This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
What is the object of epidemiological interventions during an epidemic? Is it the virus, the disease, the fear, the chaos, or the threat to security? And what is the objective of those interventions? Is it to eliminate the virus, to mitigate the effects of the disease, to calm the fear, to control the chaos, or to defeat the threat?
On …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
My time doing public health work in Guatemala in the 1990s and early 2000s has shaped how I think about emergencies. Working for an underresourced health system, my sensation was that we were always trying to implement new programs in the midst of a perpetual institutional crisis. On top of that, we would have to leave everything to deal with …
Recent years have seen major global investment in epidemic preparedness and response. The World Health Organization’s new guidelines for health emergency preparedness (WHO 2017), extending the ambit of the 2005 International Health Regulations, have accompanied growing commitments to centralised planning, surveillance, modelling and prediction capacities, funding and insurance instruments, drug and vaccine research and development, rapid response teams and more. …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology