Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg

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The future preparedness: histories of unpreparedness, zoonotic disease outbreaks and the anthropology of open preparedness

Dr. Sung-Joon Park

Dr. Sung-Joon Park

Dr. Sung-Joon Park

My research is mainly concerned with zoonotic diseases and seeks to explore the futures of preparedness for Ebola epidemics and the Coronavirus pandemic. This project builds on my ongoing field research on Ebola epidemics, most notably the Ebola epidemic in West Africa (2013-16) and the more recent outbreak in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (2018-2020) and future field research on the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite of enormous global health efforts to improve preparedness for emerging infectious diseases, epidemics and pandemics show how global health preparedness again and again fails to anticipate the circumstances under which pathogens spread and become large-scale emergencies. The history of Ebola epidemics is in this regard a notable history of unpreparedness. Since 1990s, about 20 outbreaks have been emerging in sub-Saharan Africa. After an initial transmission from animals to humans, Ebola viruses are transmitted between humans through contact with body fluids. These transmissions are usually addressed by infection prevention and control methods, contact tracing, and the isolation of Ebola patients. Case fatality rates of about 70% were regarded to be normal in the absence of effective therapies. The West African Ebola epidemic (2013-16) dramatically revealed the limitations of this approach making it to the largest Ebola epidemic in history with an estimated number of 28.000 cases of which approximately 11.200 people lost their lives. Promises to learn from the failures of the response to the West African outbreak did not necessarily improve preparedness, as the current Ebola epidemic in Eastern DRC shows, which by now is the second largest in history. In the current Ebola epidemic in Eastern DRC, the emergency response is for the first time trialing out vaccines, new therapies, and patient-friendly designs of Ebola Treatment Centers. However, the effect of these new technologies is dwarfed by the unpreparedness of global health for the specific situation of insecurity in Eastern DRC. Both, the history unpreparedness of global health and technological innovations in the field of emergency responses pose important questions about the future of Ebola epidemics and other pandemics: Why is global health preparedness repeatedly failing to contain Ebola epidemics? How are recent medical innovations changing the approach to Ebola epidemics and other pandemics? Or, in the opposite will Ebola epidemics and most notably pandemics like the Covid-19 pandemic continue to reach unprecedented scales? What preparedness is required for future outbreaks? And what alternative futures of health can be anticipated? My project argues that anthropological research is crucial for developing an in-depth understanding of the realities of epidemics and pandemics. Social science research has been and still is skewed towards the support of public health emergency interventions during a crisis. Typically, in emergencies, citizens, survivors and relatives of patients are only asked the most urgent questions without reflecting on who defines what needs are urgent. My project stresses that anthropological informants are not simply a source of information but the most important experts from whom we can learn how epidemics and pandemics are entangled with ruinous histories of medicine, war, poverty, and global transformations of natural and built environment. Such insights are crucial for improving preparedness. My project wishes to show that anthropological research, committed to an openness for the unexpected and the possible, can help us to go beyond simplifying representations of the realities of unexpected and contingent encounters between viruses, animals, and humans.

Laufzeit

2016 -

Finanzierung

DFG, Elhra (Wellkom Trust, DFID, NHS), VW Foundation

Betreuung

Prof. Dr. Olaf Zenker

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