Twenty-first century epidemiological and Global Health narratives are saturated by pronouncements of and reflections on “the lessons of this” or “the lessons of that” historical outbreak. As soon as an epidemic is resolved, our screens, newspapers, and journals begin to be populated by talks, articles, and editorials proclaiming the “lessons of SARS” or “the lessons of Ebola”. These narratives are …
When the media asked me how the Chinese government was handling the crisis of COVID-19, I offered them a distinction which comes from the social sciences: the Wuhan authorities acted well as sentinels but failed to act as whistleblowers.
Indeed, the death of 34-year-old ophthalmologist Li Wenliang from COVID-19 on February 7, after warning on the emergence of a coronavirus …
This article is part of the following series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
In October 2019 the Australian Productivity Commission (APC) released a report stating that mental health cost employers $4.7 billion AUD in absenteeism. The report also highlighted significant government expenditure on health services as well as intangible costs on committees. Over the past decade there have also been a number of reports from federal and state governments on the economic and …
This article is part of the following series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
According to accepted wisdom and textbooks, “metabolism” is a nineteenth-century term and concept, established at the confluence of organic chemistry, cell biology, and physiology. In Microscopical Researches (1839), Schwann spoke of the “metabolic phenomena of the cells,” using for the first time the adjective metabolische, from which “metabolic” entered the English language in the 1847 translation (Bing 1971). This standard …
This article is part of the following series: Histórias of Zika
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De mulher para mulher: construindo a resposta do estado à epidemia de Zika no Brasil
‘Minha vida era uma antes e outra depois da Zika’, disse Dra. Celina Turchi em uma conferência em Recife. Ela liderava o grupo que comprovou a relação causal entre o vírus da Zika e o aumento dos casos de microcefalia …
This article is part of the following series: Histórias of Zika
For English click here.
Era o ano de 1947. Em uma floresta chamada Zika, em Uganda, liderados pelo médico-entomologista escocês Alexander J. Haddow, pesquisadores colocaram macacos-rhesus em plataformas de madeira no topo de árvores. Esses animais estavam ali como “dispositivos sentinelas” (Keck e Lakoff 2013), seus corpos estavam destinados a detectar patógenos transmitidos pela picada de insetos. Um dia, verificou-se …