The Shapes of Epidemics and Global Disease

Book excerpt: This volume investigates the multifaceted SHAPES (socio-historic, artistic, political, and ecological significance) of global disease. It challenges conventional views of infection and transmission by associating epidemics with ideologies and their accompanying institutions. It argues that the physical threat of epidemics is irrevocably linked to culture, economic resources, social class, and power. Epidemics involve both the infected and non-infected, affect the local and global, and they expose control and neglect. This book provides a radical collaborative approach, drawing contributors from closely related and vastly distant fields in the search for innovative ways to address human suffering, and to find real solutions that may determine whether people live or die. Such an approach is needed within an increasingly interconnected world where both pathological diseases and health behaviors are infectious. Experts from fifteen diverse disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities present case studies from across the world and time, demonstrating the uniqueness of each disease and epidemic in its place, but also the shared experiences that span human life and death. In order to identify, measure and control epidemics, we must understand epidemics more as long biosocial processes than abrupt events in nature or culture. Such methodology examines the meaning we attach to epidemics, as well as their material reality, and provides a more complete understanding of how epidemics shape and are shaped.