burden of illness and deaths as a consequence of the policies and political decisions made in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. In our view, these should be considered epidemics or, more accurately, syndemics – the clustering and interactions of two or more diseases or health conditions and socio-environmental factors – of neglect ( Fronteira et al. , 2021 ). The first category is infectious diseases that were already considered ‘neglected’ before SARS-CoV-2 appeared. The World Health Organization
pandemic was not brought under control until 1960 ( Casey et al. , 2021 : 5–6). The mass general improvement in living standards and health services which has taken place throughout the twentieth century has strongly reduced both the prevalence of plague epidemics and mortality rates after infection ( Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020a ). However, it is estimated that several hundred plague cases, and a small number of deaths, continue
Introduction During the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic, an estimated US$ 10 billion was spent to contain the disease in the region and globally. The response brought together multilateral agencies, bilateral partnerships, private enterprises and foundations, local governments and communities. Social mobilisation efforts were pivotal components of the response architecture ( Gillespie et al. , 2016 ; Laverack and Manoncourt, 2015 ; Oxfam International, 2015
1 The uneasy politics of epidemic aid: the CDC's mission to Cold War East Pakistan, 1958 Paul Greenough Epidemic outbreaks, political struggle, civil society response Historians warn against narratives in which actors are spared the dilemmas of chance and choice. No doubt prolepsis, anachronism and teleology should be avoided, but I find it difficult to tell a story
publish studies with around 60 per 10,000. In 2008, a Japanese study then went out on a limb with a rate of 181.1 per 10,000, verging on 2 per cent. 83 Autism has since been reported to have grown in such proportions that it has become common in popular literature to talk of an autism ‘epidemic’. 84 This is somewhat ironic because Wing’s autism, the second autism, is hugely
Introduction The Ebola epidemic that occurred in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, primarily Nord Kivu, between 2018 and 2020 was the first major outbreak of the disease since West Africa 2013–16. Dramatic biomedical progress was made before and during the Kivu outbreak, including the rapid development of effective tests, treatments, vaccines and care interventions. Response efforts were marked by an extraordinarily large budget dispersed
COVID-19 has reinstated the sovereign enclosures of corpse management that mothers of the disappeared had so successfully challenged in the past decade. To explore how moral duties toward the dead are being renegotiated due to COVID-19, this article puts forward the notion of biorecuperation, understood as an individualised form of forensic care for the dead made possible by the recovery of biological material. Public health imperatives that forbid direct contact with corpses due to the pandemic, interrupt the logics of biorecuperation. Our analysis is based on ten years of experience working with families of the disappeared in Mexico, ethnographic research within Mexico’s forensic science system and online interviews conducted with medics and forensic scientists working at the forefront of Mexico City’s pandemic. In the face of increasing risks of viral contagion and death, this article analyses old and new techniques designed to bypass the prohibitions imposed by the state and its monopoly over corpse management and identification.
Despite a concerted international effort in recent decades that has yielded significant progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS, the disease continues to kill large numbers of people, especially in certain regions like rural Ndhiwa district in Homa Bay County, Kenya. Although there is still no definitive cure or vaccine, UNAIDS has set an ambitious goal of ending the epidemic by 2030, specifically via its 90-90-90 (treatment cascade) strategy – namely that 90 per cent of
Based on a study of intersecting French archives (those of the Val de Grâce Hospital, the Service Historique de la Défense and the Archives Diplomatiques), and with the support of numerous printed sources, this article focuses on the handling of the bodies of French soldiers who died of cholera during the Crimean War (1854–56). As a continuation of studies done by historians Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, the aim here is to consider how the diseased corpses of these soldiers reveal both the causes and circumstances of their deaths. Beyond the epidemiological context, these dead bodies shed light on the sanitary conditions and suffering resulting from years of military campaigns. To conclude, the article analyses the material traces left by these dead and the way that the Second Empire used them politically, giving the remains of leaders who died on the front lines of the cholera epidemic a triumphant return to the country and a state funeral.
Introduction The labelling of a crisis makes new types of action and intervention possible. In her analysis of the West African Ebola epidemic (2014–16), Kelly (2018) describes the ‘epistemic shift’ which followed the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), making it possible to fast-track clinical research in new ways. During the epidemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that, in a context of