pandemic tracking contagions from cholera to ebola and beyond

VOX Unexplainable: How do animals know where to go?.National Book Festival 2021: In conversation with David Nasaw.Great Podversations: In conversation with Caitlin Dickerson.

The Daily: The Sunday Read: ‘Animals That Infect Humans Are Scary.

For the optimism that the book upholds on our increasing ability to prevent further pandemics, I am tempted to argue that the “tools” for prevention still remain basic human rights to housing, health and dignity for all. The book will hopefully also raise further questions on the inequity in access to healthcare in our own country where public health is not yet seen as significant in electoral politics. Nevertheless, these remarks do not take away the book’s ability to ask timely and fundamental questions about the nature of a pandemic as a disease of unrestrained development, reified by unequal distribution of health resources across the world. Scholars are increasingly observing that epidemics are experienced vastly differently by those whose lives are consistently entangled with infectious diseases as compared to the relatively privileged classes who can afford to live with an “amnesia” about epidemics. Before we ask how can we prevent future pandemics, we need to reframe our approach to infectious diseases. In this context, the near-equivalence of the ‘mistrust’ for public health experts on the part of Hollywood anti-vaxxers with suspicions of marginalized communities will draw criticism from anthropologists and historians. The expanding literature on memory and history shows us that responses of “local” communities to top-down prescription cannot simply be classified as “ignorant” or “superstitious”. Shah is - rightly - quite sympathetic to the paradigmatic changes in science, but it is disappointing to see her not extending the same sympathy to the people of Haiti, Uttar Pradesh or northern Nigeria, who, because of their lived experiences with global health campaigns and memories of encounters with colonial health officials, may have grounded suspicions of top-down global health programmes. Indeed, even when governments in London and Paris eventually created their underground sewage systems, they did so not based on an acceptance of germ theory, but rather on existing concerns with miasma. For example, Shah does an expansive breakdown of Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts in science to explain why John Snow’s experiments on Cholera were not accepted by his contemporary scientific community. While the few social history analyses will peak the interests of historians, explanations of how marginalized communities in the global South experience and respond to epidemics are largely unnuanced. In spite of these notable achievements, there are noticeable gaps.

Pandemic tracking contagions from cholera to ebola and beyond