{"id":1641,"date":"2012-12-06T19:25:49","date_gmt":"2012-12-07T01:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/?p=1641"},"modified":"2014-02-12T11:55:53","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T17:55:53","slug":"crime-community-and-clostridium-difficile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/2012\/12\/06\/crime-community-and-clostridium-difficile\/","title":{"rendered":"Crime, Community, and Clostridium Difficile"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When you take a course of antibiotics to zap a bacterial infection, you can also lay waste to a lot of healthy bacteria that your body really needs. And once you\u2019ve wiped out the healthy flora in your gut, you\u2019re vulnerable to nasty bacteria such as Clostridium Difficile<\/em>, which brings symptoms ranging from severe diarrhea to life-threatening colon problems. Though I\u2019m skeptical-bordering-on-terrified of organicist arguments in sociology, hearing a talk by Minnversity colleague Mike Sadowsky<\/a>\u00a0on \u201cC. diff.\u201d brought some parallels in social research to mind. Before proceeding, I should acknowledge the obvious \u201cick factor\u201d in this post, but bear with me a moment.<\/p>\n

As Dr. Sadowsky explained, one successful treatment for recurrent C. diff infections involves fecal transplantation \u2013 essentially implanting a donor\u2019s stool sample in a recipient to repopulate the healthy colonic flora and restore bacterial balance. Within a very short time, the donor\u2019s gut flora is typically brought back to healthy equilibrium. Now that might sound icky (even when said sample is freeze-dried<\/a>), but it is way less icky than surgical treatments like colectomy. What really got me thinking was my colleague\u2019s big-picture conclusion that much of the past century of U.S. research in this area had been devoted to isolating and zapping the bacterial delinquents, while much of the next century seems devoted to restoring the whole to healthy balance. And, if I understand things correctly, it turns out that the latter approach is actually a lot simpler <\/em>than specifying, modeling, and manipulating the complex interactions among myriad bacteria that may be \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad\u201d depending on the particular combination and circumstance.<\/p>\n

Of course, certain Ghosts of Sociology Past, Present, and Future think about societies in quite similar ways. No, people aren\u2019t bacteria and communities aren\u2019t intestines, but you don\u2019t have to be a functionalist or an organicist to draw some basic analogies. For example, as William Julius Wilson points out, it is the social isolation <\/em>of the urban poor that exacerbates the challenge of redressing imbalances and (re)building the institutions needed for basic community functioning. More generally, social interventions, like medical interventions, sometimes bring their own pathologies or iatrogenic effects. Like the overprescription of antibiotics behind the apparent C. diff epidemic, the grand American experiment with racialized mass incarceration, has had untold effects<\/a> on individuals, families, and communities that are only now coming into focus.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t speculate here about how to restore social systems to healthy balance, but some of us try to at least consider such questions in our research. In some cases, this involves calling out the problems associated with attempts to isolate and zap our more delinquent members. In others, it involves identifying and assessing viable alternative approaches to reducing harm — regardless of any potential “ick factors” that might be associated with our research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you take a course of antibiotics to zap a bacterial infection, you can also lay waste to a lot of healthy bacteria that your body really needs. And once you\u2019ve wiped out the healthy flora in your gut, you\u2019re vulnerable to nasty bacteria such as Clostridium Difficile, which brings symptoms ranging from severe diarrhea […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[124,15],"class_list":["post-1641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crime","tag-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1641"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1872,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions\/1872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}