Care worker Annika announces that she does not want to go to Mr Moran. “He always complains.” “I’ll go”, says her colleague Robin, and turning to me he says, “I don’t have the intern today so you can come along if you want to see for yourself how it goes”. We head off to assemble the materials for the morning …
Tag Archives: Influenza
Breaking news! Big Shift in Biomediatization from “Swine Flu” to H3N2 to the Trump Administration’s Attack on Breastfeeding
The H3N2 epidemic didn’t really take off until early January 2018—at least as far as US media coverage is concerned. A crucial marker was the New York Times‘ publication of an op-ed by a prominent germ cold warrior, Michael Osterholm, along with Mark Olshaker, co-author of Deadliest Enemy: Our War against Killer Germs. Osterholm, extensively profiled by Andrew …
Storage and stockpiling as techniques of preparedness: Managing the bottlenecks of flu pandemics
This article is part of the series: After the End of Disease
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 …
Book Forum — The Viral Network: A Pathography of the H1N1 Influenza Pandemic
This article is part of the series: Book forum
In this Book Forum, our commentators respond to Theresa MacPhail’s provocative ethnography of influenza research and public health response, The Viral Network: A Pathography of the H1N1 Influenza Epidemic. Lyle Fearnley, Katherine A. Mason, Natalie Porter, Adia Benton, and Carlo Caduff reflect on — among other issues — the place and privileging of the laboratory, the simultaneously limiting …
Bird Flu: The Circulation of Life and Death in a Postspecies World
At the end of 2009, linguists around the world collected words to characterize the first decade of the new millennium. “Aporkalypse” appeared at the top of their list, describing a swine-inspired end of days ushered in by the threat of bird flu. Though playful, this term points to a growing recognition that animals –and their diseases –have determining …
Web Round Up
An estimated 400,000 women around the world are living with breast implants manufactured by the now defunct company Poly Implant Prosthese (PIP) using industrial grade silicone not approved for medical use. The scandal has raised concerns about the regulation of medical devices in Europe and provoked debate about neoliberal approaches to the body. Anthropologyworks points out that establishing who is …