Lukas Engelmann

Pregnant women deserve so much better than Trump’s theatre of scaremongering and shame | Kate Womersley There is no credible evidence linking autism with maternal paracetamol use. But the US president’s ‘tough it out’ message could harm mothers and babies, says doctor Kate Womersley

Yes 📣 @katewomersley.com 📣

"This political theatre highlights a longstanding and harmful problem: pregnant women, and their babies, are routinely let down by partial, poor-quality and missing medical evidence."

👇👇👇
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Very exciting new project funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social - Medicine without doctors, co-led by an incredible team at Edinburgh’s Usher, @engelmal.bsky.social

www.medicinewithoutdoctors.org

Massive opportunity to work with us in Edinburgh on Medicine without Doctors. 5 full-time postdocs each for 5 years starting in April 2026. Please share widely!

Epistemic preparedness Preparedness strategies for emergent infectious diseases have focused on microbial surveillance, medical stockpiling and healthcare infrastructure resilience. But what does it mean to be epistemically...

In BMJ Global Health, open access: epistemic preparedness. We argue for the social sciences and the humanities - expanding the category of expert - in preparing for the next pandemic!

#pandemic #epidemiology #histstm #histmed #sts
@nam.edu @humanitiesau.bsky.social @acmedsci.bsky.social @apha.org

New paper! What does it mean to be epistemically prepared for the next disease outbreak?
gh.bmj.com/content/10/6...

Led by @wombatscholar.bsky.social with @sonjavw.bsky.social @seyeabimbola.bsky.social @rachelankeny.bsky.social @engelmal.bsky.social @mstoove.bsky.social @cwaldby.bsky.social et al

Stellar review of a breathtaking book. @katewomersley.com at her best!

The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature. 2. Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events. 3. Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels. 4. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market. 5. By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.

The White House has turned COVID.gov from a public health resource into a politically charged platform promoting the lab-leak theory and attacking specific scientists and the pandemic response in general. Let’s fact check its 5 headline claims… 🧵

This weekend will be the last issue of The Observer published on The Guardian website (I've written a piece on Sophie Gilbert's new book Girl on Girl). Many super talented journalists and editors I've worked with are leaving without clear prospects due to the transition to Tortoise. Sad times.

Agree to disagree. This is entirely in line with the language used by UUK up and down the country and fits also on to the rhetoric with which cuts in Edinburgh are rationalised. Its a good representation of a misguided management policy that imho will not help to resolve the funding crisis

The issue is not that it might look on a spreadsheet like that but I contest that this a) could even be conceived to be severed from teaching and b) that research costs should be ever considered anything else but investment, and one that should be the sector's main expenditure.

According to UUK, teaching seems to be a whole different kind of spreadsheet, not even a tab on the business calculations for the sector. Sigh.

"research activity conducted by Universities is fantastically loss-making," Vivien Stern, @universities-uk.bsky.social on BBC4 today

Reckless choice of word to describe a public good, produced by public service institutions, charities and their workforce.

This is what got us into this mess.

In Memorium: Sandra Harding (1935-2025) IN MEMORIAM: SANDRA HARDING (1935-2025) Rosi Braidotti, Sarah Bracke, and Iris van der Tuin   In the history of feminist theory, there is a before and an after Sandra Harding. She has structured th…

In March, Sandra Harding died. With colleagues from (then) Women's Studies at Utrecht University, where Harding's work was pivotal in PhD training & where I had the pleasure to organize a PhD workshop, together with María Puig de Bellacasa, with Sandra, we wrote this piece. Honoring the pioneers.

Open Access publication out in History of Human Sciences!

'Making Contagion Social' is a parallel history of epidemiological modelling and the sociology of imitation. I read Gabriel Tarde's work through the lens of Ronald Ross' 'theory of happening' to contest

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

...our modern distinction between susceptibility and suggestibility, infection and imitation, epidemiologies of the social (cf, Ross), and a 'sociology of the stars' (Tarde). Epidemic modelling took shape, I argue, as a theory of the social, at a time when contagion became a matter of biology.

Open Access publication out in History of Human Sciences!

'Making Contagion Social' is a parallel history of epidemiological modelling and the sociology of imitation. I read Gabriel Tarde's work through the lens of Ronald Ross' 'theory of happening' to contest

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

#STS #socmed @ingridkyoung.bsky.social @agomoni.bsky.social @cathm.bsky.social @stsucl.bsky.social @4sweb.bsky.social @4sonline.bsky.social @stsyorku.bsky.social @sthv.bsky.social ....

Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Medicine without Doctors) at The University of Edinburgh Explore an exciting academic career as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Medicine without Doctors). Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

🚨Job Klaxon🚨

Seeking a post-doc for 5.5 years (!) on our brand new @medicinewithoutdoctors.org project!

The candidate will be working with @cathm.bsky.social and the wider team to lead on playful, design-based methodological collaboration.

Deadline 31 March 2025

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMD146/p...

Alive: An Alternative Anatomy by Gabriel Weston review – our bodies in an eye-opening new light A surgeon (and TV host) encourages us to take a fresh look at our organs in a smart and forceful study

How might one go about to make organs "speak" differently?

Brilliant review by @katewomersley.com in this week's Observer of a stellar book by Gabriel Weston

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

DEADLINE!!! Don't forget to submit your paper or panel proposal for #EAHMH25 in Berlin by March 10. It's going to be a fantastic conference with keynotes @historyelaine.bsky.social , Projit Mukharji and Birgit Nemec. More information and link to submission site at eahmh25.org #histmed #histSTM

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

'We have not thought enough about that right wing thrill, that sense of exhilaration, that people get....they want to be free to hate, free to be irrational.'

Under communications freeze, CDC updates some important health data but not others One of the CDC's weekly health publications was not published on its regular schedule, and some data about flu and vaccinations wasn't updated.

Story: www.npr.org/sections/sho...

This morning I taught on the history of AIDS and its 'birth certificate' in the 1981 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. This week the #MMWR has not been published for the first time since 1952.

Unhinged executive order vandalism with terrifying implications for trust in epidemiological info.

Delighted to share our seminar programme for Spring 2025!

#STS

Cultural Histories of the Black Death.

Brilliant thread on what sounds like a fantastic lecture!

Lanzmann was clear: the only thing that can be documented are traces of forgetting, of hiding and of unremembering the Shoah. It is a masterpiece, invoking haunting images born out of testimonies about unthinkable violence; images that will never leave you. Watch this, watch it now.
#neveragain

The most formative film I have ever watched. It was voluntary viewing in a seminar on the history of medicine in the third Reich. Gerhard Baader, the professor, put it on Saturday early am, all students who came stayed for the entire 9.5 hours. It is not a 'documentary' about the Shoah...

Institut Pasteur decides to leave X The Institut Pasteur, a research organization which for more than 130 years has been committed to tackling infectious diseases, sharing knowledge and defending science, has decided to leave X because ...

The Institut Pasteur has decided to leave X (formerly Twitter) to join BlueSky! 🦋
The Institut Pasteur made this decision due to several serious issues observed on the X platform since its acquisition. Join us here to continue advocating for science. www.pasteur.fr/en/home/pres...

Screenshot of titlepage of W. Trotter's 'Instincts of the herd in peace and war', published in 1916

Quite the debate. You could either go for the veterinary story, which David Robertson has pursued a bit (doi.org/10.2105/AJPH...), but have a good look at @wombatscholar.bsky.social paper, anchoring this in the early 20th century moral panic about crowds: doi.org/10.2105/AJPH..., especially in: