Vital Systems Security

The blog Effect Measure argues that it is too early to write off the severity of this H1N1 influenza strain.  The blogger notes that the most common “underlying medical condition” is asthma (30% of hospitalized adults and 33% of hospitalized children).  And “we’re not talking about uncontrolled asthma. Just having asthma and having it mentioned in the medical record is enough to put you in the “underlying medical condition” category.”

Calculations of the severity of the novel H1N1 influenza pandemic have been sorely lacking.  As Laurie Garret and other experts noted early on, the lack of an index of severity in WHO’s pandemic alert system perhaps led some governments—and certainly much of the public—to consider ‘pandemic’ as an indication of danger rather than a reflection of geographical prevalence.  H1N1 was responded to as if it were the actualization of the potential H5N1 outbreak everyone was waiting for.  Or it was for a moment.  For no sooner did some numbers start coming in then the threat began to be downplayed: death rates appeared far lower than seasonal flu.

Now, in a report issued on December 12th by CDC, we have some more numbers about how many people have caught the pandemic flu, how many have been hospitalized and how many have died in the United States.  The summarized data presented in the media is distilled in the number 9,820: deaths from H1N1.  This is usually presented either to downplay the severity, by comparing the number to the 36,000 seasonal flu deaths estimated to occur each year; or, conversely, to demonstrate the danger of the outbreak through a comparison with the previous estimate, one month ago, of only 3,900 H1N1 deaths.  But as we know with influenza, it is important to get behind the numbers.  How are these calculations made?
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CALL FOR PAPERS

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.

A World Health Organization official today signaled that the agency is stepping back from plans to develop a way to grade pandemic severity, because its experts believe severity will vary from place to place, making the development of a severity index difficult and its use impractical.

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 »

Here is a new and interesting article that engages some of the VSS work:

Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to life and security are framed by what has been described as the `precautionary principle’ (Ewald), `preparedness’ (Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow) or `pre-emption’ (Derrida). This article redescribes features common to these characterizations as the paradigm of prudence and examines how this approach to risk management is playing out in the context of fears that feature within the Australian political imaginary. We explore how the approach to the future entailed in the paradigm enframes `life’ and stifles democratic participation and innovation in ways of living. Three case studies (in biosecurity, bioecology and biomedicine) demonstrate not only how the paradigm pervades the government of everyday life, but also how it is challenged by human `agents’, material `life’ and the dynamic relations between these two. By formulating what this involves, we point to a concept of the political more conducive to democratic pluralism, diversity of life and innovative culture.

The New York Times has an article today that is worth a read on the distribution of Homeland Security Grants to states. The basic topics are pretty familiar, so it doesn’t bear saying too much about it (but read the full text after the jump). A couple notes that resonate with various work we have done in the past.

• As was true with civil defense, local officials are looking to find ways to use these funds to deal with problems that they face on a routine basis. So there are some interesting concepts emerging like “all-crimes” programs (a complement to all-hazards).

• There is a clear normative conflict — of the type that Lyle, Dale, and others have analyzed in public health-health security discussions, and that Andy and I summarize in the new biosecurity volume — between the way that central officials think about threats and the way that local officials do. Local officials here seem to have something like a classic cost-benefit approach in thinking about crime, as opposed to an orientation to catastrophic terrorism. No doubt, as is the case in public health, one could trace a tradition of approaching crime that emphasizes archival statistics and a “maximization” logic in the allocation of resources that comes into conflict with “existential threat” thinking.

• There is a concern with a creep in the mission. Typical: Catastrophic events keep not happening, so it is hard to stay focused on them. It is easier, notably, in a military in which all you *do* is think about such threats. But harder when you are a local agency spending 99% of your time on other things that seem more pressing, and that are now being starved for funds due to the downturn in local government revenues.

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I am happy to introduce Amelia Moore to this blog. Amelia is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley. Currently, she is conducting fieldwork in the Bahamas (and the U.S.). Her terrific research project focuses on biocomplexity and resonates with many other projects conducted by our little group over here at the vss blog. Amelia recently sent me a short description of her research project. To learn more, read on! Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but thought it was interesting: An Investor’s Guide to Avian Flu Found it on the UPMC Center for Biosecurity site in a page they have for a 2005 conference on avian flu and the private sector.

This summer the UN-initiated “Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction” met in Geneva. The event aimed at increasing political awareness and action on system-vulnerability questions at a global scale. It is interesting to think about this use of the term “platform.” It indicates a space that “brings together a wide range of actors in the various sectors of development and humanitarian work, and in the environmental and scientific fields related to disaster risk reduction.” However, it does not yet seem to point to a coherent way of organizing these diverse elements (including not only actors but also techniques and practices) toward a shared aim.