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Surrounded by an otherwise occupied crowd, a person wearing a white cap and shirt uses gloved hands to work with the finger of a person seated beside them. The second person wears a red-orange dress and holds a baby while a slightly older child stands beside them, looking at the viewer.

Gene Therapy’s Promise Meets Nigeria’s Sickle Cell Reality

Breakthrough treatments can now cure sickle cell anemia in the U.S. But the pricey therapies will hardly help in Nigeria, where social changes could do more for millions impacted by the disease.
Three people toward the image’s left pull a green net with several lobsters in it from the water while a person wearing a straw hat puts lobsters into a bucket. Two other people look on.

Neighborliness Matters to Your Health

Drawing from cross-cultural research, an anthropologist shows how neighborliness can lessen wealth-based health disparities.
Several people wearing puffy hooded coats, beanies, windbreakers, and backpacks watch lava and smoke pour out of a volcano on the horizon.

Slow Death by Volcano

A biocultural anthropologist shares new research on the surprising long-term hazards of volcanoes in Iceland—and how to address them.
A black-and-white photograph features four people in a discussion, with three casually dressed facing one who has their hair pinned up and wears a white-collared dress. The latter speaks and points to a flyer on the wall.

A Native Alaska Community’s Reckoning With Vaccine Hesitancy

An anthropologist’s research with Tlingit communities in Alaska shows they have good reasons to be skeptical about vaccines. They know their history.
A radiologist examines an X-ray image of human lungs on two computer screens.

At the Limits of Cure for Tuberculosis

In a new book, anthropologist Bharat Venkat reflects on the history of TB, a seemingly curable yet increasingly deadly disease.
Unlikely Blessings Glenn H. Shepard Jr.

Unlikely Blessings

When the unthinkable happens, how do we even speak? A poet-anthropologist finds a way through a poem written during his infant son’s chemotherapy treatments, caught in the haunting terrain between hope and despair.
pnas contamination

Communities Grapple With Exposure to “Forever Chemicals”

Toxic chemicals known as PFAS pollute the water at more than 2,000 sites across the U.S.—and reside in the bodies of most Americans. How do residents cope with contamination?

How Cutting-Edge Archaeology Can Improve Public Health

An anthropologist’s study of rickets from archaeological sites might help dentists spot signs of vitamin D deficiency in children.
white supremacy - So-called alt-right groups, such as these demonstrators at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017, have been emboldened by recent political developments in the U.S.

The Shameful Persistence of White Supremacy in the United States

This loathsome worldview continues to have an outsize impact on U.S. culture. Can Black Lives Matter and other progressive movements do anything about it?