Research Interests

My research addresses issues at the interface of anthropology, public health, and medicine. I am particularly concerned with the analysis of political and economic underpinnings of health and illness in cross-cultural perspective. Most recently my work has focused on social and behavioral aspects of sexually transmitted diseases (STD). Other areas of interest include the study of health care access and decisionmaking, biomedicine as a cultural system, alternative/heterodox medical systems, culture-bound syndromes, and the role of anthropology in clinical and public health research. I have conducted field research in Peru and in urban North America.

I am currently conducting research on sociocultural aspects of sexually transmitted disease control in developed countries, including analysis of sex partner networks; perception of symptoms and health-seeking responses; concordance and discordance in sexual partnerships; and the ethnography of community risk. I work with colleagues in medicine and public health using ethnographic approaches to specific issues in STD/HIV transmission. We have discovered that choice of sex partners within STD networks is not a random occurrence, but rather a highly patterned phenomenon which varies by disease. This work draws from advances in epidemiology and mathematical modeling, as well as medical anthropology.

Selected Publications

Stoner, B.P

In press Estimating duration in partnership studies: issues, methods and examples.  Sexually Transmitted Infections.  (with Burington B, Hughes JP, Whittington W, Garnett G, Aral SO, Holmes KK)

 2009 Anal intercourse among young heterosexuals in three sexually transmitted disease clinics in the United States.  Sexually Transmitted Diseases 2009; 36:193-8.  (with Gorbach PM, Manhart LE, Hess KL, Martin DH, Holmes KK)

2008 Sexually transmitted infections: overview. In International Encyclopedia of Public Health (Heggenhougen HK, Quah SR, eds.), Vol. 5. San Diego: Academic Press, 2008, pp. 713-723.

2008 Rapid tests for maternal syphilis screening: effective and cost-effective. Sexually Transmitted Diseases 2008; 35: 785-6.

2007 Health care decision-making and the erosion of public health services: institutionalized social suffering. Abstracts of the 2007 Canadian Anthropological Society – American Ethnological Society Conference, Toronto, Canada.

2007 The need and plan for global elimination of congenital syphilis. Sexually Transmitted Diseases 44 (Suppl. 7): S5-10. (with Schmid GP, Hawkes S, Broutet N)

2004 Of drips and drugs: political-economic determinants of STD persistence in America. Abstracts of the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Dallas, TX.

2003 Avoiding risky sex partners: perception of partners’ risks vs. partners’ self-reported risks. Sexually Transmitted Infections, 79: 197-201. (with Whittington WLH, Aral SO, Hughes JP, Handsfield HH, Holmes KK)

2002 Implementing social and sex partner network methods of partner notification and referral for syphilis in St. Louis, Missouri. Proceedings of the NIDA Conference on Network Paradigms in Research on Drug Abuse, HIV and Other Blood-Borne and Sexually Transmitted Infections. Washington DC, National Institute on Drug Abuse.

2002 Relationships of stigma and shame to gonorrhea and HIV screening. American Journal of Public Health, 92: 378-381. (with Fortenberry JD, McFarlane M, Bleakley A, Bull S, Fishbein M, Grimley DM, Malotte CK)

1986 Understanding medical systems: traditional, modern, and syncretic health care alternatives in medically pluralistic societies. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17:44-48. (W.H.R. Rivers Prize Paper)

Courses

Medicine and Society Freshman Seminar (L48 141)
Topics in Health and Community (L48 260)
Medicine and Anthropology (L48/L58 4881)
Anthropology and Public Health (L48/L58 4882)
Political Economy of Health (L48/L58 4883)