Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the ecological realm, environmental pollution, climate change, and bird flyways
encourage and spread disease. In the social realm, the population explosion, aging
populations with weakened immune systems, and dense urbanisation foster the
spread. In the economic realm, unequal resource distributions produce vulnerable
areas for outbreak, while the greater speed, scope, and scale of international trade and
tourism transfer diseases rapidly around the world. In the political realm, conflicts of
both interstate and intrastate types and suspicions of former imperial powers makes
it hard to reach people with vaccines and medicines, as shown by the persistence of
polio in nigeria and HIv/aIDS in South africa.
Standing out as the great causal multipliers are the social-psychological factors
of fatalism, fear, stigma, and solidarity. Fatalism and fear are by no means new
human reactions to mounting disease, as thucydides' account of the plague in
athens shows. but their dynamics can now spread much further and faster with a
much magnified effect. Fatalism itself seems to have withered, as the advance of
modern medicine and the profession of public health have led most to assume that
they can be protected from or cured of disease. but stigma is still potent. as Huang
points out, Jews were considered scapegoats as spreaders of the black Death in
europe and killed en masse as a result. More recently, a quarter of the population
fled the infected Indian city of Surat in four days, leading those around the world
to fear the disease would thus be brought to them. Hany besada shows that stigma
still fosters the spread of HIv/aIDS in southern africa. SarS led to the shunning of
asian travellers, restaurants, visible minorities, and the entire expanse of the second
largest country in the world, in which only one city experienced infections. It was
such shunning that did the real economic damage and had social costs long after the
physical challenge had been met. Yet as Huang recalls, the 1918 influenza pandemic
also led to social solidarity of the sort often seen within countries that are at war,
especially when victory is felt to be close at hand.
to be sure, different clusters of causes arise in different diseases and countries.
these causal cocktails make it important to determine the relevant salience of a
wide array of causes across these different domains and place priority on the most
potent ones. but, above all, the challenge is a comprehensive, interconnected one
that embraces all spheres of collective human life. Such a physical challenge cries
out for a similarly holistic public response.
Response
In the cases examined in this volume, such a response has seldom arisen across the
full repertoire of collective action taken by actors, beyond the family or clan, to
treat or prevent the physical challenges of illness. rather, the response has usually
involved only a few of the relevant actors, using in cybernetic fashion their existing
repertoires of instruments, standard operating procedures and knowledge, acting at
the borders or within their own countries, and doing so in a closed, partial, un-
coordinated way.
