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Pandemic Perspectives: Praxis, Policy and Pedagogies
by Reena Marwah Sandra JosephThe book explores the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on nations across the globe since early 2020. It hosts a variety of perspectives within economic, social and development research studies, providing contemporary and proper information. The book also presents policy prescriptions for developing economies, critiques the system of disease surveillance and waste management, and defines a vision for India's development. It also mirrors issues related to digitisation, marginalisation, government regulations and health systems and provides original ideas for innovative methodologies suitable for higher education.Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)
Pandemic Planning
by David R. Black J. Eric DietzPreparedness and rigorous planning on community, state, and regional levels are critical to containing the threat of pandemic illness. Steeped in research and recommendations from lessons learned, Pandemic Planning describes the processes necessary for the efficient and effective preparation, prevention, response, and recovery from a pandemic threa
Pandemic Police Power, Public Health and the Abolition Question (Palgrave Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Criminal Justice)
by Tryon P. WoodsThis book critically explores how police power manifested beyond criminal law into the field of public health during the pandemic. Whilst people were engaged with anti-police violence protests, particularly in the US, they were being policed openly and notoriously by the government and medical science in the public health arena. The book explores how public health policing might be an abuse of constitutional power and encourages the abolition question to be applied consistently to the state’s discourse in the area of public health, as black people the world over continue to bear a disproportionate cost burden for public health policies. The chapters explore contemporary policing in terms of the historical context of slavery, the growth of the police and prison abolition movement and how this should be applied more widely, and how police power operates throughout society beyond the criminal justice system, in finance, technology, housing, education, and in medicine and health science. It seeks to re-examine our relationship to health sovereignty and the police power more fundamentally. It provides insights into the convergence of policing and social control of humans and argues that the most normative response is abolition.
Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID
by Thomas B. Pepinsky Sara Wallace Goodman Shana Kushner GadarianHow the politicization of the pandemic endangers our lives—and our democracyCOVID-19 has killed more people than any war or public health crisis in American history, but the scale and grim human toll of the pandemic were not inevitable. Pandemic Politics examines how Donald Trump politicized COVID-19, shedding new light on how his administration tied the pandemic to the president’s political fate in an election year and chose partisanship over public health, with disastrous consequences for all of us.Health is not an inherently polarizing issue, but the Trump administration’s partisan response to COVID-19 led ordinary citizens to prioritize what was good for their “team” rather than what was good for their country. Democrats, in turn, viewed the crisis as evidence of Trump’s indifference to public well-being. At a time when solidarity and bipartisan unity were sorely needed, Americans came to see the pandemic in partisan terms, adopting behaviors and attitudes that continue to divide us today. This book draws on a wealth of new data on public opinion to show how pandemic politics has touched all aspects of our lives—from the economy to race and immigration—and puts America’s COVID-19 response in global perspective.An in-depth account of a uniquely American tragedy, Pandemic Politics reveals how the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic has profound and troubling implications for public health and the future of democracy itself.
Pandemic Resilience: Vaccination Resistance and Hesitance, Lessons from COVID-19 (Risk, Systems and Decisions)
by David M. BerubeThis edited volume draws from health communication scholars and offers a depthful examination of the roles vaccination have played and continue to play in contributing to human, community, and transnational protection against infectious diseases. The problems associated with vaccination against infection diseases was made abundantly clear during the current pandemic of COVID-19. Vaccines were traced back to Dr. Edward Jenner in the 18th century as a tool to control smallpox in England. Today we have six different categories of vaccines (three seem most controversial today): inactivated, live-attenuated, and messenger RNA (mRNA). We examine the reasons for public reluctance and outright resistance to vaccines examining cognitive biases, communication campaign failures, politicization, misinformation, partisanship, and greed. The healthcare industry has not treated all infected people equally, especially the poor and people of color. This is true in the USA as well as abroad. In the future, we can expect more exotic infections to increase due to globalization, development, and transportation. As climate changes, humans will contact more species carrying many different bacteria and viruses. Advances in medical research have led to increases in the number of vaccinations available to control infection and outbreaks. However, the rates of vaccination have fluctuated over time. A vaccine that is not used is meaningless. To increase vaccination rates, we must learn why the public shies away from vaccinations and under what circumstances. This information will enable us to design more effective messaging and communication campaigns to maximize general resilience. An interactive partnership between providers of healthcare and their patients is a prerequisite to productive and effective vaccination campaigns
Pandemic Societies
by Jean-Louis Denis, Catherine Régis, and Daniel WeinstockAt the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many thought the changes taking place would be fleeting. It is now widely recognized that COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic in our highly interconnected world, and “pandemic societies” will be with us for some time.Pandemic Societies brings together experts in a wide range of academic disciplines to reflect on how their fields might be transformed in this new context. While the pandemic forces global institutions, such as the World Health Organization, to reimagine the ways in which they function, it also reaches into our everyday lives to change how we organize culture, performing arts, sports, tourism, and cities. Exploring how COVID-19 has altered people’s daily experiences – the ways they meet to play, to perform, and to entertain themselves – this book also pulls the lens back to take in the broader institutional and political contexts in which these quotidian activities are carried out.Examining the profound ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed every aspect of our lives, Pandemic Societies attempts to understand how we might act to steer this pandemic society, and how to reinvent institutions and practices that we think of as intrinsically face to face.
Pandemic Societies: A Critical Public Health Perspective
by Alan PetersenFrom SARS to Zika, and Ebola to COVID-19, epidemics and pandemics have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. Each outbreak presents new challenges but the responses are often similar. This important book explores the dimensions, dynamics and implications of emerging pandemic societies. Drawing on ideas from sociology and science and technology studies, it sheds new light on how pandemics are socially produced and, in turn, shape societies in areas such as governance, work and recreation, science and technology, education, and family life. It offers pointers to the future of pandemic societies, including the expansion of technologies of surveillance and control, as well as the prospects of social renewal created by economic and social disruption.
Pandemic Voices: Unheard Stories from the Front Lines
by Laura A. Hawryluck Nathan D. NielsenPandemic Voices sheds light on previously unheard or overlooked international perspectives of patients and health care and community services workers through unprecedented access to some of the most challenging moments of the COVID-19 pandemic: the innovations, the stories of lives saved, those of lives lost, and the prices paid. Divided into seven thematic sections, the collection chronicles the experiences from the front lines of the pandemic. It highlights the disruptions faced by medical systems and the innovative adaptations that emerged to simply keep them functioning, as well as the pandemic impacts from locations overlooked by global media. The book delves into the profound effects on health care workers and reveals insights into strain on health care systems. It amplifies the voices of individuals who faced unique struggles during the pandemic, such as caregivers for children with special needs or individuals battling addiction, in times when resources were basically non-existent in a chaotic landscape. The collection concludes with a reflection on how history will judge our pandemic-era actions, alongside the hard lessons learned on truth, science, and advocacy throughout these challenging years. In sharing the heartbreaks, the triumphs, and the scars that left none of us untouched, Pandemic Voices assesses what we have been through – what went well, what did not – in order to learn and, in time, hopefully to heal.
Pandemic in Potosí: Fear, Loathing, and Public Piety in a Colonial Mining Metropolis (Latin American Originals #18)
by Kris LaneIn 1719, a deadly and highly contagious disease took hold of the Imperial Villa of Potosí, a silver mining metropolis in what is now Bolivia. Within a year, the pathogen had killed some 22,000 people, just over a third of the city’s residents. Victims collapsed with fever, body aches, and effusions of blood from the nose and mouth. Most died within days. The great Andean pandemic of 1717–22 was likely the most destructive disease to strike South America since the days of the Spanish conquest.Pandemic in Potosí features the single longest narrative of this nearly forgotten period, penned by local historian Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, along with shorter treatments of the disease’s ravages in Cuzco, Arequipa, and the outskirts of Lima. The "Gran Peste," as it was called, was a pivotal event about which Arzáns wrote at length because he lived through it, but also because it was believed to have cosmic significance. Kris Lane translates and contextualizes Arzáns’s account, which is rich in local detail that sheds light on a range of topics—from therapeutics, devotional life, class relations, gender, and race to conceptions of illness, sin, and human will and responsibility during a major public health crisis.Original narratives of the pandemic, translated here for the first time, help readers see commonalities and differences between past and present disease encounters. Designed for use in courses on Latin American history, this concise work will also interest scholars and students of the history of religion, history of medicine, urban studies, and epidemiology.
Pandemic in Potosí: Fear, Loathing, and Public Piety in a Colonial Mining Metropolis (Latin American Originals)
by Kris LaneIn 1719, a deadly and highly contagious disease took hold of the Imperial Villa of Potosí, a silver mining metropolis in what is now Bolivia. Within a year, the pathogen had killed some 22,000 people, just over a third of the city’s residents. Victims collapsed with fever, body aches, and effusions of blood from the nose and mouth. Most died within days. The great Andean pandemic of 1717–22 was likely the most destructive disease to strike South America since the days of the Spanish conquest.Pandemic in Potosí features the single longest narrative of this nearly forgotten period, penned by local historian Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, along with shorter treatments of the disease’s ravages in Cuzco, Arequipa, and the outskirts of Lima. The “Gran Peste,” as it was called, was a pivotal event about which Arzáns wrote at length because he lived through it, but also because it was believed to have cosmic significance. Kris Lane translates and contextualizes Arzáns’s account, which is rich in local detail that sheds light on a range of topics—from therapeutics, devotional life, class relations, gender, and race to conceptions of illness, sin, and human will and responsibility during a major public health crisis.Original narratives of the pandemic, translated here for the first time, help readers see commonalities and differences between past and present disease encounters. Designed for use in courses on Latin American history, this concise work will also interest scholars and students of the history of religion, history of medicine, urban studies, and epidemiology.
Pandemic in the Metropolis: Transportation Impacts and Recovery (Springer Tracts on Transportation and Traffic #20)
by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris Alexandre M. Bayen Giovanni Circella R. JayakrishnanThis book brings together reports of original empirical studies which explore the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban mobility and transportation and the associated policy responses. Focusing on the California region, the book draws on this local experience to formulate general lessons for other regions and metropolitan areas. The book examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has had different impacts on vulnerable populations in cities. It explores the pandemic's impacts on the transportation industry, in particular public transit, but also on other industries and economic interests that rely on transportation, such as freight trucking, retail and food industries, and the gig-economy. It investigates the effect of the viral outbreak on automobile traffic and associated air quality and traffic safety, as well as on alternative forms of work, shopping, and travel which have developed to accommodate the conditions it has forced on society. With quantitative data supported with illustrations and graphs, transportation professionals, policymakers and students can use this book to learn about policies and strategies that may instigate positive change in urban transport in the post-pandemic period.
Pandemic, Governance and Communication: The Curious Case of COVID-19 (Routledge Series on the Humanities and the Social Sciences in a Post-COVID-19 World)
by Dipankar SinhaThis book focuses on what is arguably the most devastating phenomenon in the history of modern civilization, the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows how, on the one hand, the pandemic has exposed governments the world over to deal with a major health crisis; and, on the other, efforts by the ruling forces to enforce surveillance on people and disciplining them by maneuvering cutting-edge digital technology in the name of security and safety. Second, it explores how the mainstream versions of crisis communication and risk communication face huge challenges during a pandemic. Finally, it analyses how the pandemic propels an extraordinary expansion of infodemic — rapid spread of excessive quantities of misinformation and disinformation of the fake and false variety — and how social media in particular becomes its main tool in causing subversion of the prevalent information order. Engaging, comprehensive and accessible, this book will be of immense importance to scholars and researchers of politics, especially governance and political communication, communication studies, and public health management. It will be vital for public policy professionals, experts in thinktanks, career bureaucrats, and non-governmental organizations.
Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick
by J. David McSwane&“This startling, vital book deserves our attention.&” —San Francisco Chronicle For readers of War Dogs and Bad Blood, an explosive look inside the rush to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic, from the award-winning ProPublica reporter who saw it firsthand. The United States federal government has spent over $10 billion on medical protective wear and emergency supplies, yet as COVID-19 swept the nation, life-saving equipment such as masks, gloves, and ventilators was nearly impossible to find. In this brilliant nonfiction thriller, award-winning investigative reporter J. David McSwane takes us behind the scenes to reveal how traders, contractors, and healthcare companies used one of the darkest moments in American history to fill their pockets. Determined to uncover how this was possible, he spent over a year on private jets and in secret warehouses, traveling from California to Chicago to Washington DC, to interview both the most treacherous of profiteers and the victims of their crimes. Pandemic, Inc. is the story of the fraudster who signed a multi-million-dollar contract with the government to provide lifesaving PPE, and yet never came up with a single mask. The Navy admiral at the helm of the national hunt for additional medical resources. The Department of Health whistleblower who championed masks early on and was silenced by the government and conservative media. And the politician who callously slashed federal emergency funding and gutted the federal PPE stockpile. Winner of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, McSwane connects the dots between backdoor deals and the spoils systems to provide the definitive account of how this pandemic was so catastrophically mishandled. Shocking and revelatory, Pandemic, Inc. exposes a system that is both deeply rigged, and singularly American.
Pandemic, States and Socieites in the Asia-Pacific, 2020-2021: Responding to COVID (Routledge Studies on the Asia-Pacific Region)
by Nichole Georgeou Charles HawksleyHawksley and Georgeou bring together scholars and practitioners from across the region to analyse the main effects of the first two years of the COVID pandemic in a range of case studies from Southeast Asia, East Asia, South Asia, and Oceania. The book provides a broad survey of how Indonesia, Bangladesh, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Nepal, Australia, Cambodia, Taiwan, and New Zealand attempted to manage the COVID pandemic; the challenges they faced; and how they fared. Drawing on insights from politics, economics, sociology, law, public health, education, and geography, most authors are nationals of the cases they discuss. Written in non-specialist language, ten case studies are examined, providing a useful analysis of the first two years of COVID in the Asia-Pacific from the emergence of COVID in January 2020 to the lifting of restrictions in December 2021. Chapters focus on different issues according to the scholar’s academic expertise, and a wide diversity of national pandemic experiences, challenges, and responses are showcased. An essential read for scholars and students interested in the areas of Asia-Pacific politics, sociology, and public health.
Pandemic, States and Societies in the Asia-Pacific, 2020–2021: Responding to COVID (Routledge Studies on the Asia-Pacific Region)
by Nichole Georgeou Charles HawksleyHawksley and Georgeou bring together scholars and practitioners from across the region to analyse the main effects of the first two years of the COVID pandemic in a range of case studies from Southeast Asia, East Asia, South Asia, and Oceania.The book provides a broad survey of how Indonesia, Bangladesh, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Nepal, Australia, Cambodia, Taiwan, and New Zealand attempted to manage the COVID pandemic; the challenges they faced; and how they fared. Drawing on insights from politics, economics, sociology, law, public health, education, and geography, most authors are nationals of the cases they discuss. Written in non-specialist language, ten case studies are examined, providing a useful analysis of the first two years of COVID in the Asia-Pacific from the emergence of COVID in January 2020 to the lifting of restrictions in December 2021. Chapters focus on different issues according to the scholar’s academic expertise, and a wide diversity of national pandemic experiences, challenges, and responses are showcased.An essential read for scholars and students interested in the areas of Asia-Pacific politics, sociology, and public health.Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Pandemic: A Novel (Dr. Noah Haldane)
by Daniel KallaGenesis of a PlagueRight now, in a remote corner of rural China, a farmer and his family are sharing their water supply with their livestock: chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep. They share the same waste-disposal system, too.Bird viruses meet their human counterparts in the bloodstreams of the swine, where they mix and mutate before spreading back into the human population. And a new flu is born....Dr. Noah Haldane, of the World Health Organization, knows that humanity is overdue for a new killer flu, like the great influenza pandemic of 1919 that killed more than twenty million people in less than four months. So when a mysterious new strain of flu is reported in the Gansu Province of mainland China, WHO immediately sends a team to investigate. Haldane and his colleagues soon discover that the new disease, dubbed Acute Respiratory Collapse Syndrome, is far more deadly than SARS, killing one in four victims, regardless of their age or health. But even as WHO struggles to contain the outbreak, ARCS is already spreading to Hong Kong, London, and even America.In an age when every single person in the world is connected by three commercial flights or fewer, a killer bug can travel much faster than the flu of 1919.Especially when someone is spreading the virus on purpose...At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Pandemic: A Pandemic Novel (Pandemic #1)
by Amanda BridgemanBased on the smash hit boardgame, here&’s the debut of an incredible new novel series that shows just what humanity can achieve when experts work together, to ensure a global pandemic is never allowed to break out againBodhi Patel is the brand new Lead Epidemiologist for the world&’s top epidemic specialists, Global Health Agency, but there&’s no time to settle in: his new boss, Helen Taylor, deploys GHA to contain a mysterious new killer virus spreading from Peru into Brazil. On the ground they learn that the virus is loose in a region controlled by a heavily armed drug warlord, and the race against time to discover a cure just got a whole lot tougher. Meanwhile, Bodhi finds himself with a newly reshuffled team still smarting from the changes, including his ex – the last person he expected to be working with.
Pandemics and Apocalypse in World Literature: The Hope for Planetary Salvation (Routledge Focus on Literature)
by William FrankePandemics and Apocalypse rereads classical narratives of plague from the Bible (Exodus) and classical antiquity, both Greek (Homer, Thucydides, Sophocles) and Roman (Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid), through the Middle Ages (Dante, Boccaccio) and Modernity (Defoe, Manzoni, Artaud, Camus) as a basis for contemplating the significance of the recent Covid-19 pandemic. It concerns how we are to confront future pandemics and other inextricably related crises, notably those of an ecological nature. Responses to Covid-19 typically set everything on defeating this “enemy,” but actually we cannot eliminate viruses without eliminating ourselves. We need to see the pandemic as revealing us to ourselves in our inherently vulnerable condition as a first step to admitting the infinite openness to one another and to our Ground—physical and metaphysical—that alone can save our world by engendering a different attitude, open and engaged, to one another and to the Earth as sources of our collective life.
Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation
by A. David Lewis Sathyaraj Venkatesan Antara Chatterjee Brian CallenderThis edited book analyses how artists, authors, and cultural practitioners have responded to and represented episodes of epidemics/pandemics through history. Covering a broad range of notable epidemics/pandemics (black death, cholera, Influenza, AIDS, Ebola, COVID-19), the chapters examine the cultural representations of epidemics and pandemics in different contexts, periods, languages, media, and genres. Interdisciplinary in nature and drawing on perspectives from medicine, literature, medical anthropology, philosophy of medicine, and cultural theory, the book investigates and emphasizes the urgent need to reflect on past catastrophes caused by such outbreaks. By delving into cultural history, it re-examines how societies and communities have responded in the past to species-threatening epidemics/pandemics. Sure to be of interest to lay readers as well as students and researchers, this work situates epidemics and pandemics outbreaks within the contexts of culture and narrative, and their complex and layered representation, commenting on intersections of contagion, culture, and community. It offers a cross-cultural, global, and comparative analysis of the trajectories, histories and responses to various epidemics/pandemics that impacted people worldwide.
Pandemics and Ethics: Development – Problems – Solutions
by Andreas Reis Andreas Frewer Martina SchmidhuberPandemics such as Covid-19, Ebola, SARS, and influenza, as well as the necessary measures for their research, prevention, and treatment, raise a number of ethical issues that confront science, the medical profession, and health policy.This overview volume, written by renowned experts from medicine, the humanities, and the social sciences, addresses the central ethical issues in pandemics. Focusing on the disciplines of philosophy, public health, bioethics, and law, the book discusses issues of resource allocation, triage, and research, as well as restrictions on freedom, rights and duties of health professionals, and ethical aspects of digital medicine in crises. The volume is intended to serve as a handbook and to provide physicians as well as nurses, politicians and interested laypersons with valuable advice on how to deal with the difficult moral problems of epidemics and pandemics.With expert contributions by Steffen Augsberg (Giessen), Klaus Bergdolt (Cologne), Nikola Biller-Andorno (Zurich), Walter Bruchhausen (Bonn), Christiane Druml (Vienna), Hans-Jörg Ehni (Tuebingen), Alice Faust (Berlin), Sophia Forster (Erlangen-Nuremberg), Andreas Frewer (Erlangen-Nuremberg), Sara Gerke (Boston/Cambridge), Patrik Hummel (Eindhoven), Elena Jirovsky-Platter (Vienna), Katharina Kieslich (Vienna), Otmar Kloiber (Ferney-Voltaire), Ulrich H. J. Körtner (Vienna), Eva Kuhn (Bonn), Georg Marckmann (Munich), Timo Minssen (Copenhagen), Tim Nguyen (Geneva), Barbara Prainsack (Vienna), Andreas Reis (Geneva), Anita Rieder (Vienna), Stephan Rixen (Bayreuth), Lana Saksone (Berlin), Martina Schmidhuber (Graz), Harald Schmidt (Philadelphia), Annabel Seebohm (Brussels), Daniel Strech (Berlin), Sebastian Wäscher (Zurich), Hans-Werner Wahl (Heidelberg), Stefanie Weigold (Berlin), and Lena Woydack (Berlin).
Pandemics and Global Health
by Barry YoungermanInfectious agents have been prime movers of whole populations, economies, and societies, and our age is not exempt just because it arrives on a plane rather than a ship. Author Youngerman helps those who wish to inform themselves and others about pandemics, starting by looking at examples of mass infection in the US and elsewhere. He explains the primary sources available for study, gives advice on how to conduct research, provides some relevant facts and figures and describes key players. He closes with information on organizations and agencies that can supply information for research and an annotated bibliography. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Pandemics and Innovative Food Systems (Food Biology Series)
by Anil Kumar AnalThe debate on health, nutrition and food security could not have arisen at a more opportune time. The recent pandemic has given rise to increased food and nutrition insecurity for individuals, families, and communities. The crisis threatened the food security and nutrition of millions of people, many of whom were already suffering. We face possible disruptions to the functioning of food systems, with severe consequences for health and nutrition. Pandemics create a greater burden for poorer countries and countries since they are already pressure of inadequate food supplies. With concerted action, we can not only avoid some of the worst impacts but do so in a way that supports a transition to more sustainable food systems that are in better balance with nature and that support healthy diets – and thus better health prospects for all. This book aims to highlight the impact of pandemics in food systems and nutrition security. It draws on the experience from the past and present pandemics to better prepare the world for future crises.
Pandemics and Literature: Regional and Global Perspectives
by Kamlesh Mohan Saurav Kumar RaiThis volume provides a literary-cum-historiographical analysis of epidemics and pandemics. It looks at folklore, tribal folktales, eyewitness accounts, memoirs and missionary writings from India and the west to explore the history of some of the major outbreaks in history. The chapters focus on the impact of outbreaks such as plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis and COVID-19, upon the material life of people, their social dislocation and their complex responses to such crises.The book studies the role of pandemics in pushing scientists, social actors and littérateurs to develop new paradigms in knowledge generation, theories of environmental dislocation and the economic slide. It examines themes such as changes in the perception of epidemic diseases across different periods of history, popular responses to state intervention during epidemics, gendering epidemics, as well as the impact of rumours during epidemics.An important contribution to the social history of health and medicine, the volume will be useful for students and researchers of cultural studies and medical anthropology, public health, literature, history of pandemics and epidemics, sociology of medicine and South Asian studies.
Pandemics and Resilience: Lessons we should have learned from Zika (Risk, Systems and Decisions)
by David M. BerubeThe aim of the book was to produce the most comprehensive examination of a pandemic that has ever been attempted. By cataloging the full extent of the Zika pandemic, this book will be the most complete history and epistemic contextualization ever attempted to date. The work should function as the primary source for students, researchers, and scholars who need information about the Zika pandemic. This book examines the technical literature, digital and popular literature, and online materials to fully contextualize this event and provide a bona fide record of this event and its implications for the future. It is somewhat serendipitous that while this work was underway, we are going through another pandemic. One of the primary lessons we did not learn by Zika was pandemic events will return repeatedly, and we need to learn from each one of them to prepare the planet for the next one. Just because Zika seemed to have died out does not make it less important. We were lucky that the virus evolved into what seemed to be a less virulent version of itself, and the vector mosquitoes were concentrated elsewhere. Finally, this book represents a tour de force in scholarship involving nearly 4,000 sources of information and does not shy from a detailed examination of the controversies, conspiracies, and long-term consequences when we avoid learning from outbreaks, such as Zika.
Pandemics, Pills, and Politics: Governing Global Health Security
by Stefan ElbeThe fascinating story of Tamiflu's development and stockpiling against global health threats.orld's most prominent medical countermeasure, Tamiflu.A pill can strengthen national security? The suggestion may seem odd, but many states around the world believe precisely that. Confronted with pandemics, bioterrorism, and emerging infectious diseases, governments are transforming their security policies to include the proactive development, acquisition, stockpiling, and mass distribution of new pharmaceutical defenses. What happens—politically, economically, and socially—when governments try to protect their populations with pharmaceuticals? How do competing interests among states, pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and scientists play out in the quest to develop new medical countermeasures? And do citizens around the world ultimately stand to gain or lose from this pharmaceuticalization of security policy?Stefan Elbe explores these complex questions in Pandemics, Pills, and Politics, the first in-depth study of the world’s most prominent medical countermeasure, Tamiflu. Taken by millions of people around the planet in the fight against pandemic flu, Tamiflu has provoked suspicions about undue commercial influence in government decision-making about stockpiles. It even found itself at the center of a prolonged political battle over who should have access to the data about the safety and effectiveness of medicines.Pandemics, Pills, and Politics shows that the story of Tamiflu harbors deeper lessons about the vexing political, economic, legal, social, and regulatory tensions that emerge as twenty-first-century security policy takes a pharmaceutical turn. At the heart of this issue, Elbe argues, lies something deeper: the rise of a new molecular vision of life that is reshaping the world we live in.