Covid-19: When Species and Data Meet

This article explores how species meet, in particular humans and the Covid-19 virus. It also draws attention to the digital world through the lens of contact-tracing apps. Here, I examine human-virus-data relations, with humans, Covid-19, and data meeting and intra-acting. This article examines what has led us to this situation with Covid-19 and the role data is currently playing. The article offers an answer to two questions. How do humans, Covid-19, and Covid-19 contact-tracing apps meet and intra-act? What are the social justice issues and problems associated with contact-tracing apps? This article examines how species meet and intra-act, as well as how the Anthropocene has contributed to the current situation. The article also discusses contact-tracing apps and what these apps mean for society. Finally, the article shows how entanglements are not only constrained to those which are multispecies but also stretch out to the digital. These postdigital hybrid assemblages enable the coming together of humans, biological-more-than-human-worlds, and the digital. Postdigital hybrid assemblages enable us to push beyond boundaries, helping us understand Covid-19 and its impacts on society. Hopefully, this discussion about the postdigital hybrid assemblage will contribute to discussions in the future, and long after Covid-19, about how we are living our lives, and who and what we are living our lives with

Ebola: translational science considerations

We are currently in the midst of the most aggressive and fulminating outbreak of Ebola-related disease, commonly referred to as “Ebola”, ever recorded. In less than a year, the Ebola virus (EBOV, Zaire ebolavirus species) has infected over 10,000 people, indiscriminately of gender or age, with a fatality rate of about 50%. Whereas at its onset this Ebola outbreak was limited to three countries in West Africa (Guinea, where it was first reported in late March 2014, Liberia, where it has been most rampant in its capital city, Monrovia and other metropolitan cities, and Sierra Leone), cases were later reported in Nigeria, Mali and Senegal, as well as in Western Europe (i.e., Madrid, Spain) and the US (i.e., Dallas, Texas; New York City) by late October 2014. World and US health agencies declared that the current Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak has a strong likelihood of growing exponentially across the world before an effective vaccine, treatment or cure can be developed, tested, validated and distributed widely. In the meantime, the spread of the disease may rapidly evolve from an epidemics to a full-blown pandemic. The scientific and healthcare communities actively research and define an emerging kaleidoscope of knowledge about critical translational research parameters, including the virology of EBOV, the molecular biomarkers of the pathological manifestations of EVD, putative central nervous system involvement in EVD, and the cellular immune surveillance to EBOV, patient-centered anthropological and societal parameters of EVD, as well as translational effectiveness about novel putative patient-targeted vaccine and pharmaceutical interventions, which hold strong promise, if not hope, to curb this and future Ebola outbreaks. This work reviews and discusses the principal known facts about EBOV and EVD, and certain among the most interesting ongoing or future avenues of research in the field, including vaccination programs for the wild animal vectors of the virus and the disease from global translational science perspective

Current accounts of antimicrobial resistance: stabilisation, individualisation and antibiotics as infrastructure.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the latest issues to galvanise political and financial investment as an emerging global health threat. This paper explores the construction of AMR as a problem, following three lines of analysis. First, an examination of some of the ways in which AMR has become an object for action-through defining, counting and projecting it. Following Lakoff's work on emerging infectious diseases, the paper illustrates that while an 'actuarial' approach to AMR may be challenging to stabilise due to definitional and logistical issues, it has been successfully stabilised through a 'sentinel' approach that emphasises the threat of AMR. Second, the paper draws out a contrast between the way AMR is formulated in terms of a problem of connectedness-a 'One Health' issue-and the frequent solutions to AMR being focused on individual behaviour. The paper suggests that AMR presents an opportunity to take seriously connections, scale and systems but that this effort is undermined by the prevailing tendency to reduce health issues to matters for individual responsibility. Third, the paper takes AMR as a moment of infrastructural inversion (Bowker and Star) when antimicrobials and the work they do are rendered more visible. This leads to the proposal of antibiotics as infrastructure-part of the woodwork that we take for granted, and entangled with our ways of doing life, in particular modern life. These explorations render visible the ways social, economic and political frames continue to define AMR and how it may be acted upon, which opens up possibilities for reconfiguring AMR research and action

The Prophetic Faculty of Epidemic Photography: Chinese Wet Markets and the Imagination of the Next Pandemic

Dominant trends in epidemiological research and medical journalism today share a belief in the “next pandemic,” a microbiological catastrophe of Old Testament proportions that threatens to annihilate humanity. Expected to arise out of a zoonotic spillover, in most cases a newly emergent or mutant form of animal-to-human influenza, the ground zero of the “next pandemic” is located in so-called wet markets, live animal markets in East Asia and China in particular. Focusing on photographic representations of wet markets during the SARS outbreak of 2003, this article examines critically the visual regime constructed around and supporting this outbreak narrative. Examining the temporality of spillover events and the dialectic between their visibility and invisibility, the article argues that the photographic visualization of points of pandemic eruption sets in place a prophetic faculty. Imaging spillover as an inevitable destiny and, at the same time, as having always or already occurred, wet market photography constitutes a new biomedical temporality that institutes human extinction as a never-completed but always in process end-event

The Epidemiologist as Culture Hero: Visualizing Humanity in the Age of “the Next Pandemic”

Concern over the “coming plague,” a projected microbiological catastrophe threatening the survival of humanity, has come to generate a new cinematic figure: the epidemiologist as culture hero. The visual narrative of the “coming plague” unfolds in recent films, where the biopolitical content of this symbolic form becomes clear. This article examines how, by merging fears regarding the next pandemic with apocalyptic fantasy, the films in question institute the epidemiologist as responsible for the re-pastoralization and re-pasteurization of humanity—a goal achieved by setting self-limitation of individual freedoms as the condition for the biological and ontological perseverance of humankind.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2016.110882

Introduction: the plague and the city in history

Book synopsis: Plague and the City uncovers discourses of plague and anti-plague measures in the city during the medieval, early modern and modern periods, and explores the connection between plague and urban environments including attempts by professional bodies to prevent or limit the outbreak of epidemic disease. Bringing together leading scholars of plague working across different historical periods, this book provides an inter-disciplinary study of plague in the city across time and space. The chapters cover a wide range of periods, geographical locations and disciplinary approaches but all seek to answer significant questions, including whether common motives can be identified, and how far knowledge about plague was based on an understanding of the urban space. It also examines how maps and photographs contribute to understanding plague in the city through exploring the ways in which the relationship between plague and the urban environment has been visualised, from the poisoned darts of plague winging their way towards their victims in the votive pictures from the Renaissance, to the mapping of the spread of disease in late nineteenth-century Bombay and photographing Honolulu’s great plague fire in 1900. Containing a series of studies that illuminate plague’s urban connection as a key social and political concern throughout history, Plague and the City is ideal for students of early modern history, and of the early modern city and plague more specifically

The anthropology of epidemic control:technologies and materialities

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