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The ‘truth about Ebola’: Insecure epistemologies in post-outbreak Forest Guinea
Abstract
This dissertation examines the ways in which the ‘truth’ about an outbreak of zoonotic disease stabilises through the labour of sampling animals. While scarcely any case of Ebola had ever been reported in West Africa, the deadliest epidemic to date started in 2013 in the southeastern region of Guinea called ‘Forest Guinea’. Since then, ecologists and virologists from Africa, America and Europe have been conducting the largest investigation into what some frame as the origins of Ebola: they are trying to establish a fuller picture of the processes by which the disease is maintained and infects humans in a place that has become known as one of its ‘hotspots’. During 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I closely tracked the Guinean staff of one of those foreign projects – local vets who professionally defined their role as préleveurs (‘samplers’ in English) – while they captured animals, took, and dispatched fluid samples, communicated about the risks of contact with bats, and disclosed the finding of a new species of Ebola virus in bat species. The social sciences have dismantled the idea of singular, hegemonic epidemic origins, and indicated that complex sociospatial conditions allow for epidemics to emerge. This dissertation adopts a different analytical angle and outlines the technological, epistemological, and affective consequences of framing microbiological research as a search for the origin of epidemics. It focuses on the economy of knowledge, epistemological labour, and ethical aspirations of animal préleveurs, whose work is to make a hotspot exist in Forest Guinea. By combining attention to history, the scientific literature and ethnographic fieldwork, I resituate animal sampling within a West African genealogy of asymmetrical extraction and conservation, which crosscuts the colonial sciences, interwar disease ecology, global health, outbreak preparedness, and the newer One Health agenda. At the core of this multifaceted sampling enterprise is an interdependence between anticipatory practices and forms of insecurity – political, economic, environmental. The thesis suggests that insecurity is normalised by hotspot investigations, and that associated social hierarchies, causalities and moralities inflect the local notion of responsibility for the epidemic. Ultimately, insecurity configures the production of evidence about the so-called reservoir of Ebola and leads the hypothesis of a bat origin to gain strength in Guinea. The dissertation chapters foreground the controversies, dissimulation practices, fear, and cynicism that the quest for epidemic origins elicits locally, even as it contributes to imposing a single narrative for disease causality. In so doing, I challenge a social science view that scientific claims become authoritative when the institutions and practices that manufacture them are socially recognised as trustworthy and legitimate, i.e., secure. Instead, insecurity is entangled in the material performances and ethos of préleveurs. Far from only producing scientific evidence for experts, their activity generates clues about Ebola’s origins for many people in Guinea and Africa more generally – with significant consequences for research priorities and prevention policies.
This study uses a fuzzy-based logical controller to compute the multiorgan spreading analysis of COVID-19 in a novel way. The proposed method combines the use of fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence to generate an accurate and reliable prediction system to detect the pattern of the disease. The model is able to analyze the patient’s data and predict the probability of organ involvement. The fuzzy logical reasoning system can analyze the patient’s symptoms and laboratory results and make an informed decision regarding the probability of COVID-19. The fuzzy logic-based system is also capable of recommending the best suitable treatments, preventions and preventative measures for a particular case. The proposed system is evaluated through a comprehensive experimental study using real-time data from the hospitals. The findings demonstrated the high accuracy of the suggested strategy, which may be applied to give prompt and trustworthy diagnosis and support decision-making throughout the pandemic.
Seven years after the declaration of the first epidemic of Ebola virus disease in Guinea, the country faced a new outbreak—between 14 February and 19 June 2021—near the epicentre of the previous epidemic1,2. Here we use next-generation sequencing to generate complete or near-complete genomes of Zaire ebolavirus from samples obtained from 12 different patients. These genomes form a well-supported phylogenetic cluster with genomes from the previous outbreak, which indicates that the new outbreak was not the result of a new spillover event from an animal reservoir. The 2021 lineage shows considerably lower divergence than would be expected during sustained human-to-human transmission, which suggests a persistent infection with reduced replication or a period of latency. The resurgence of Zaire ebolavirus from humans five years after the end of the previous outbreak of Ebola virus disease reinforces the need for long-term medical and social care for patients who survive the disease, to reduce the risk of re-emergence and to prevent further stigmatization.
The unexpected Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa in 2014 involving the Zaire ebolavirus made clear that other regions outside Central Africa, its previously documented niche, were at risk of future epidemics. The complex transmission cycle and a lack of epidemiological data make mapping areas at risk of the disease challenging. We used a Geographic Information System-based multicriteria evaluation (GIS-MCE), a knowledge-based approach, to identify areas suitable for Ebola virus spillover to humans in regions of Guinea, Congo and Gabon where Ebola viruses already emerged. We identified environmental, climatic and anthropogenic risk factors and potential hosts from a literature review. Geographical data layers, representing risk factors, were combined to produce suitability maps of Ebola virus spillover at the landscape scale. Our maps show high spatial and temporal variability in the suitability for Ebola virus spillover at a fine regional scale. Reported spillover events fell in areas of intermediate to high suitability in our maps, and a sensitivity analysis showed that the maps produced were robust. There are still important gaps in our knowledge about what factors are associated with the risk of Ebola virus spillover. As more information becomes available, maps produced using the GIS-MCE approach can be easily updated to improve surveillance and the prevention of future outbreaks.
Since the first reports of a novel SARS-like coronavirus in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, there has been intense interest in understanding how SARS-CoV-2 emerged in the human population. Recent debate has coalesced around two competing ideas: a “laboratory escape” scenario and zoonotic emergence. Here, we critically review the current scientific evidence that may help clarify the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
Background
Following the 2013-2016 West African Ebola outbreak, distinct, persistent health complaints were recognized in Ebola virus disease (EVD) survivors. Here we provide an in-depth characterization of post-Ebola syndrome over 2.5 years after resolution of disease. Additionally, we report sub-phenotypes of post-Ebola syndrome with overlapping symptom clusters in survivors from Eastern Sierra Leone.
Methods
Participants in Eastern Sierra Leone were identified by the Sierra Leone Association of Ebola survivors. Survivors and their contacts were administered a questionnaire assessing self-reported symptoms and a physical exam. Comparisons between survivors and contacts were conducted using conditional logistic regression. Symptom groupings were identified using hierarchical clustering approaches. Simplified Presentation of Incredibly Complex Evaluations (SPICE), correlation analysis, logistic regression and principal component analysis (PCA) were performed to explore the relationships between symptom clusters.
Results
375 EVD survivors and 1040 contacts were enrolled into the study. At enrollment, EVD survivors reported significantly more symptoms than their contacts in all categories (p<.001). Symptom clusters representing distinct organ systems were identified. Correlation and logistic regression analysis identified relationships between symptom clusters, including stronger relationships between clusters including musculoskeletal symptoms (r=0.63, p<.001; and p<.001 for correlation and logistic regression, respectively). SPICE and PCA further highlighted sub-phenotypes with or without musculoskeletal symptoms.
Conclusions
This study presents an in-depth characterization of post-Ebola syndrome in Sierra Leonean survivors over 2.5 years after disease. The interrelationship between symptom clusters indicates that post-Ebola syndrome is a heterogeneous disease. The distinct musculoskeletal and non-musculoskeletal phenotypes identified likely require targeted therapies to optimize long-term treatment for EVD survivors.
Significance
The recent emergence and spread of zoonotic viruses, including Ebola virus and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, demonstrate that animal-sourced viruses are a very real threat to global public health. Virus discovery efforts have detected hundreds of new animal viruses with unknown zoonotic risk. We developed an open-source risk assessment to systematically evaluate novel wildlife-origin viruses in terms of their zoonotic spillover and spread potential. Our tool will help scientists and governments assess and communicate risk, informing national disease prioritization, prevention, and control actions. The resulting watchlist of potential pathogens will identify targets for new virus countermeasure initiatives, which can reduce the economic and health impacts of emerging diseases.
Neutralizing antibody function provides a foundation for the efficacy of vaccines and therapies1–3. Here, using a robust in vitro Ebola virus (EBOV) pseudo-particle infection assay and a well-defined set of solid-phase assays, we describe a wide spectrum of antibody responses in a cohort of healthy survivors of the Sierra Leone EBOV outbreak of 2013–2016. Pseudo-particle virus-neutralizing antibodies correlated with total anti-EBOV reactivity and neutralizing antibodies against live EBOV. Variant EBOV glycoproteins (1995 and 2014 strains) were similarly neutralized. During longitudinal follow-up, antibody responses fluctuated in a ‘decay–stimulation–decay’ pattern that suggests de novo restimulation by EBOV antigens after recovery. A pharmacodynamic model of antibody reactivity identified a decay half-life of 77–100 days and a doubling time of 46–86 days in a high proportion of survivors. The highest antibody reactivity was observed around 200 days after an individual had recovered. The model suggests that EBOV antibody reactivity declines over 0.5–2 years after recovery. In a high proportion of healthy survivors, antibody responses undergo rapid restimulation. Vigilant follow-up of survivors and possible elective de novo antigenic stimulation by vaccine immunization should be considered in order to prevent EBOV viral recrudescence in recovering individuals and thereby to mitigate the potential risk of reseeding an outbreak. In many survivors of Ebola virus infection, antibody responses show long-term patterns of decline followed by restimulation, possibly owing to recrudescence of persisting virus.
Entre 1899 et 1900, le bacille de la peste bubonique est identifié pour la première fois au Brésil, dans le cœur économique du pays, à São Paulo et Rio de Janeiro. Pour combattre le fléau, les pouvoirs publics créent deux laboratoires chargés de la production de sérums et de vaccins antipesteux, Butantan et Manguinhos, et mettent en place une série de mesures d’hygiène publique, dont les vaccinations et la chasse aux rats. La politique sanitaire produit progressivement ses effets, de sorte que vers 1917 la maladie a quitté ces deux régions du pays. En 1922, l’année du premier centenaire de l’indépendance du Brésil, des savants font de cet épisode le début d’une tradition scientifique nationale, initiant une lecture qui sera reprise ensuite par certains historiens. À partir de sources conservées dans des archives institutionnelles, diplomatiques et gouvernementales au Brésil, en France, en Italie et au Royaume-Uni, la thèse propose une autre lecture de cet événement. Elle montre d’abord le dialogue établi entre des acteurs basés au Brésil et des savoirs microbiologiques développés avant 1900 aussi bien à Bombay, qui est alors l’épicentre de la pandémie de peste, qu’à Paris, siège de l’Institut Pasteur. Elle examine ensuite la façon dont ces acteurs et d’autres, basés à São Paulo et à Rio de Janeiro, se sont engagés, entre 1900 et 1914, dans de grands débats internationaux sur le traitement et la prophylaxie de la maladie. À cet égard, la thèse accompagne la trajectoire de sérums antipesteux envoyés depuis le Butantan jusqu’à Bombay ; la mobilisation de statistiques sur l’usage du sérum antipesteux de Manguinhos par les savants de l’Institut Pasteur ; et le développement de pratiques d’immunisation antipesteuse et de politiques sanitaires contre les rats, d’abord à Bombay, puis dans les villes brésiliennes touchées par le fléau, et jusqu’à Paris, frappée à son tour par la maladie en 1920. Les principales conclusions de la thèse s’adressent autant à l’histoire des sciences au Brésil qu’à l’histoire de la microbiologie en général. On conclut que la mise au point et la stabilisation des acquis majeurs de la microbiologie – les sérums, les vaccins et la destruction de vecteurs – relèvent, en ce qui concerne la peste bubonique, de l’interaction directe et indirecte entre des groupes de savants basés au Brésil, en Inde et en France. On établit également que certains savoirs élaborés au Brésil et en Inde ont pu circuler en France, où le fléau se présentait comme une menace étrangère constante, quand la peste est devenue un problème de santé publique en 1920. On montre enfin que la microbiologie, vue souvent comme une science européenne exportée vers le reste du monde, ou comme le produit de traditions scientifiques nationales, possède en vérité des trajectoires plus complexes, voire globales.
Long-term follow up studies from Ebola virus disease (EVD) survivors (EBOV_S) are lacking. Here, we evaluate immune and gene expression profiles in 35 Guinean EBOV_S from the last West African outbreak, a median of 23 months (IQR [18–25]) after discharge from treatment center. Compared with healthy donors, EBOV_S exhibit increases of blood markers of inflammation, intestinal tissue damage, T cell and B cell activation and a depletion of circulating dendritic cells. All survivors have EBOV-specific IgG antibodies and robust and polyfunctional EBOV-specific memory T-cell responses. Deep sequencing of the genes expressed in blood reveals an enrichment in ‘inflammation’ and ‘antiviral’ pathways. Integrated analyses identify specific immune markers associated with the persistence of clinical symptoms. This study identifies a set of biological and genetic markers that could be used to define a signature of “chronic Ebola virus disease (CEVD)”. Patients who have recovered from Ebola virus can have ongoing health problems. Here, the authors show that 35 Guinean survivors of the last West African Ebola epidemic have a chronic disease with high inflammatory cytokine expression and other markers of immune activation as well as evidence of intestinal tissue damage nearly two years after their release from hospital.
The present outbreak of a coronavirus-associated acute respiratory disease called coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) is the third documented spillover of an animal coronavirus to humans in only two decades that has resulted in a major epidemic. The Coronaviridae Study Group (CSG) of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, which is responsible for developing the classification of viruses and taxon nomenclature of the family Coronaviridae, has assessed the placement of the human pathogen, tentatively named 2019-nCoV, within the Coronaviridae. Based on phylogeny, taxonomy and established practice, the CSG recognizes this virus as forming a sister clade to the prototype human and bat severe acute respiratory syndrome coronaviruses (SARS-CoVs) of the species Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus, and designates it as SARS-CoV-2. In order to facilitate communication, the CSG proposes to use the following naming convention for individual isolates: SARS-CoV-2/host/location/isolate/date. While the full spectrum of clinical manifestations associated with SARS-CoV-2 infections in humans remains to be determined, the independent zoonotic transmission of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 highlights the need for studying viruses at the species level to complement research focused on individual pathogenic viruses of immediate significance. This will improve our understanding of virus–host interactions in an ever-changing environment and enhance our preparedness for future outbreaks.
Marburg virus (MARV) causes sporadic outbreaks of severe Marburg virus disease (MVD). Most MVD outbreaks originated in East Africa and field studies in East Africa, South Africa, Zambia, and Gabon identified the Egyptian rousette bat (ERB; Rousettus aegyptiacus) as a natural reservoir. However, the largest recorded MVD outbreak with the highest case–fatality ratio happened in 2005 in Angola, where direct spillover from bats was not shown. Here, collaborative studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Njala University, University of California, Davis USAID-PREDICT, and the University of Makeni identify MARV circulating in ERBs in Sierra Leone. PCR, antibody and virus isolation data from 1755 bats of 42 species shows active MARV infection in approximately 2.5% of ERBs. Phylogenetic analysis identifies MARVs that are similar to the Angola strain. These results provide evidence of MARV circulation in West Africa and demonstrate the value of pathogen surveillance to identify previously undetected threats. Egyptian rousette bats (ERBs) are natural reservoirs for Marburg virus (MARV), but these bats have not been linked to the MARV Angola strain that caused the largest and deadliest outbreak on record. Here, Amman et al., in a multi-institutional surveillance effort, identify and isolate Angola-like MARV in ERBs in West Africa.
Background
With the increasing frequency and impact of Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreaks illustrated by recent epidemics, good knowledge on extent of viral persistance or RNA detection in body fluids from survivors is urgently needed.
Methods
Ebola viral RNA shedding was studied with molecular assays in semen (n=1,368), urine (n=1,875), cervico-vaginal fluid (n=549), saliva (n=900), breast milk (n=168) and feces (n=558) from EVD survivors in Guinea (POSTEBOGUI cohort, n=802) at a regular base until 40 months after inclusion.
Results
27/277 (9.8%) male survivors tested positive for Ebola RNA in at least one semen sample. The probability of remaining positive for Ebola RNA in semen was estimated at 93.02% and 60.12% after three and six months. Viral RNA in semen was more frequent in patients with eye pain (p=0.036), joint pain (p=0.047), and higher antibody levels to Ebola virus antigens (NP (p=0.001), GP (p=0.05) and VP40 (p=0.05)). Ebola RNA was only rarely detected in other body fluids from EVD survivors : saliva (1/454) urine (2/593), breast milk (2/168), cervico-vaginal secretions (0/273), feces (0/330). RNA was detected in breast milk one month after delivery but 500 days after discharge of Ebola treatment unit (ETU) in a women who became pregnant seven months after discharge from the ETU.
Conclusions
The frequency and potential long term presence of viral RNA in semen confirm that systematic prevention measures in male survivors are required. Our observation in breast milk suggest that our knowledge on viral reservoir in immune priveledged sites and its impact are still incomplete.
By combining an ethnographic study of youth with an analysis of the local state in the making, this research monograph introduces the perspective of »meandering lives« to grasp being young and growing up in the Guéckédou borderland, a remote space approximately 700 kilometers southeast of Conakry, Guinea's capital. This history-sensitive perspective represents a fruitful lens to not only depict youth but to also draw a nuanced picture of the functioning of the state in Guinea.
In 2018, a previously unknown Ebola virus, Bombali virus, was discovered in Sierra Leone. We describe detection of Bombali virus in Guinea. We found viral RNA in internal organs of 3 Angolan free-tailed bats (Mops condylurus) trapped in the city of N'Zerekore and in a nearby village.
Background Examining press coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, this article analyzes the work of the hazmat suit as a visual signifier of disease.
Analysis Hazmat imagery from Africa operated to make the disease visible, both “othering” it and contributing to fantasies of containment. In American imagery, the suit became a figure of biosecurity and reassurance, while also connoting the prospect of American “diseaseability.”
Conclusion and implications African hazmat imagery reinforced pre-existing schema for understanding Ebola within a news category while American imagery straddled the boundary between the geography of disease fear and the imagined immunological community, potentially destabilizing press narratives of reassurance.
The Ebola virus is unparalleled in its charismatic ability to ignite fear, anxiety and disgust at a scale grossly disproportionate to the number of lives it claims. As an archetypal ‘Emerging Infectious Disease’ (EID), this designation and the politics that have encircled it have provided Ebola with a conceptual space in which epidemiology and geography to splice together in the genesis and maintenance of its charismatic valence. Even before the West African outbreak of 2013-2016, Ebola was an ‘exceptional’ and ‘master status’ disease around which media attention mobilised to an unparalleled degree and effect. This paper argues that even if never directly conceptualised as such, Ebola is uniquely charismatic among EIDs and, more, this charisma can be understood geographically. To do so, the paper proceeds in three parts to explore how Ebola’s geographic charisma emerges from: (i) it being fixed ‘in place’ as something innately African; (ii) fears about the virus moving ‘out of place’ and (iii) its ‘potential energy’ or the persistent unease generated by the uncertainty of when and where the virus’s potential geographies will become actual.
This book combines evidence from natural and social sciences to examine the impact on Africa of seven cholera pandemics since 1817, particularly the current impact of cholera on such major countries as Senegal, Angola, Mozambique, Congo, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Myron Echenberg highlights the irony that this once-terrible scourge, having receded from most of the globe, now kills thousands of Africans annually - Africa now accounts for more than 90 percent of the world's cases and deaths - and leaves many more with severe developmental impairment. Responsibility for the suffering caused is shared by Western lending and health institutions and by often venal and incompetent African leadership. If the threat of this old scourge is addressed with more urgency, great progress in the public health of Africans can be achieved.
There is a growing trend to prepare children for future disasters. A Japanese nonprofit organization has developed an event called Iza! Kaeru Caravan, which includes games that teach children and their families how to survive disasters, from earthquakes to floods. Many disaster experts and government officials from other countries have now implemented the Caravan in their own contexts. Based on ethnographic research in Japan and Chile, this article shows how playful methods in disaster preparedness orient children, and by proxy their families, to accept an apocalyptic future, helping the neoliberal state buy time. Advocates of disaster preparedness in Japan and Chile accept that state actors will not come immediately to the rescue. Playful methods mobilize children and their families to take responsibility for their own survival through the subjunctive work of the “as if.” Ambiguously positioned between fun and education, playful methods of preparedness command attention from children and adults—what I call “attentive play”—as they frame and reframe the games to figure out, “Is this play?” Ultimately, the article shows that attentive play buys time for the state to temporarily defer its responsibilities to citizens, but the ambiguity of play can also exceed its ideological effects.
This article critically examines the unknowing of the source of the Ebola epidemic in Northern Uganda, in 2000/1, by asking how this unknowing has been achieved and has shaped the disease situation. Specifically, this article follows my informants’ explanation that soldiers of the Uganda People's Defence Force had brought the disease from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Uganda. This account is widely rejected as a rumour by scientists, who insist that the source of the epidemic remains unknown. By contrast, I suggest that following these stories, as embodied experiences of the multiple connections between war and epidemics, human and nonhuman lives, provides crucial insights into the political ecology of Ebola in the wider region – a region where, even today, conflict and Ebola outbreaks are intricately interwoven. Understanding how unknowing is achieved and shapes a disease situation directs attention to forms of silent knowing, which illuminate what preparedness means in the political ecology of Ebola.
While focused on the United States, Rosenberg's work on epidemics offers a nuanced framing that defines the stages and unfolding trajectories of epidemics. His writing is a good starting point to analyze the scope and challenges of epidemic historiography in South Asia. To redress its gaps, I have suggested an approach focused on writing histories of epidemics "sideways" and examined plague and influenza epidemics to situate the fluid politics of lived risks and marginality, moving away from dominant interpretations that have tried to characterize epidemics as finite and episodic.
With >1, 400 species, bats comprise the second-largest order of mammals and provide critical ecological services as insect consumers, pollinators, and seed dispersers. Yet, bats are frequently associated with infectious human diseases such as SARS, MERS, and Ebola. As early as the end of January, 2020, at least five virological studies have suggested bats as a probable origin for SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19. How does the public view the role of bats in COVID-19? Here we report pilot data collected shortly after the outbreak of COVID-19 using two online surveys, combined with a conservation intervention experiment, primarily on people who are receiving or have received higher education in China. We found that 84% of the participants of an online survey (n = 13, 589) have misunderstood the relationship between bats and COVID-19, which strengthened negative attitudes towards bats. Knowledge of bats, gender, and education level of the participants affected their attitudes towards bats. Participants who indicated a better knowledge of bats had a more positive attitude towards bats. The proportion of female participants who had negative attitudes towards bats was higher than that of male participants. Participants with a higher education level indicated a more positive attitude towards bats after the outbreak of COVID-19. A specially prepared bat conservation lecture improved peoples’ knowledge of bats and the positive attitudes, but failed to correct the misconception that bats transmit SARS-CoV-2 to humans directly. We suggest that the way virologists frame the association of bats with diseases, the countless frequently inaccurate media coverages, and the natural perceptual bias of bats carrying and transmitting diseases to humans contributed to the misunderstandings. This probably led to a rise in the events of evicting bats from dwellings and structures by humans and the legislative proposal for culling disease-relevant wildlife in China. A better understanding of the relationship between disease, wildlife and human health could help guide the public and policymakers in an improved program for bat conservation.
As COVID-19 began to spread around the world, so did reports of discrimination and violence against people from marginalized groups. We argue that in a global politics characterized by racialized inequality, pandemics such as COVID-19 exacerbate the marginalization of already oppressed groups. We review published research on previous pandemics to historicize pandemic othering and blame, and enumerate some of the consequences for politics, policy, and public health. Specifically, we draw on lessons from smallpox outbreaks, the third bubonic plague, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and more recent pandemics, such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Ebola. We also compile reports to document the discrimination and violence targeting marginalized groups early in the COVID-19 pandemic. This article lays bare the continuation of a long history of othering and blame during disease outbreaks and identifies needs for further inquiry to understand the persistence of these pandemic politics.
Human contact with bats has been epidemiologically linked to several of the most recent Ebola outbreaks, including the 2014 West Africa epidemic and the 2007 Luebo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, outbreak. While fruit bats remain the likely primary reservoir for Ebola virus (Zaire ebolavirus), recent wildlife surveillance efforts have identified a new species of ebolavirus (Bombali ebolavirus) in microchiropteran insect-eating bats in West and East Africa. Given the role of bats as potential Ebola reservoirs and sources of spillover into human populations, it is critically important to understand the circumstances and behaviors that bring human populations into close contact with bats. This study explores two sites in Bombali, Sierra Leone, where human populations have had close contact with microchiropteran bats via household infestations and fruit bats by hunting practices. Through interviews and focus groups, we identify the knowledge, beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors that may potentially protect or expose individuals to zoonotic spillover through direct and indirect contact with bats. We also describe how this research was used to develop a risk reduction and outreach tool for living safely with bats.
In Tampa, Florida, the threat of material destruction and social dislocation associated with planned highway expansion has ignited local resistance, which, in turn, brings together a loose grouping of social and political actors. Through a shared commitment to cynicism, the members of this socioeconomically diverse array of antihighway activists join one another in making claims on the state, even as they doubt these claims will ever be heeded. Cynicism, in this context, acts as an affective boundary object that enables actors to negotiate the moments of intrasubjective and intersubjective incoherence that inevitably arise in the course of private and public life. Attending to the citizen effects of cynical affects invites a reformulation of the place of negative feelings within the politics of the city, and social life more broadly.
This book is a groundbreaking study of the historical reasons for the divergence in public health policies adopted in Britain, France, Germany and Sweden, and the spectrum of responses to the threat of contagious diseases such as cholera, smallpox and syphilis. In particular the book examines the link between politics and prevention. Did the varying political regimes influence the styles of precaution adopted? Or was it, as Peter Baldwin argues, a matter of more basic differences between nations, above all their geographic placement in the epidemiological trajectory of contagion, that helped shape their responses and their basic assumptions about the respective claims of the sick and of society, and fundamental political decisions for and against different styles of statutory intervention? Thus the book seeks to use medical history to illuminate broader questions of the development of statutory intervention and the comparative and divergent evolution of the modern state in Europe.
Biomedicine is often thought to provide a scientific account of the human body and of illness. In this view, non-Western and folk medical systems are regarded as systems of 'belief' and subtly discounted. This is an impoverished perspective for understanding illness and healing across cultures, one that neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his research in several American and Middle Eastern medical settings, in this 1993 book Professor Good develops a critical, anthropological account of medical knowledge and practice. He shows how physicians and healers enter and inhabit distinctive worlds of meaning and experience. He explores how stories or illness narratives are joined with bodily experience in shaping and responding to human suffering and argues that moral and aesthetic considerations are present in routine medical practice as in other forms of healing.
Whatever one may claim, this pandemic is banally generating what happened elsewhere in Africa during the Ebola epidemic: social inequalities in health, pharmaceutical shortage generated by austerity policies (Abramowitz 2016), denial and blame, contradictory injunctions in public health, undignified burials (Le Marcis 2015), academic delay, travel bans for Africans, isolation of countries that have caused the penalization of their entire economic sector: tourism, agriculture, markets. The reference to the Ebola epidemic as regards African popular reactions during this painful and worrying period largely echoes current experiences. The same scenarios force us to think symmetrically about the pandemic upheavals in different societies.
The Sexual Politics of Meat is Carol Adams’ inspiring and controversial exploration of the interplay between contemporary society’s ingrained cultural misogyny and its obsession with meat and masculinity. First published in 1990, the book has continued to change the lives of tens of thousands of readers into the second decade of the 21st century.
Published in the year of the book’s 25th anniversary, the Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a substantial new afterword, including more than 20 new images and discussions of recent events that prove beyond doubt the continuing relevance of Adams’ revolutionary book.
This dissertation interrogates the relationships between humans and animals responsible for creating ‘pests’ as an element in the physical and intellectual landscape of rural South Africa in the 1910s through the 1930s. Through analysing four groups of animals deemed to be pests – herds of ‘rogue’ elephants; trypanosomes and big game; ‘wild birds’ and crop-devouring insects; veld rodents and Yersinia pestis – I show how the concept of pest and the organisms bearing this label fundamentally shaped settler agrarian societies. To do this, I synthesise three frames of analysis: pests, knowledge, and boundaries. Firstly, I examine how beings were constructed as ‘pest’ or ‘vermin’, how these organisms changed human/animal relations, and how settler and pest world-making was negotiated. Secondly, mobilising the category “settler science”, I explore how the agency of pests stimulated humans to produce, debate, and circulate knowledge about indigenous faunas with a view to controlling their movements, appetites, and settlement patterns. Thirdly, I chart how pests and those who studied them dismantled or reinforced boundaries between spheres of veld, farm, and town, as well as colonial modernist binaries of wild/domestic, useful/harmful, healthy/unhealthy fauna. By synthesising these frames, this dissertation integrates human, animal, and pathogenic agency into a single historical framework. Pestilent fauna have almost never been foregrounded as agents in South African history. Historians have largely regarded them as obstacles to settler expansion, victims of colonial violence, or treated them as metaphors that mediate human relationships. Bringing these beings to the forefront of my analysis allows me to rethink some key arguments in southern African histories of human-animal interaction. This dissertation shows that despite the efforts of settler colonists, spheres of nature and culture or human and animal were never thoroughly separated. The settlement and development of rural land depended not only on declarations of war on ‘vermin’, but alliances, negotiations, and concessions. Management of animals in the countryside engaged settlers in distinguishing their ‘natural allies’ from ‘natural enemies’ and subsequently attempting to conserve ‘useful’ or control ‘harmful’ fauna. A diverse array of actors, some entirely invisible in press and periodicals, contributed to this process: African and settler farmers, hunters, bureaucrats, game conservators, rodent-inspectors, and even pest-devouring carnivora. This thesis demonstrates that an expansive view of history of science, which foregrounds such experts in the production of knowledge without losing sight of the uneven power dynamics of colonialism is necessary to understand their contributions. Ultimately, between the 1910s and 1930s, policies of wildlife-management evolved in tandem with racial segregation. The management of both animals and humans stemmed from shared political imperatives justified by scientific racism: preservationism and white economic protectionism. Their ramifications continue to impact South Africa to this day.
In 2007 the Indonesian government claimed sovereignty over the H5N1 influenza virus samples isolated within Indonesia’s territories, refusing to share those samples with the World Health Organisation. Indonesia’s sovereignty claims conflicted with the decades-long practice of sharing influenza samples with the WHO, and was seen as an affront to scientific norms of cooperation and openness. The conflict was ostensibly resolved in 2011 with the introduction of the WHO’s Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework (PIP Framework), which was intended to secure access to influenza viruses from around the world and effect a fairer distribution of vaccines and other benefits associated with the use of pandemic influenza samples. The problem is, the PIP Framework did not resolve the issues created with the concept of viral sovereignty. In fact, by recognising the sovereign rights of states over this subset of pathogens, the PIP Framework legitimised viral sovereignty as a broader legal norm. Instead of resisting this concept, the WHO quietly acceded to it and reinforced a set of perverse incentives for countries to restrict access to pathogens precisely when those pathogens embody the greatest value: during a public health emergency. This chapter demonstrates that the concept of viral sovereignty did not begin with Indonesia in 2007, and more importantly, it did not end with the PIP Framework in 2011. Despite the term “viral sovereignty” fading into relative obscurity, the concept itself is now an established legal norm that could delay efforts to save lives during epidemics and pandemics.
In December 2013, a two-year-old child died from viral haemorrhagic fever in Méliandou village in the South-East of Guinea, and constituted the likely index case of a major epidemic. When the virus was formally identified as Ebola, epidemiologists started to investigate the chains of transmission, while local people were trying to make sense out of these deaths. The epidemic control measures taken by national and international health agencies were soon faced by strong reluctance and a sometimes aggressive attitude of the affected communities. Based on ethnographic work in Macenta (Forest region) in the autumn of 2014 for the Global Outbreak and Alert Response Network (GOARN) of the World Health Organization, this chapter shows that while epidemiologists involved in the outbreak response attributed the first Ebola deaths in the Forest region to the transmission of a virus from an unknown animal reservoir, local citizens believed these deaths were caused by the breach of a taboo. Epidemiological and popular explanations, mainly evolving in parallel, but sometimes overlapping, were driven by different explanatory models: a biomedical model embodying nature in the guise of an animal disease reservoir, which in turn poses as threat to humanity, and a traditional-religious model wherein nature and culture are not dichotomized. The chapter will argue that epidemic responses must be flexible and need to systematically document popular discourse(s), rumours, codes, practices, knowledge and opinions related to the outbreak event. This precious information must be used not only to shape and adapt control interventions and health promotion messages, but also to trace the complex biosocial dynamics of such zoonotic disease beyond the usual narrow focus on wild animals as the sources of infection.
This essay considers ethnography in a social world rife with quotidian duplicity, where the pretense of ongoing sociality must continue even when betrayers have been unmasked and deceptions unraveled. The article follows my unintentional entanglement in a series of confidence schemes in Abidjan to explore the ways in which such scams develop their own agentive force beyond the control of their participants. Driven by the performative efficacy of its own narrative and role-play structure, the frame of duplicity sometimes exceeds the control of its authors. My own participation involved a spectrum of roles progressing from 1) innocent passerby, 2) an unwitting set piece meant to convey legitimacy, 3) an ethically compromised ethnographer, and 4) the target of the scam, all the way through to 5) an active participant in deception—with several of the roles converging at times. Ethnography inside a scam allows for reflection into the role of deception in everyday social interaction, as well as within the engagements of fieldwork itself. Résumé Cet essai considère les enjeux d’ethnographie dans un monde social truffé de duplicité quotidienne, où la performance des relations sociales doit continuer même lorsque les menteurs ont été démasquées et les tromperies révélées au grand jour. Mon article revient sur mon engagement involontaire dans une succession d’arnaques à Abidjan afin d’explorer les manières dont de telles escroqueries développent leur selon les logiques qui leur sont propres, échappent parfois même au contrôle de ceux qui les ont mises en place. Ma propre position a impliqué un éventail de rôles qui m’ont fait passer de 1) un témoin accidentel, 2) la pièce innocente d’un mécanisme destiné à inspirer confiance, puis à 3) un ethnographe compromis sur le plan éthique, et à 4) la cible de l’arnaque et 5) un participant actif à l’affaire. Ces différents rôles se sont parfois entremêlés. Faire de l’ethnographie de l’intérieur d’une telle arnaque permet de réfléchir au rôle de la duplicité dans les interactions quotidiennes, comme dans le travail de terrain.
The current Ebola epidemic in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has surpassed 1 700 deaths. Social resistance, a major barrier to control efforts, invites exploration of community beliefs around Ebola and its origins. We conducted a mixed-methods study, using four focus group discussions (FGDs) involving 20 participants, and a 19-item survey questionnaire, administered to a nonprobability sample of 286 community members throughout the outbreak zone. FGDs and surveys were conducted between 4 and 17 August 2018. FGDs revealed a widespread rumor early in the epidemic of two twins bewitched by their aunt after eating her cat, who developed bleeding symptoms and triggered the epidemic. However, this myth appeared to dissipate as the epidemic progressed and biomedical transmission became generally accepted. In our survey, 6% of respondents endorsed supernatural origins of Ebola. These respondents were more likely to believe that traditional medicine practitioners can cure Ebola. Wild animals were recognized as sources of Ebola by 53% and FGD participants commented that ‘Ebola leaves the forest and hides in the hospital,’ recognizing that zoonotic origins gave way to nosocomial transmission as the epidemic progressed. Taken together, our findings suggest that a dynamic syncretism of mythical and biomedical understanding of Ebola may have shaped transmission patterns. Mythical conceptions and fear of contagion may have fueled the ‘underground’ transmission of Ebola, as patients sought care from traditional healers, who are ill-equipped to deal with a highly contagious biohazard. A deeper understanding of beliefs around Ebola origins may illuminate strategies to engage communities in control efforts.