Event overview
Science and narratives of spillover in Meliandou, Guinea, with James Fairhead, Sussex University. Part of Anthropology in the Anthropocene, Spring term seminar series.
Current narrations of the emergence of zoonotic diseases such as Ebola – human diseases that have their origins in spillover from non-human nature - draw together key policy and public anxieties: population growth, human transformations of the natural world (deforestation and forest fragmentation), bush-meat hunting, and the impact of climate change on disease vectors. When coupled with the mobility associated with globalisation, the spectre of new plagues is galvanising scientists, policymakers and research funders to address all dimensions. Yet there are problems associated with this these 'one-health' nexus of explanations and their relation to the epistemic communities that support it. Focusing on the 2013-15 West African Ebola outbreak, but drawing on those earlier, we argue that this nexus exaggerates environmental degradation and reproduces pernicious social and gender representations. It also downplays women’s and children’s interactions with potential disease hosts: many of those identified as ‘index cases’ in Ebola epidemics are women and children, as in Meliandou in south-east Guinea to which the Ebola epidemic is thought to have emerged in 2013. Might hunter and 'one health' discourses be occluding attention to other viral reservoirs and sources of infection? Circumstances in Meliandou suggest the plausible salience of alternative explanations of spillover, whether to overlooked dimensions of women and children’s ecological lives, or to infection linked to an ill visitor overlooked when discerning ‘patient zero’.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 31 Jan 2018 | 3:15pm - 5:15pm |
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