Pub Date : 2010-04-21DOI: 10.1108/S1057-6290(2010)0000011005
J. Shantz
Purpose – For much of the first half of 2003 world attention was captured by news of a mysterious but deadly virus that was claiming lives in places as distant as Toronto and Beijing. In a matter of months there were around 8,000 infections and over 689 deaths related to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). In my hometown, Toronto, 43 people died of SARS during the outbreaks of 2003. Approach – This chapter examines issues of class and poverty in emergence of SARS. The chapter begins with a discussion of the political economy of the emergence of SARS, and its relation to the spread of the virus. It then discusses issues of public policy, and particularly neo-liberal cuts to social services and public spending, that set the stage for the SARS outbreak, influenced its impact and contributed to the failures of response in Ontario. Findings – Through analysis of the lack of social resources available to working people in the province and the prioritizing of corporate, particularly tourism industry, concerns, the chapter illustrates how issues of class underpinned public responses to SARS, exacerbating problems. The chapter concludes by giving attention to the need for social solidarity and community mutual aid. Contributions to the field – The chapter shows the extent to which neo-liberal governments prioritize business security above the health and social security of workers and reveals some of the ways in which the pressures of capitalist social relations make people ill.
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Pub Date : 2010-04-21DOI: 10.1108/S1057-6290(2010)0000011011
A. Mukherjea
Purpose – This chapter considers the social politics of H5N1 (“avian influenza”), the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and the response to it within the context of the history of pandemic influenzas and the continuing need for robust preventative public health systems more generally. In particular, the author considers how the borders between nations, species, and individuals are thrown into relief and called into question by influenza outbreaks and their management. Methodology/approach – This work relies on literature review, media research, and critical and interpretative sociological methods. Findings – While panic surrounding new and potentially highly virulent influenza strains is reasonable, such panic is not sustainable and belies the fact that every year presents the danger of a pandemic. This chapter argues that, if public health systems only respond to immediate panic and fail to consider how quickly airborne diseases can cross all sorts of borders, they do not attend to the real need for far-seeing, long-term, internationally collaborative disease prevention and disaster preparedness. Contribution to the field – The author offers a critical and wellness- and prevention-oriented perspective on what priorities should be emphasized in the rapidly growing fields of disaster studies and disaster preparedness, which, by their nature, tend to be crisis oriented and focused on the micro-term, with planning done on a case-by-case basis. Such a narrow focus can render preventative health systems inflexible and unable to rise to the challenge of a disease that can spread easily through casual contact.
{"title":"The social politics of pandemic influenzas: the question of (permeable) international, inter-species, and interpersonal boundaries","authors":"A. Mukherjea","doi":"10.1108/S1057-6290(2010)0000011011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1108/S1057-6290(2010)0000011011","url":null,"abstract":"Purpose – This chapter considers the social politics of H5N1 (“avian influenza”), the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and the response to it within the context of the history of pandemic influenzas and the continuing need for robust preventative public health systems more generally. In particular, the author considers how the borders between nations, species, and individuals are thrown into relief and called into question by influenza outbreaks and their management. Methodology/approach – This work relies on literature review, media research, and critical and interpretative sociological methods. Findings – While panic surrounding new and potentially highly virulent influenza strains is reasonable, such panic is not sustainable and belies the fact that every year presents the danger of a pandemic. This chapter argues that, if public health systems only respond to immediate panic and fail to consider how quickly airborne diseases can cross all sorts of borders, they do not attend to the real need for far-seeing, long-term, internationally collaborative disease prevention and disaster preparedness. Contribution to the field – The author offers a critical and wellness- and prevention-oriented perspective on what priorities should be emphasized in the rapidly growing fields of disaster studies and disaster preparedness, which, by their nature, tend to be crisis oriented and focused on the micro-term, with planning done on a case-by-case basis. Such a narrow focus can render preventative health systems inflexible and unable to rise to the challenge of a disease that can spread easily through casual contact.","PeriodicalId":237579,"journal":{"name":"Understanding Emerging Epidemics: Social and Political Approaches","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131382506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-04-21DOI: 10.1108/S1057-6290(2010)0000011014
F. Attenborough
Purpose – The aims of this chapter are twofold – first, to develop an understanding of the ways in which primary historical data come to be transformed across generations of popular science histories of emerging epidemics; and second, to develop an understanding of the ways in which those transformations impact on our ability to know what really happened during those epidemics. Approach – The chapter begins with a rhetorical analysis of one particularly influential account of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak. Therein, we learn that the race to discover the outbreak's aetiology was tainted by scientific malpractice; that an esteemed Chinese microbiologist, Dr. Hong, apparently promoted his own, patently false, aetiological discovery, stifled debate on the matter and, in doing so, held the international response to the outbreak back by a number of weeks. But how was this account rhetorically constructed? And how did it engage with Dr. Hong's own research work? Findings – Does Hong deserve to be remembered as an inept scientist? Subsequent accounts have been quick to repeat this one, founding text's account, suggesting that ‘yes, he does’. This chapter, however, returns to the primary data, examines the ways in which the original account troped those data and moves to suggest that ‘no, he does not’. Contributions to the field – Teasing out the more general implications of this particular case study, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the analytical gains that might accrue if other popular scientific histories of emerging epidemics were approached as ‘topics’ rather than ‘resources’.
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