When the international teams began closing the Ebola Treatment Centres (ETCs) in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea this signalled the end of Ebola for many people. As researchers, NGO employees, and an array of personnel from across the globe said their good-byes to local staff, packed their bags, checked out of their hotel rooms and flew home, reflections on their …
In “The Time that Is Left”, Giorgio Agamben sketches the problem of messianic time. He writes that the messianic is “not the end of time, but the time of the end. (…) the time that is left between time and its ending” (Agamben 2002, 2). In the following article, I want to take his reflection on messianic time as a …
It was one of those typical late spring afternoons in Beijing, when the desert sand blowing from the North begins to give way to an electric atmosphere more pregnant with thunder than rain. Seated on a covered leather-armchair, I tried to concentrate my attention away from the rasp of the polyethene sheet under me and repeat the question: So what …
…Early Elegy: Smallpox
by Claudia Emerson
- The world has certified itself rid of
- all but the argument: to eradicate or not
- the small stock of variola frozen,
- quarantined—a dormancy it has
- refused, just once, for a woman behind a sterile
- lens, her glass slide a clearest, most
- becoming pane. How could it resist slipping
- away with her, that discrete first
In the last twenty years, influenza has been considered by global health experts as a model for the emergence of new pathogens from animal reservoirs. In the logic of zoonoses, human disease is the tip of the iceberg constituted by a wide circulation of viruses – often asymptomatic – in animals; it is often described as an “evolutionary dead-end”. As …
The emergence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China’s Guangdong Province in the winter of 2002 was an exemplary spillover event: it marked the passage of a lethal pathogen from nonhuman to human animals and was widely heralded as the first “plague” of the twenty-first century. The SARS coronavirus seemed to burst out of nowhere and demonstrated …