School of Social and Political Science

Background

I joined Edinburgh as a Lecturer in Global Health Policy in 2024, and was previously based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Trained as a medical anthropologist, over the past decade I have immersed in the interdisciplinary fields of critical public health and vaccine social science. My research interrogates ideas of health protection, what it means and according to whom - and how to reconcile diverging approaches to that goal. I explore these questions in the context of vaccination & disease outbreaks, and more broadly in child, reproductive and sexual health. An emerging area of interest is narratives of time and temporality in public health responses to 're-emerging' infectious diseases in the global north. The pursuit of public health equity forms a red thread throughout my research and advocacy, and I work with minoritised communities to understand how responsibility for health protection can be a shared endeavour through co-production methods. 

I have supported UKHSA and CDC with vaccine responses to the transnational spread of poliovirus, and was instructed as an expert witness as part of the Covid-19 Inquiry (Module 4 - vaccine delivery systems and disparities in coverage). I regularly comment for national and international media on vaccination and public health, and have contributed to The Guardian, Forbes, Gavi's Vaccine Works, BBC World News, BBC Africa, New Statesman, Sky News, La Tercera (Chile), El País (Brazil). I have written several op-eds on attempts to reduce public health to a threadbare service, both in the UK and the US under the Trump administration, most recently for Nature, BMJ and Epidemiology & Infection.

PhD supervision to date includes research on immunisation decisions among migrant mothers in London  and health security collaboration in southeast Asian countries.  

Publications are available here: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/ben-kasstan-dabush

2024-25 publications

Kasstan-Dabush B, Chantler T & Bedford H. 2025. Decline in UK childhood vaccine uptake: Coordinate action to improve confidence and convenience. British Medical Journal (BMJ).  

Kasstan-Dabush B & Gur-Arie R. 2025. Withdrawing funds from US vaccination programmes will worsen crisis of trust in public-health science. Nature.

Kasstan-Dabush B,  Bedford H & Chantler T. 2025. Public health agencies need to be 'Kennedy ready'. Epidemiology & Infection.  

Kasstan-Dabush B & McGuinness S. 2025. Transgression and its costs. Women's Studies International Forum. 110, p. 1-3 3 p., 103087.

Kasstan-Dabush B. 2025. Observing the observatory on race and health: Reviewing “Health Communications with (and for) Jewish Communities.” Anthropology and Medicine.  

Kasstan-Dabush B, Flores SA, Easton D, Bhatt A, Saliba V & Chantler T. 2024. Polio, public health memories and temporal dissonance of re-emerging infectious diseases in the global north. Social Science and Medicine. 

Kasstan-Dabush B, Lazarus R, Ali I & Mounier-Jack S. 2024. Improving influenza vaccine uptake in clinical risk groups: Patient, provider and commissioner perspectives on the acceptability and feasibility of expanding delivery pathways in England. BMJ Public Health.