Natalie Porter
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226648804
- eISBN:
- 9780226649139
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226649139.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Medical Anthropology
This book narrates the story of H5N1 avian influenza in Vietnam. At this epicenter of bird flu infection, “One Health” regimes are bringing nonhuman animals squarely into the fold of global health ...
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This book narrates the story of H5N1 avian influenza in Vietnam. At this epicenter of bird flu infection, “One Health” regimes are bringing nonhuman animals squarely into the fold of global health policy and practice. Following the pathways of transnational scientists, NGO workers, livestock developers, state veterinarians, and poultry farmers as they move through new and unconventional sites of health intervention, the account reveals how pandemic threats like bird flu are engendering a new arena of global health, one that is increasingly structured by the patterns of global livestock economies. In this emergent arena of global health policy and practice, the standardization of life forms and the circumscription of human-animal relations, which create conditions for market uniformity and commodity mobility, are now being implemented in health interventions as a means to safeguard human and nonhuman animals. Yet, however global in scope, flu interventions are constituted in particular economic, cultural, and political contexts. This book therefore argues that as global health programs expand their purview to include life and livestock, they must weigh the interests of public health against those of commercial agriculture, rural tradition, and scientific innovation in a late-socialist nation witnessing neoliberal reforms and new regimes of governance. The outcomes of One Health interventions are thus as unpredictable as the bird flu virus itself, and Vietnam comes into view as a site of global health experimentation, a place where the agents and subjects of disease control are redefining how to live with lively and deadly creature-commodities.Less
This book narrates the story of H5N1 avian influenza in Vietnam. At this epicenter of bird flu infection, “One Health” regimes are bringing nonhuman animals squarely into the fold of global health policy and practice. Following the pathways of transnational scientists, NGO workers, livestock developers, state veterinarians, and poultry farmers as they move through new and unconventional sites of health intervention, the account reveals how pandemic threats like bird flu are engendering a new arena of global health, one that is increasingly structured by the patterns of global livestock economies. In this emergent arena of global health policy and practice, the standardization of life forms and the circumscription of human-animal relations, which create conditions for market uniformity and commodity mobility, are now being implemented in health interventions as a means to safeguard human and nonhuman animals. Yet, however global in scope, flu interventions are constituted in particular economic, cultural, and political contexts. This book therefore argues that as global health programs expand their purview to include life and livestock, they must weigh the interests of public health against those of commercial agriculture, rural tradition, and scientific innovation in a late-socialist nation witnessing neoliberal reforms and new regimes of governance. The outcomes of One Health interventions are thus as unpredictable as the bird flu virus itself, and Vietnam comes into view as a site of global health experimentation, a place where the agents and subjects of disease control are redefining how to live with lively and deadly creature-commodities.
