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The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted ethnic minorities in the global north, evidenced by higher rates of transmission, morbidity, and mortality relative to population sizes. Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in London had extremely high SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence rates, reflecting patterns in Israel and the US. The aim of this paper is to examine how responsibilities over health protection are conveyed, and to what extent responsibility is sought by, and shared between, state services, and 'community' stakeholders or representative groups, and families in public health emergencies. The study investigates how public health and statutory services stakeholders, Orthodox Jewish communal custodians and households sought to enact health protection in London during the first year of the pandemic (March 2020–March 2021). Twenty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted across these cohorts. Findings demonstrate that institutional relations – both their formation and at times fragmentation – were directly shaped by issues surrounding COVID-19 control measures. Exchanges around protective interventions (whether control measures, contact tracing technologies, or vaccines) reveal diverse and diverging attributions of responsibility and authority. The paper develops a framework of public health relations to understand negotiations between statutory services and minority groups over responsiveness and accountability in health protection. Disaggregating public health relations can help social scientists to critique who and what characterises institutional relationships with minority groups, and what ideas of responsibility and responsiveness are projected by differently-positioned stakeholders in health protection. • COVID-19 produced diverse responses and relations around health protection in London. •Pandemic preparedness can be enhanced by mapping possible partners in localities. •Establishing public health partnerships requires adequate resources. •Public health services cannot defer responsibility entirely to local partners. •Households are key constituents of public health relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) continues to present a challenge to international healthcare systems and structures of public health. The focus on optimizing antibiotic prescribing in human populations has challenged healthcare systems charged with making responsible their physician-prescribers. In the United States, physicians in almost every specialty and role use antibiotics as part of their therapeutic armamentariums. In United States hospitals, most patients are administered antibiotics during their stay. Therefore, antibiotic prescribing and utilization is a commonly accepted part of medical practice. In this paper, we utilize social science work on antibiotic prescribing to examine a critical space of care in United States hospital settings. From March to August 2018, we used ethnographic methods to study hospital-based medical intensive care unit physicians at the offices and hospital floors they frequent in two urban United States teaching hospitals. We focused on eliciting the interactions and discussions surrounding antibiotic decision-making that are uniquely influenced by the context of medical intensive care units. We argue that antibiotic use in the medical intensive care units under study was shaped by urgency, hierarchy, and uncertainty representative of the medical intensive care unit's role within the larger hospital system. We conclude that by studying the culture of antibiotic prescribing in medical intensive care units, we can see more clearly both the vulnerability of the looming antimicrobial resistance crisis and by contrast the perceived insignificance of stewarding antibiotic use when considered alongside the fragility of life amidst acute medical concerns regularly experienced in the unit. • Antibiotic prescribing in the intensive care unit was shaped by existing workflows. • The pressure to treat patients in an urgent manner led to increased antibiotic use. • Felt urgency combined with complicated patient cases fostered uncertainty. • Participants recognized an interconnectedness with other teams working in the unit. • Participants used timeliness as a rationale for antibiotic prescribing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors present a brief personal account of the senior author's 30 years of exploration in behavioral gerontology. The main thesis of the paper is that behavioral methods and interventions have found a home both in mainstream gerontology and at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). There are three sections: (a) a personal vignette discussing the problems inherent in using operant terminology in a nonoperant world; (b) a discussion, with examples from NIH sources, of the Institutes' views on behavior change; and (c) using Burgio and Burgio (1986) as a reference point, the authors show evidence of progress and vitality of behavioral gerontology in 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In social sciences, there is currently rare consensus on the underlying mechanism for cultural evolution, partially due to lack of suitable data. The evolution of first names of newborn babies offers a remarkable example for such researches. In this paper, we employ the historical data on baby names from the United States to investigate the evolutionary process of culture, in particular focusing on how inequality among baby names changes over time. Then we propose a stochastic model where individual choice is determined by both individual preference and social influence, and show that the decrease in the strength of social influence can account for all the observed empirical features. Therefore, we claim that the weakening of social influence drives cultural evolution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper is an examination of the “discourse of disaster” that has cleared the way for the dismantling of public housing in the US. It is argued that this narrative represents public housing communities as deviant, dysfunctional, or obsolete. In response, residents have generated a discourse of resistance that focuses on dimensions of home and community. The social science evidence that validates the residents’ storyline is summarized. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Childhood asthma is a major chronic condition affecting millions of children in this country, yet little is known about its potential long term consequences. In this paper, we estimate the relationship between childhood asthma and several outcomes as a young adult. To overcome many of the methodological issues plaguing earlier research on this topic, we estimate sibling fixed effect models that correct for measurement error using parental reports of asthma status. In our preferred specification, we find substantial long term impacts of childhood asthma on general health status, obesity, and missed work and school days as a young adult. Broadly, our findings contribute to the growing literature in social sciences on the impacts of early life health conditions on later life health and social outcomes and suggest early treatment of asthma may have long-run benefits on young adult health and socioeconomic outcomes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop an expert system using fuzzy approach to investigate the effects of noise pollution on speech interference. The speech interference measured in terms of speech intelligibility is considered to be a function of noise level, distance between speaker and listener, and the age of the listener. The main source of model development is the reports of World Health Organization (WHO) and field surveys conducted by various researchers. It is implemented on Fuzzy Logic Toolbox of MATLAB using both Mamdani and Sugeno techniques. The results are found to be in good agreement with the findings of World Health Organization (WHO) and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The study reveals that for good communication at normal distances (‘short’ and ‘medium’) encountered in ambient environment, the noise level should not exceed 65dB(A) for ‘young’ and ‘middle aged’, and 55dB(A) for ‘old’ persons. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]