A few weeks ago, the UK Government made public its proposed strategy to address the COVID-19 outbreak (the SARS-CoV-2 virus) by building ‘herd immunity’, leaving the general public mystified by a concept it was little aware of. However, the British Society for Immunology was unimpressed, stating emphatically its objections to the government decision. In an open letter from its President, …
In June 2015 The Bellagio Task Force on Epidemics and Xenophobia met to discuss the resurgence of xenophobia across the globe—one most recently prompted by fearful and unsympathetic responses to the Ebola epidemic and those afflicted communities and healthcare workers who returned home. The problem of xenophobia is however part of a much larger and pernicious problem, one that falls
Intolerant Bodies is beautifully written—an informed, informative, and engaging assessment of the history of autoimmunity. But the small book is far more than the short history it humbly claims to be; for Anderson and Mackay take on a complex subject many of us have struggled to summarize with more words than fewer.
As with many researchers, the difficulty of conceptualizing …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology