Introduction: Human Animal Health in Medical Anthropology.

This introductory article maps out the parameters of an emerging field of medical anthropology, human animal health, and its potential for reorienting the discipline. Ethnographic explorations of how animals are implicated in health, well-being, and pathogenicity allow us to revisit theorizations of central topics in medical anthropology, notably ecology, biopolitics, and care. Meanwhile, the conditions of the Anthropocene force us to develop new tools to think about human animal entanglement. Anthropogenic change reorients debates around health and disease, but it also requires us to move beyond what some consider the traditional boundaries of the discipline. Zoonotic diseases, veterinary medicine, animal therapeutics, and food and farming are examples of topics that force such movement.

Local Biologies, Leaky Things, and the Chemical Infrastructure of Global Health.

This article examines how two chemical substances are woven into the infrastructure of global health as well as into the social lives of health workers in urban Nicaragua. One chemical is temephos, an organophosphate used to control mosquitoes. The other is chlorine-based products, which are used to disinfect surfaces and water. While global health projects tend to treat these substances as stable objects, there are three ways in which they might be understood as leaky things, implicated in fluid social interactions. First, global health chemicals are tracked through rigid accounting, but because of numerical leakages, they become vehicles for fashioning new forms of concern. Second, chemicals leak structurally: They can be dissolved and reproduced at a molecular level, although that dissolution is never absolute, and that reproduction is not everywhere the same. Third, chemicals leak in a sensory fashion. Sensory interactions with chemicals produce an entanglement of knowledge about bodies and environments.

"Love isn't there in your stomach": a moral economy of medical citizenship among Nicaraguan community health workers.

Drawing on participant-observation in Nicaraguan dengue prevention campaigns and a series of semistructured interviews with Nicaraguan health ministry personnel, this article shows how community health workers (CHWs) balanced two kinds of "medical citizenship." In some situations, CHWs acted as professional monitors and models of hygienic behavior. At other times, CHWs acted as compassionate advocates for their poor neighbors. In 2008, Nicaragua's Sandinista government moved to end a long-standing policy of paying CHWs, recasting them as citizen-volunteers in a "popular struggle" against dengue. Although CHWs approved of the revival of grassroots advocacy, they were hostile to the elimination of compensation. Framing this ambivalence as part of CHWs' desire to serve as "brokers" between the poor and the state, I suggest that attention to medical citizenship provides insight into the sometimes contradictory ways in which CHWs engage the participatory health policies now taking hold in Latin America and elsewhere.