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The securitization of health is not a new phenomenon. However, global responses to the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa reveal the extent to which epidemic preparedness and response is now s...

South Africa is increasingly offering screening, diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis (TB), and especially drug-resistant TB, at the primary care level. Nosocomial transmission of TB within primary health facilities is a growing concern in South Africa, and globally. We explore here how TB infection prevention and control (IPC) policies, historically focused on hospitals, are being implemented within primary care facilities. We spoke to 15 policy actors using in-depth interviews about barriers to effective TB-IPC and opportunities for improving implementation. We identified four drivers of poor policy implementation: fragmentation of institutional responsibility and accountability for TB-IPC; struggles by TB-IPC advocates to frame TB-IPC as an urgent and addressable policy problem; barriers to policy innovation from both a lack of evidence as well as a policy environment dependent on 'new' evidence to justify new policy; and the impact of professional medical cultures on the accurate recognition of and response to TB risks. Participants also identified examples of TB-IPC innovation and described conditions necessary for these successes. TB-IPC is a long-standing, complex health systems challenge. As important as downstream practices like mask-wearing and ventilation are, sustained, effective TB-IPC ultimately requires that we better address the upstream barriers to TB-IPC policy formulation and implementation.

This article offers an analysis of the body-mapping dimension of the 'treatment literacy' initiatives of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an HIV/AIDS-focused social movement in South Africa. It situates body mapping within the politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa. The alliance between activists and biomedical practitioners is explored and the emphasis on the 'science of HIV' in TAC treatment literacy considered alongside the foregrounding of social realities, such as poverty and inequality. The article argues that the education activities of the TAC illustrate 'context-sensitive' science, rather than following a linear model of 'public understanding of science'. The personal accounts published alongside the first body maps are explored to illustrate an evident re-socialisation of biological organs and an emphasis on the relationality of bodies. The bounded bodies and the activist emphasis on body politics become ways to counteract fears of the virulence of the illness.