“This century we’ve already trainspotted novel strains of African swine fever, Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Ebola, E. coli O157:H7, foot-and-mouth disease, hepatitis E, Listeria, Nipah virus, Q fever, Salmonella, Vibrio, Yersinia, Zika, and a variety of novel influenza A variants, including H1N1 (2009), H1N2v, H3N2v, H5N1, H5N2, H5Nx, H6N1, H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H7N9, and H9N2.
And near-nothing real was done about any of them. Authorities spent a sigh of relief upon each’s reversal and immediately took the next roll of the epidemiological dice, risking snake eyes of maximum virulence and transmissibility.
That approach suffers more than a failure of foresight or nerve. However necessary, emergency interventions cleaning up each of these messes can make matters worse.
You see, sources of intervention compete. And, as my colleagues and I argue, emergency criteria are deployed as impositions in Gramscian hegemony to keep us from talking about structural interventions around power and production. Because, don’t you know, we’re warned, IT’S AN EMERGENCY RIGHT NOW!
Atop this game of keep away, the failure to address structural problems can render these very emergency interventions ineffectual. The Allee threshold that prophylaxes and quarantine aim to push pathogen populations below—so that infections may burn out on their own unable to find new susceptibles—is set by structural causes.
As our team wrote about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa:
“Commoditizing the forest may have lowered the region’s ecosystemic threshold to such a point that no emergency intervention can drive the Ebola outbreak low enough to burn out. Novel spillovers suddenly express larger forces of infection. On the other end of the epicurve, a mature outbreak continues to circulate, with the potential to intermittently rebound.
“In short, neoliberalism’s structural shifts are no mere background on which the emergency of Ebola takes place. The shifts are the emergency as much as the virus itself… Deforestation and intensive agriculture may strip out traditional agroforestry’s stochastic friction, which typically keeps the virus from lining up enough transmission.”
Despite now both an effective vaccine and antivirals, Ebola is presently undergoing its longest recorded outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. What got lost along the way? Where is our biomedical God now? Blaming the Congolese to cover up this failure is an exercise in colonial displacement, washing imperialism’s hands of decades of structural adjustment and regime change in the global North’s favor.”
– Rob Wallace, Coronavirus: Agribusiness Breeds Another Deadly Epidemic, posted January 29 2020
Coronavirus: Agribusiness breeds another deadly epidemic
(of course one certainly can and should blame the Congolese state *along with* the rest of the various states, non-state bodies and capitals involved, rather than defaulting to the left’s usual incomplete understanding of imperialism.)
GLOBAL BODY 