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Behemoth – A peer-reviewed journal published by the Akademie Verlag, Berlin

Special Issue: Epidemic Orders

In the past few years, epidemic events, both actual and virtual, have made a spectacular comeback. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases such as avian and swine flu have generated great anxiety the world over, resulting in a pervasive sense of vulnerability, insecurity, and uncertainty. A powerful spirit of urgency, based on a genuine concern for human health and well-being, overdetermined by a variety of scientific, political, and economic interests, engendered a real flurry of action. In the epic battle against germs, the biopolitical state mobilized material and symbolic resources at an unprecedented scale.

In the shadow of the emerging infectious disease threat, significant shifts in public health, medical care, and scientific research have occurred. The aim of this special issue of Behemoth is to offer an initial set of diagnostic accounts. What are the domains in which fundamental shifts have occurred over the past few years? Who are the actors involved and what are the underlying logics animating these shifts in public health, medical care, and scientific research? The key aim of this issue is to draw analytic attention to recent reconfigurations and to identify the kind of epidemic orders that are taking shape today at the heart of the biopolitical state.

Please send abstracts for this special issue of Behemoth to the editor Carlo Caduff (carlocaduff@access.uzh.ch) and to Kathrin Franke (behemoth@rz.uni-leipzig.de). Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30 January 2010. Deadline for submission of articles: 30 June 2010.

The register also has a lovely article lamenting the lack of really good panic.

… no good news today. Not avian flu, but swine flu … !

New, deadly swine flu hits Mexico

By Noel Randewich and Armando Tovar
Reuters
Friday, April 24, 2009 11:30 AM

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A deadly strain of swine flu never seen before has broken out in Mexico, killing at least 16 people and raising fears it is spreading across North America.

The World Health Organization said it was concerned about what it called 800 “influenza-like” cases in Mexico, and also about a confirmed outbreak of a new strain of swine flu in the United States.

Mexico canceled classes for millions of children in its sprawling capital city and surrounding areas on Friday after authorities noticed a higher number of deaths involving flu-like illness than normal in recent weeks.

“It is a virus that mutated from pigs and then at some point was transmitted to humans,” Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told the Televisa network.

He linked the disease in Mexico to a new kind of swine flu that struck seven people in California and Texas.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the virus in the United States was a never-before-seen mixture of viruses typical among pigs, birds and humans. All seven American patients have recovered.

The Mexican government warned people not to shake hands or kiss when greeting or share food, glasses or cutlery for fear of contracting the flu.

Mexico City, one of the world’s biggest cities and home to some 20 million people, was quieter than usual on Friday morning. Normally choking traffic was less chaotic in the absence of school buses and parents driving kids to school.

Many people waiting to enter subway stations had their faces covered with surgical masks.

The virus is an influenza A virus, carrying the designation H1N1. It contains DNA typical to avian, swine and human viruses, including elements from European and Asian swine viruses, the CDC has said.

WHO said about 60 people in Mexico have died from the disease. The Geneva-based U.N. agency said it was in daily contact with U.S., Canadian and Mexican authorities and had activated its Strategic Health Operations Center (SHOC) — its command and control center for acute public health events.

Surveillance for and scrutiny of influenza has been stepped up since 2003, when H5N1 bird flu reappeared in Asia. Experts fear this strain, or another strain, could spark a pandemic that could kill millions.

(Additional reporting by Maggie Fox in Washington and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Frances Kerry, Editing by Eric Walsh)

Note: There have been quite a few thoughtful comments posted in response to the first half of this discussion, and although many of my replies spring from the interview below I will continue the exchange on the previous page to maintain its flow.

A little more than 150 years ago cellular pathologist and anthropologist Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow coined the term zoonosis.  Today, his assertion that “between animal and human medicine, there is no dividing line—nor should there be,” is a favorite quotation of One Health proponents.  With ideas of One Medicine targeting avenues of biosecurity as paths to implementation it appears high time for anthropology and One Health to reencounter and reassess each other.

While Dr. Laura Kahn notes in the interview to follow that most of the biosecurity applications of One Health have not been taken up by the security community at large, it is worth mentioning that the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health Affairs at Homeland Security (under Bush at least, I can’t ascertain if this has changed under Obama), who is the head of the entire WMD & Biodefense wing, is a DVM (and not an MD) and has participated in One Medicine events.

I have divided the interview into four parts, added a little blurb on points of interest, and swung the bio-sketch down from the beginning to the end so the most relevant aspects are on top.

Contents
Of Biosensors and Sentinels- NNDSS and veterinary discrimination—potential models of animal sentinels— human valuations of animals and their utility in critter surveillance

Species of Flourishing and Animalia Biosecurity- Getting past animals as a tool for human health—how One Medicine is also grappling with Haraway’s question of “Which historically situated practices of multispecies living and dying should flourish?”

Natural Analogies and All Hazards Preparedness- How actually preparing for the risk depicted in powers law is tugged at by that of the bell curve and siphoned into cross cutting infrastructure.

Biographical Sketch – How institutions geared towards understanding and mitigating nuclear risks come to incorporate biological risks: more happenstance than strategy it seems.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note on what is below and what is to come: this post briefly introduces some (re)emergent techniques of zoonotic disease preparedness and surveillance accompanied by a few theoretical implications that, well, seem to overheat quite quickly.

The second post will take a more empirical turn, and will flesh out some of the issues at hand by way of an interview.

Early on in her latest manuscript Donna Haraway proclaims:

Species interdependence is the name of the worlding [ie alternative globalizing] game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect. That is the play of companion species learning to pay attention.

This declaration is a slightly modulated echo of the plea of ‘One Medicine’ or ‘One Health,’ a discontinuous cadre of MDs, DVMs, and public health experts that are calling for a renewed focus on interspecies medical entanglements.  Although the movement does include many non-infectious disease elements such as trans-species oncology, shared pet and owner obesity, and perhaps even the ultra-mundane pet-as-tripping hazard, the main thrust of the One Health agenda revolves around the threat posed by zoonoses, or diseases that can hop between animals and humans.

Of particular interest to this blog is the past and proposed further use of animals as biosensors for zoonotic disease (for both ‘natural’ and intentional epidemics). These calls for ‘animals as sentinels’ of disease draw upon the epidemiological triad of animals oft increased exposure to pathogens, reactions at lower doses, and shorter incubation periods in comparison to humans, to sound an early outbreak alarm.  Resonating with the Haraway quotation above, many One Health advocates are requesting more MD respect for and faster response to animals’ sickness as an early indication of human exposures, and for the security community to learn to pay attention to the signs of sentinel species. Read the rest of this entry »

Not surprisingly, prominent among the recommendations of the World at Risk report is a call for “global monitoring of infectious diseases”. “Crucial to mounting a defense against biological weapons development and attack is the early detection and reporting of outbreaks of infectious disease, a capability known as disease surveillance” (37). Moreover, World at Risk emphasizes the global geography and pre-diagnostic temporality of this future surveillance. “In addition, the United States should offer bilateral assistance to those developing countries at greatest risk of epidemics, helping them to establish surveillance networks for detecting and reporting both human and animal disease outbreaks prior to a confirmed laboratory diagnosis” (70). Doing so could provide, in their vision, an “’extended defense perimeter’ around the United States” (40).

It is striking to me that calls for enhancing “disease surveillance”—and in particular, global or international disease surveillance—have been appearing for at least fifteen years now. For example, the groundbreaking Institute of Medicine report Emerging Infections emphasized increasing ‘national and international disease surveillance’ as the key to preventing and mitigating emerging outbreaks of disease. “The key to recognizing new or emerging infectious diseases, and to tracking the prevalence of more established infectious diseases, is surveillance” (IOM 113). Yet in important ways these statements are not saying exactly the same thing. What has changed and what has stayed the same? Read the rest of this entry »

An article in today’s New York Time’s announces the release of Google Flu Trends, a tool developed by the philanthropy wing Google.org. Google Flu Trends tracks a specified set of search terms for “ebbs and flows”, broken down geographically by regions and states. Monitored search terms include “flu symptoms” and “muscle aches” (A complete list of monitored terms does not seem to be publicly available, perhaps because of the possibility of manipulation). Read the rest of this entry »

DemfromCT — a blogger on DailyKos — has another interesting post on school closure and pandemic preparedness. It is about many things, among more information on exercises that show that in the US school closure may not be in time to help much, and an interesting comparison with a recent minor outbreak in Hong Kong, where, apparently, parents held students home from school in a “precautionary” fashion before a decision was taken to close schools. Also interesting is the mention of the role that blogs and the internet more generally would play in a pandemic.

It’s hallucinatory Friday in VSS land — and that must mean DARPA. Wired has an article about a $1.3 million contract to Lockheed for an “Integrated Crises Early Warning System.” They are seeing this, it seems, as a kind of “situational awareness” — but one that has less to do with enemy positions and more with, well, the social. ” David Honey, who is the head of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office is quoted in the article as saying that “Commanders will always need to have an accurate picture of enemy positions, as well as friendly units and allies. But increasingly it’s social, cultural, political and economic information, foreign language capabilities and other clues – that are proving essential.” And who better for that than Lockheed?

Interestingly, the article points out, there is a history of similar efforts. For example, an integrated crisis warning system that was funded by the agency in the 1970s, and some other more recent efforts, including the ACUMEN (Anticipatory Culture-Based Modeling Environment) model, from which the diagram above is taken.

But actually it was something else in the article that really caught my eye. Wired makes a joke about “forecasting riots” — like the weather, ha ha. But in fact, as we have been finding out in our work on the Office of Emergency Preparedness, in the late 1960s and early 1970s it does seem that models of riots and models for things like natural hazards occupied a common space — or, more accurately, they were modeled using similar techniques. Hopefully we will have more to say about this when we start moving through the mountain of material that Onur and Brian brought back from the archives.

Another troubling disease event in China. What is interesting, from an event detection perspective, is the disjuncture between the Chinese government’s official description of the event (165,000 pigs infected with a common pig virus) and international estimates. Because of China’s reluctance to release data, international officials are basing estimates not on health-related information, but on economic data–skyrocketing pork prices. “In part, the skepticism comes from the fact that pork prices have skyrocketed 85 percent in the last year — an increase that, absent other factors, suggests the losses from disease are more widespread than Beijing admits.”

Article below.

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