Ebola, 1995/2014
Nicholas B. King looks back at the dialectics of confidence and paranoia in the Ebola outbreaks of 1995 and 2014.
narratives
After the End of Disease: Rethinking the Epidemic Narrative
In conversations with people living with polio in Hungary, I often encountered members of the tight-knit community referring to themselves as “dinosaurs”.
We are a breed that is about to die out, they said. Nobody gets polio anymore, some added, and they were right – epidemics, even sporadic wild polio cases disappeared from the country in the 1960s.
Haemorrhagic Fevers in Africa: Narratives, Politics and Pathways of Disease and Response
Outbreak narratives have justified rapid and sometimes draconian international policy responses and control measures. Yet there is a variety of other ways of framing haemorrhagic fevers. There present different views concerning who is at risk, and how? Is the ‘system’ of interacting social-disease ecological processes a local or a global one, and how do scales intersect? Should haemorrhagic fevers be understood in terms of short-term outbreaks, or as part of more ‘structural’, long-term social-disease-ecological interactions?
What of the perspectives of people living with the diseases in African settings? And what of uncertainties about disease dynamics, over longer as well as short time scales? This paper contrasts global outbreak narratives with three others which consider haemorrhagic fevers as deadly local disease events, in terms of culture and context, and in terms of long-term social and environmental dynamics. It considers the pathways of disease response associated with each,
Ebola, Politics and Ecology: Beyond the ‘Outbreak Narrative’
The origin of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has been traced to the likely confluence of a virus, a bat, a two-year-old child and an under equipped rural health centre. Understanding how these factors may have combined in south-eastern Guinea near the end of 2013 requires us to rethink elements of the familiar Ebola ‘outbreak narrative’, as propagated by the international media, in a deeper political, economic and ecological context. This includes examining the social, ecological and epidemiological evidence and questioning long-held and misplaced assumptions about rural resource users, rural livelihoods, deforestation and environmental change, and the role of development in both the current crisis and in realising a more resilient future.
Emerging research indicates that demography, patterns of land use and of human-wildlife interaction are all implicated in zoonotic ‘spillover’ events, but cannot be generalised across cases and localities.
Epidemics for All? Governing Health in a Global Age
Current global health policy is dominated by a preoccupation with infectious diseases and in particular with emerging or re-emerging infectious diseases that threaten to ‘break out’ of established patterns of prevalence or virulence into new areas and new victims. This paper seeks to link a set of dominant narratives about epidemics and infectious disease with what is often called the architecture, or organizational landscape, of global health policy. A series of dichotomies helps to distinguish and valorise epidemics policies. Fast- versus slow-twitch models of disease, global versus local models of culture, and official versus unofficial models of knowledge provide categories according to which policies can be evaluated, designed and implemented. As a result, policy on the global scale has tended to be oriented towards addressing highly time-focussed outbreaks that threaten to cross international boundaries rather than longer-term endemic problems the affect the most vulnerable people.
To Pandemic or Not? Reconfiguring Global Responses to Influenza
Examining the political economy of knowledge in responses to the 2009-10 influenza pandemic, this paper argues that globally, and in many individual nations, techno-scientific narratives constructed by bio-medical actor networks failed to correspond with the more variegated narratives of multifarious global publics, and so struggled to recruit support and maintain credibility and authority.With reductive narratives constructed by bio-medical actor networks confounded by the uncertainties intrinsic to the influenza virus, the complexities of the disease in individuals, and compromised by continuing ignorance, political and cultural forces became dominant.Universalistic, one-size-fits-all responses drawn from reductive science are therefore argued to be insufficient, and possibly misguided. Planning and response efforts must consider diverse local settings and concerns. Reductive technical framings emerging from tight, unreflexive actor networks may prevent other options from emerging, and limit response pathways.
Such narrow,technocratic responses are not only at odds with the varied understandings,
