to call biomedical prevention work. We further suggest that this analytical framework can be applicable to other biomedical prevention methods in other contexts. • Describes what it may entail to use PrEP among key populations in Dar es Salaam • PrEP use among men who have sex with men and transgender women • We argue that PrEP users do 'work' to use PrEP as HIV prevention • Presents novel conceptual framework: Biomedical Prevention Work • Framework describes how people may take preventative care with biomedical technology [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The term 'industry' can be understood in a variety of ways. • Simple understandings of 'industry' miss out on the complexity of relations. • Systemic and social understandings of 'industry' provide more opportunities. Use of the term 'alcohol industry' plays an important role in discussions of alcohol and public health. In this paper, we examine how the term is currently used and explore the merits of alternative conceptualisations. We start by examining current ways of referring to 'alcohol industry' in public health and then explore the potential for organisational theory, political science, and sociology to provide alcohol research with more inclusive and nuanced conceptualizations. We identify, and critique, three conceptualisations based on purely economic understandings of industry: literal, market , and supply-chain understandings. We then examine three alternative conceptualizations based on systemic understandings of industry: organizational, social-network, and common-interest understandings. In examining these alternatives, we also identify the extent to which they open up new ways of approaching the levels at which industry influence is understood to operate in alcohol and public health research and policy. Each of the six understandings of 'industry' can play a role in research but their utility depends on the question being asked and the breadth and depth of the analysis being undertaken. However, for those intending to engage with a broader disciplinary base, approaches grounded in the systemic understandings of 'industry' are better positioned to study the complex nexus of relationships that contribute to alcohol industry influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]