64 research outputs found
Jackson Mark, The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 311, £35, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-19-958862-6.
Copyright © The Author(s) 2013PMCID: PMC386596
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Rene Dubos, tuberculosis, and the "ecological facets of virulence"
Reflecting on his scientific career toward the end of his life, the French-educated medical researcher RenĂ© Dubos presented his flowering as an ecological thinker as a story of linear progressionâthe inevitable product of the intellectual seeds planted in his youth. But how much store should we set by Dubosâs account of his ecological journey? Resisting retrospective biographical readings, this paper seeks to relate the development of Dubosâs ecological ideas to his experimental practices and his career as a laboratory researcher. In particular, I focus on Dubosâs studies of tuberculosis at the Rockefeller Institute in the period 1944â1956âstudies which began with an inquiry into the tubercle bacillus and the physiochemical determinants of virulence, but which soon encompassed a wider investigation of the influence of environmental forces and hostâparasite interactions on susceptibility and resistance to infection in animal models. At the same time, through a close reading of Dubosâs scientific papers and correspondence, I show how he both drew on and distinguished his ecological ideas from those of other medical researchers such as Theobald Smith, Frank Macfarlane Burnet, and Frank Fenner. However, whereas Burnet and Fenner tended to view ecological interactions at the level of populations, Dubos focused on the interface of hosts and parasites in the physiological environments of individuals. The result was that although Dubos never fully engaged with the science of ecology, he was able to incorporate ecological ideas into his thought and practices, and relate them to his holistic views on health and the natural harmony of man and his environment
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The art of medicine In search of sick parrots: Karl Friedrich Meyer, disease detective
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Between Securitisation and Neglect: Managing Ebola at the Borders of Global Health
In 2014 the World Health Organization (WHO) was widely criticised for failing to anticipate that an outbreak of Ebola in a remote forested region of south-eastern Guinea would trigger a public health emergency of international concern (pheic). In explaining the WHOâs failure, critics have pointed to structural restraints on the United Nations organisation and a leadership âvacuumâ in Geneva, among other factors. This paper takes a different approach. Drawing on internal WHO documents and interviews with key actors in the epidemic response, I argue that the WHOâs failure is better understood as a consequence of Ebolaâs shifting medical identity and of triage systems for managing emerging infectious disease (EID) risks. Focusing on the discursive and non-discursive practices that produced Ebola as a âproblemâ for global health security, I argue that by 2014 Ebola was no longer regarded as a paradigmatic EID and potential biothreat so much as a neglected tropical disease. The result was to relegate Ebola to the fringes of biosecurity concerns just at the moment when the virus was crossing international borders in West Africa and triggering large urban outbreaks for the first time. Ebolaâs fluctuating medical identity also helps explain the prominence of fear and rumours during the epidemic and social resistance to Ebola control measures. Contrasting the WHOâs delay over declaring a pheic in 2014, with its rapid declaration of pheics in relation to H1N1 swine flu in 2009 and polio in 2014, I conclude that such âmissed alarmsâ may be an inescapable consequence of pandemic preparedness systems that seek to rationalise responses to the emergence of new diseases
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Imagining pandemics now, and then: a century of medical failure
Ever since the devastating 1918â1919 influenza pandemic, policy makers have employed mathematical models to predict the course of epidemics and pandemics in an effort to mitigate their worst impacts. But while Britain has long been a pioneer of predictive epidemiology and disease modellers occupied influential positions on key committees that advised the government on its response to the coronavirus pandemic, as in 1918 Britain mounted one of the least effective responses to Covid-19 of any country in the world. Arguing that this âfailure of expertiseâ was the result of medical and political complacency and over-reliance on disease models predicated on influenza, this paper uses the lens of medical history to show how medical attitudes to Covid-19 mirrored those of the English medical profession in 1918. Rather than putting our faith in preventive medicine and statistical technologies to predict the course of epidemics and dictate suppressive measures in future, I argue we need to cultivate more profound forms of imaginative engagement with infectious disease outbreaks that take account of the long history of quarantines and the lived experiences of pandemics. A useful starting point would be to recognize that while measures such as the R° may be useful for calculating the reproductive rate of a virus, they can never capture the full risks of pandemics or their social complexity
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Taking pandemic sequelae seriously: from the Russian influenza to COVID-19 long-haulers
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Introduction: microbes, networks, knowledgeâdisease ecology and emerging infectious diseases in time of COVID-19
This is an introduction to the topical collection Microbes, Networks, Knowledge: Disease Ecology in the twentieth Century, based on a workshop held at Queen Mary, University London on July 6â7 2016. More than twenty years ago, historian of science and medicine Andrew Mendelsohn asked, âWhere did the modern, ecological understanding of epidemic disease come from?â Moving beyond Mendelsohnâs answer, this collection of new essays considers the global history of disease ecology in the past century and shows how epidemics and pandemics have made âmicrobes complexâ
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