In Senegal, Type II diabetes often causes rapid weight loss. Weight loss is usually the reason women will finally seek out a biomedical diagnosis for their ailment. Loss of weight has many negative connotations for Senegalese women—HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, financial troubles, or an unhappy marriage. When women lose weight, they become the subject of rumors and gossip in their communities. This leads to isolation. Research has shown that isolation has deleterious mental health effects, especially in places as communal as Senegal. Worsening mental health can also exacerbate diabetes. This article explores Senegalese women's experiences with weight loss due to Type II diabetes and the effects their weight loss, in addition to their diabetes, has on their lived experience and their social networks.

In December 1853, British officials at Hong Kong amended the Passenger Acts to allow the substitution of “opium for tobacco” on voyages taking indentured laborers, or “coolies,” from China to the Caribbean. Authorities in the US, Cuba, and Peru followed suit by legalizing and mandating opium in what became known as la trata amarilla. By using fresh evidence to explore the genesis of this little-known cluster of regulations, this article explains the process through which Western officials authorized the provision of opium as a prophylactic against shipborne contagions, linking the circulation of opium with the global movement of Chinese labor. Whereas scholars have tended to present smoking opium either as a harmless restorative or as a tool of social control, this study calls attention to the prevalence of comorbidities between opium dependence and infectious illnesses such as cholera and typhoid to suggest that, above all, the drug served as a volatile resource necessitated by the exigencies of epidemic risk.