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Contagious - Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Paperback)
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Contagious - Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Paperback)
Series: A John Hope Franklin Center Book
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How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the
accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated,
following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the
mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images,
and story lines—of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones
and tenacious microbes—produced a formulaic narrative as they
circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction
and film. The “outbreak narrative” begins with the
identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the
global networks of contact and contagion, and ends with the
epidemiological work that contains it. Priscilla Wald argues that
we need to understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak
narrative because the stories we tell about disease emergence have
consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival
rates and contagion routes. They upset economies. They promote or
mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, locales,
behaviors, and lifestyles. Wald traces how changing ideas about
disease emergence and social interaction coalesced in the outbreak
narrative. She returns to the early years of microbiology—to the
identification of microbes and “Typhoid Mary,” the first known
healthy human carrier of typhoid in the United States—to
highlight the intertwined production of sociological theories of
group formation (“social contagion”) and medical theories of
bacteriological infection at the turn of the twentieth century.
Following the evolution of these ideas, Wald shows how they were
affected by—or reflected in—the advent of virology, Cold War
ideas about “alien” infiltration, science-fiction stories of
brainwashing and body snatchers, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Contagious is a cautionary tale about how the stories we tell
circumscribe our thinking about global health and human
interactions as the world imagines—or refuses to imagine—the
next Great Plague.
General
Imprint: |
Duke University Press
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Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
A John Hope Franklin Center Book |
Release date: |
2008 |
Firstpublished: |
2008 |
Authors: |
Priscilla Wald
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Dimensions: |
230 x 155 x 24mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
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Pages: |
373 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8223-4153-6 |
Categories: |
Books >
Social sciences >
General
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LSN: |
0-8223-4153-0 |
Barcode: |
9780822341536 |
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