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.
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