Drawing on archival research and fieldwork conducted in Ho Chi Minh City and its environs in 2007–2008, this article examines a shift from a moral-economic model of protection/patronage turning on the long-standing figure of “the People,” to a biopolitical mechanism of power deploying neoliberal practices and technologies centered on a new figure, here instantiated as “the Human.” In Vietnam in the early 2000s, an older social-evils-based HIV/AIDS apparatus was destabilized by new epidemiological conditions, a reproblematization of epidemic disease after SARS, and the arrival of PEPFAR. Building on literature concerning global humanitarian intervention, I argue that in Vietnam HIV/AIDS prevention and control operates within what I call an “economy of virtue,” the general form in which neoliberal technologies and logics are being incorporated as rational, technical, scientific guarantors of the integrity and dignity of the Human. The remainder of the essay tracks the migration of neoliberal logics to the realm of global health management and their intersection with the political, technological, and ethical elements of late socialism in the combat of HIV/AIDS.

Conservation of sea snakes is virtually nonexistent in Asia, and its role in human-snake interactions in terms of catch, trade, and snakebites as an occupational hazard is mostly unexplored. We collected data on sea snake landings from the Gulf of Thailand, a hotspot for sea snake harvest by squid fishers operating out of the ports of Song Doc and Khanh Hoi, Ca Mau Province, Vietnam. The data were collected during documentation of the steps of the trading process and through interviewers with participants in the trade. Squid vessels return to ports once per lunar synodic cycle and fishers sell snakes to merchants who sort, package, and ship the snakes to various destinations in Vietnam and China for human consumption and as a source of traditional remedies. Annually, 82 t, roughly equal to 225,500 individuals, of live sea snakes are brought to ports. To our knowledge, this rate of harvest constitutes one of the largest venomous snake and marine reptile harvest activities in the world today. Lapemis curtus and Hydrophis cyanocinctus constituted about 85% of the snake biomass, and Acalyptophis peronii, Aipysurus eydouxii, Hydrophis atriceps, H. belcheri, H. lamberti, and H. ornatus made up the remainder. Our results establish a quantitative baseline for characteristics of catch, trade, and uses of sea snakes. Other key observations include the timing of the trade to the lunar cycle, a decline of sea snakes harvested over the study period (approximately 30% decline in mass over 4 years), and the treatment of sea snake bites with rhinoceros horn. Emerging markets in Southeast Asia drive the harvest of venomous sea snakes in the Gulf of Thailand and sea snake bites present a potentially lethal occupational hazard. We call for implementation of monitoring programs to further address the conservation implications of this large-scale marine reptile exploitation.

The aim of the study was to improve the safety culture at a Veterans Administration hospital using evidence-based approaches.Methods: We implemented a patient safety summit with follow-up actions. We measured safety climate before and after the summit using the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Hospital Survey of Patient Safety Culture with modifications and the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ). The summit brought hospital leaders together to discuss patient safety topics and relate them to our hospital. At the summit's end, hospital workgroups collectively submitted Safety Culture Action forms, indicating their intended actions to improve safety culture. We analyzed all survey results using the χ 2 test. We shared lessons learned. Results:The hospital leadership started safety walk rounds. There were 107 hospital employees at the summit. Attendees submitted 53 Safety Culture Action forms. We received 232 AHRQ survey responses in 2014 and 116 in 2016, for response rates of approximately 11% and 8.9%, respectively. We received 140 SAQ responses (11%) from 1244 employees in 2016 and 242 responses (18%) from 1342 employees in 2017. The AHRQ survey results indicated that perception of teamwork within hospital units improved. The SAQ results indicated that employees' comfort with reporting errors and expressing disagreement with physicians improved, and employees' perceptions of leadership's safety efforts and the levels of staffing worsened. Conclusions:Although some aspects of safety culture improved after the summit and follow-up interventions, others did not. Future interventions should be targeted toward individual microsystems or units and measure safety climate perceptions for intervention recipients exclusively.

Neoliberal logics and calculations have been incorporated into strategies for global health management as rational, technical, scientific guarantors of the integrity and dignity of The Human. NGOs demonstrate, accrue and trade in virtue to gain support, funding and prestige. They field site-visit teams which conduct audits of local partners, review programme data and collect images and narratives of and from the recipients of aid. These images and narratives are used to assess the performance of their local partners and win new donations and volunteers in their home countries. These powerful images and harrowing stories appear in NGO media, establishing the NGOs' humanitarian credentials. Images of the ill, abandoned and poor are put to work among distant actors as assurances that funds are being efficiently applied and that these efforts are 'doing good'. The practice is commonplace within a contemporary neoliberalised health humanitarian apparatus. This process both requires and produces particular subjects and structure relationships between and among NGOs, their posited receiving publics, donors and constituents. Specific imperilled persons and histories are rendered abstractions, immediately graspable and ostensibly unmediated within a specific grammar of global southern suffering. Digitised they become, in a specific, contemporary way, immortal; never changing, but imminently interchangeable