Quality and risk management frameworks for biosolids: An assessment of current international practice.

Biosolids, a product of wastewater treatment, provide a valuable resource, but to optimize the use of this resource it is necessary to manage risks posed to public health and the environment. Key requirements include identifying contaminant sources and providing barriers to ensure containment and treatment while maintaining the viability and value of biosolids products. Responsibility for managing biosolids is the remit of many stakeholders but primarily it rests with private and public wastewater facilities. The global variabilities in the way biosolids resources are acknowledged, applied, and managed are substantial. For example, some countries are increasing incineration because of their ability to remove contaminants while others have experienced a proportional decrease in incineration dependent on industrial resources or regarding resource recovery costs and needs. Some jurisdictions focus on energy recovery and others on land application. A risk management framework is a tool that may provide a suitable holistic approach to biosolids management. With this focus, current instruments in practice globally to manage biosolids were assessed for the degree to which they have adopted a risk management framework. To form a basis for this assessment a set of criteria was established by concept mapping several internationally recognized standards. Guidelines for a range of developed and developing countries were then assessed against these criteria. That process enabled the identification of which current practices were holistic in terms of applying biosolids risk management principles from production to end-use. Through this process, risk management gaps and vulnerabilities were identified. The results reveal that the incorporation of risk standards into risk management frameworks around the world is variable for the presence of risk criteria and the scale of detail provided. Contaminant concentrations need perspective within the changing risk landscape for stakeholders and the environment while jointly the opportunities and contaminant challenges require solutions that balance risks.

"It's professional but it's personal": Participation, personal connection, and sustained disagreement in drug policy reform.

While there is widespread agreement as to the importance of increasing participation in drug policy design, drug policy literature contains limited reflection on the practices that may support inclusion and collaboration amongst policy actors, particularly when disagreement and difference are an intrinsic part of participation. Drawing on qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with actors engaged in an Australian illicit drug policy reform campaign, this paper examines how particular modes of personal connection mattered in establishing and maintaining working relationships between a range of differently situated actors. Through engagement with this case study, we argue that modes of personal connection marked by qualities such as being frank; engaged; not forcing consensus; enacting respect; listening in order to understand; and acting in ways that respected the obligations and limits that came with people's roles while also recognising one another as more than those roles, were particularly important qualities that supported connection across difference. Such personal connections seem to have been even more important for the engagement of people representing more marginal positionalities. Arguing that personal connection is already an element of both inclusion and exclusion in drug policy creation, we suggest that policy actors interested in contributing to a more diverse and rigorous policy participation space attend to how people connect, with whom, and with what space for disagreement, while also taking seriously the labour of such connection across difference.

Navigating the grey: Experiences of incremental cannabis reform in Australia.

INTRODUCTION AND AIMS: There have been many changes to cannabis laws across the globe, some dramatic but more often incremental. This study explored the experiences after an incremental cannabis law reform in the Australian Capital Territory, Australia. METHOD: Semi-structured interviews (n = 30) were conducted in March and April 2021, 14 months after the introduction of cannabis law reform, with people aged 18 and over who had grown and/or consumed cannabis in the previous 12 months. Participants were asked about recent and past cannabis use, growing cannabis and changes to their practices after the introduction of the legislation. RESULTS: Incremental cannabis law change resulted in regulatory grey areas. How people interpreted and navigated such grey areas were connected to their relative privileges, circumstances and histories. Those who were highly policed were more likely to experience the grey areas negatively. Those who were not highly policed found the grey areas confusing or 'half-arse' (insufficiently executed), but mostly experienced the new laws positively through new cannabis cultivation or perceived reduction in stigma and fear of arrest. Those with self-identified privilege were unconcerned with grey areas of the legislation. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Incremental policy change can result in grey areas that require some navigation. Vulnerable populations appear less likely to experience the full benefits of such incremental drug law reform. It is vital to attend to the inequities that can arise from incremental law reform so that positive experiences are shared across the population regardless of relative privilege.

Reimagining Health as a 'Flow on Effect' of Biomedical Innovation: Research Policy as a Site of State Activism.

As health care systems have been recast as innovation assets, commercial aims are increasingly prominent within states' health and medical research policies. Despite this, the reformulation of notions of social and of scientific value and of long-standing relations between science and the state that is occurring in research policies remains comparatively unexamined. Addressing this lacuna, this article investigates the articulation of 'actually existing neoliberalism' in research policy by examining a major Australian research policy and funding instrument, the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF). We identify the MRFF and allied initiatives as a site of state activism: reallocating resources from primary and preventive health care to commercially-oriented biomedical research; privileging commercial objectives in research and casting health as a "flow on effect"; reorganising the publicly funded production of health and medical knowledge; and arrogating for political actors a newly prominent role in research grant assessment and funding allocation. We conclude that rather than the state's assumption of a more activist role in medical research and innovation straightforwardly serving a 'public good', it is a driver of neoliberalisation that erodes commitments to redistributive justice in health care and significantly reconfigures science-state relations in research policy.

Bioengineering human placentas: social implications of an advancing field.

Technological advances in bioengineering, especially in microphysiological systems and organoids, are changing the way in which placental tissue is used and perceived. These advances raise important questions surrounding consent, privacy, biobanking, and research ethics. We explore emerging technologies which use placental tissue and the pressing associated bioethical concerns they raise.

Relational Risk and Collective Management: A Pathway to Transformational Risk Management.

Risk tends to be conceptualized at the individual scale, with global risk communication and governance efforts fixated on an individual's knowledge and behavior. While individuals are undoubtedly influenced by those who surround them, such human-human interactions tend to be excluded from empirical and field-based analyses of risk taking. This study diverges from prevailing analyses of risk as an individualized phenomenon, exploring the collective and relational practices that influence risk while fishing from hazardous rocky coasts. The aim is to counter the near-universal tendency to individualize risk in empirical analyses by instead using a mixed-methodology that can quantify and enable consideration of collective responses to risk, in real-time. We demonstrate that both rock fishing practice and many of the high-risk events that emerge while rock fishing are managed collectively. Compared to the tendency to individualize risk, we demonstrate that collective responses to risk are more representative of how risk is experienced and acted upon, with implications for risk management in countless contexts.

The importance of reflecting on treatment and post-treatment care when assessing the social aspects of cosmetic nanomedicine and transdermal delivery system.

In the field of nanomedicine, the development of targeted drug delivery aims to design more effective delivery systems that directly target cancer cells and tumours. The development of transdermal delivery mechanisms is promising. At the same time, these areas of research raise profound social and ethical questions and are tied to significant transformations in the nature of contemporary healthcare and personal subjectivity. Socio- political consideration of these issues is shaped by a wider set of debates concerning the societal dimensions of nanotechnology. In this paper we report findings from an interdisciplinary research project uilising semi-structured interviews with key-informants engaged in cancer research and health-care. We identified narrative constracts that shaped participants' responses to and understandings of novel nanomedicines. This analysis contributes to a growing body of literature on the social and ethical aspects of nanotechnology and nanomedicine, providing evidence for the engagement of publics in the early stage of technological developments.

How to do things with metaphors: engineering life as hodgepodge.

This paper presents a collaboration between social scientists and a chemist exploring the promises for new therapy development at the intersection between synthetic biology and nanotechnology. Drawing from ethnographic studies of laboratories and a recorded discussion between the three authors, we interrogate the metaphors that underpin what Mackenzie (Futures 48:5-12 2013) has identified as a recursive relationship in the iconography of the life sciences and its infrastructure. Focusing specifically on the use of gene editing techniques in synthetic biology and bio-nanotechnology, we focus our analysis on the key metaphors of 'evolutionary life as hodge-podge' within which 'cutting' of DNA and the 'sticking' and 'binding' of engineered particles to proteins can be performed by researchers in laboratory settings. Taken together, we argue that these metaphors are consequential for understanding metaphors of life-as-machine and the prevalence of notions of 'engineering life'. Exploring the ways in which notions of cutting, targeting and life as an evolutionary hodgepodge prefigure a more contingent notion of engineering and synthesis we close by considering the interpretive implications for ethnomethodological approaches to contemporary life science research.