This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Even as pandemic response is focused on understanding, controlling and preventing COVID-19 among humans, a ghost haunts epidemiological concerns about the disease: reverse-zoonotic sylvatic Covid. Or, the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to spill-back from humans to domestic or farmed animals, and from there to wild-life, where the virus can establish ineradicable disease reservoirs. This scenario is not far-fetched: the case of …
George Eliot’s narrator in The Mill on the Floss (1860) reminds us that it is lamentable “that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor – that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else.”
But accuracy is not really the problem; it goes without saying that language is limited in …
Halfway through the pandemic thriller Contagion (2011), one scene exposes some of the challenges of health communication in the digital age. In a live television interview with Ellis Cheever, head of the CDC, the crooked blogger Alan Krumwiede takes the American government to task over its unwillingness to provide clear numbers or explain epidemiological models on an outbreak of the …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
I teach an undergraduate course called Cultural diversity, structural barriers, and multilingualism in clinical and healing encounters at the University of Chicago. The title is a mouthful, and the course can be thought of as one that combines medical anthropological perspectives and a social determinants of health framework. A social determinants of health framework examines the “causes of the causes” …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Since its emergence in December 2019, COVID-19 has led to a global pandemic, in everything but name. To date, over 100,000 people have been infected across the globe, with the vast majority of burden of the infection and of the 3,400 deaths so far being borne by China, where the disease originally emerged. There the epidemic has led to the …
One of the most striking factors of the 1918 Flu pandemic is that the pandemic’s global scope and devastating impact only became visible after the fact. To determine the flu’s global distribution and to reconstruct its case numbers and fatality rates at the end of the First World War was a task eventually left to the pandemic’s historians. To …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology