Courses
Medicine and Anthropolgy; Anthropology and Public Health; Topics in Health and Community; Medicine and Society; The Political Economy of Health

Research Interests
Professor Stoner's research addresses issues at the interface of anthropology, public health, and medicine. He is particularly concerned with the analysis of political and economic underpinnings of health and illness in cross-cultural perspective. Most recently his 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. Professor Stoner has conducted field research in Peru and in urban North America.

He currently conducts 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. He works with colleagues in medicine and public health using ethnographic approaches to specific issues in STD/HIV transmission. They 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:

Garnett, G.P., J.P. Hughes, R.M. Anderson, B.P. Stoner, S.O. Aral, W.L. Whittington, H.H. Handsfield, K.K. Holmes (1996) Sexual mixing patterns of patients attending sexually transmitted disease clinics. Sexually Transmitted Diseases 23:248-257.

(with Aral SO, Hughes JP, et al.) (1999) Sexual mixing patterns including linking and bridge populations, in spread of gonococcal and chlamydial infections. American Journal of Public Health 89:825-833.

(with Whittington WL, Hughes JP, et al.) (2000) Comparative epidemiology of heterosexual gonococcal and chlamydial networks: implications for transmission patterns. Sexually Transmitted Diseases 27: 215-223.

(with Todd CS, Haase C) (2000) Urine-based ligase chain reaction (LCR) screening for asymptomatic gonococcal and chlamydial genital tract infection in an emergency department population. American Journal of Public Health 91: 461-464.

(with Fortenberry JD, McFarlane MM et al.) (2001) Relation of health literacy to gonorrhoea related care. Sexually Transmitted Infections 77: 206-211.