Open Collections

Holmberg, Mollie

University of British Columbia

Over the last several decades, scientists and policymakers have increasingly drawn attention to emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) as a pressing global health security problem bridging public health and environmental science. USAID initiated a program in 2009 called PREDICT to address the global health security threats posed by EIDs. PREDICT monitored emerging zoonotic viruses and calculated zoonotic spillover risks over geographies, species, and human-wildlife interfaces. During the eleven years it ran, it operated in over thirty countries across Latin America, Asia, and Africa. How did PREDICT’s efforts to make spillover risk calculable make people, animals, and the geographies they inhabit newly legible to optimized forms of management? What effects did this have on local and global health systems, and how did it interface with categories of human and nonhuman difference? To explore these questions, I draw on document analysis and 21 semi-structured interviews to trace PREDICT’s work through data collection, on-the-ground outbreak prevention and response, and spillover risk assessments. By following data as it was collected, deployed in outbreak response, and modeled, I examine how PREDICT worked to jointly transform the nature of spillover risk calculation and EID response. I find that USAID rolled out PREDICT as a strategy for rendering EID risk cost-effective to manage by identifying “high-risk” geographies, species, and human-wildlife interfaces to target for surveillance and sanitation. In particular, its risk calculations singled out wildlife as the ultimate progenitor of EIDs affecting people and domestic species globally and defined features of non-Western populations and geographies as “global” health security threats. Its focus on wildlife and non-Western geographies were linked: by fixing wildlife as the natural “origin” for pandemics, PREDICT scientists also fixed the geographic range of those animals and their ecologies as the “natural” geographic limit to epidemic risk. PREDICT thus operated within a framework that historian Alexandre White calls epidemic Orientalism, which defines Western geographies as disease-free relative to the rest of the world that it defines as posing a continuous disease threat. In practice, this introduced novel risks, uncertainties, and inefficiencies into public health and wildlife management systems and reified global health inequalities.

Text

2024-12-04

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89778

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/