The natural body meets the body politic in the act of vaccination, where a single needle penetrates both. – Eula Biss, On Immunity
In recent years, outbreaks of highly contagious diseases like measles and whooping cough have reached epidemic proportions in the US. Such a resurgence in supposedly eradicated diseases has been attributed to rising rates of vaccine refusal in …
I assume everyone is, like me, tired of (and stressed out about) the US election, so let’s take a break from that to take a quick look around at some interesting recent public health stories.
According to data released last month by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the maternal mortality rate in the …
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 …
On Immunity: An Inoculation
By Eula Biss
Graywolf Press, 2014, 205 pp.
The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era
By Lennard J. Davis
University of Michigan Press, 2013, 155 pp.
Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks
By Jordynn Jack
University of Illinois Press, 2014, 306 pp.
Disability themes have become an increasingly central figure …
When my parents came to visit a few weeks ago, they brought with them legal documents for my siblings and me to sign relating to their wills and end of life care. Happily, they did not do this because such an event is considered imminent; rather, they recently retired and are simply putting their affairs in order. The ensuing conversations …
On July 20th the food crisis in the Horn of Africa was officially declared a famine. In David Keen’s 1994 book The Benefits of Famine he argues that famines are “naturalised” as “disasters”, and that this naturalisation obscures the processes which cause hunger, the “identifiable forces within the province of rational human control” Susan George wrote of in her 1974 …