Health, hygiene and biosecurity: tribal knowledge claims in the UK poultry industry

Since 1997 the world has been facing the threat of a human influenza pandemic that may be caused by an avian virus and the poultry industry around the globe has been grappling with the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1, or in more informal terms bird flu. The UK poultry industry has lived with and through this threat and its consequences since 2005. This study investigates knowledge claims about health, hygiene and biosecurity as tools to ward off the threat from this virus. It takes a semi-ethnographic and discourse analytic approach to analyse a small corpus of semi-structured interviews carried out in the wake of one of the most publicised outbreaks of H5N1 in Suffolk in 2007. It reveals that claims about what best to do to protect flocks against the risk of disease are divided along lines imposed on the one hand by the structure of the industry and on the other by more 'tribal' lines drawn by knowledge and belief systems about purity and dirt, health and hygiene

Fecal microbiota transplants: Emerging social representations in the English-language print media

open access articleThis study investigates how English-language news sources have represented fecal microbiota transplants (FMT). FMT involves transferring stool from a healthy donor to a recipient with a dysfunctional intestinal flora in order to repopulate their gut microbiome. FMT applications are increasingly moving into mainstream clinical care. We investigate press coverage of stool transplants, as well as broader themes associated with health and the gut microbiome, in order to uncover emerging social representations. Our findings show that print media focused in particular on creating novel, mainly hopeful, social representations of feces through wordplay and punning, side-lining issues of risk and fear. We also identify changing metaphorical framings of microbes and bacteria from ‘enemies’ to ‘friends’, and ways in which readers are familiarized with FMT through the depiction of the process as both mundane and highly medicalized