Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China's Pandemic Epicenter
by Lyle Fearnley
Duke University Press, 2020 eISBN: 978-1-4780-1258-0 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-0999-3 | Paper: 978-1-4780-1105-7 Library of Congress Classification RA644.I6F44 2020
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK Scientists have identified southern China as a likely epicenter for viral pandemics, a place where new viruses emerge out of intensively farmed landscapes and human--animal interactions. In Virulent Zones, Lyle Fearnley documents the global plans to stop the next influenza pandemic at its source, accompanying virologists and veterinarians as they track lethal viruses to China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang Lake. Revealing how scientific research and expert agency operate outside the laboratory, he shows that the search for origins is less a linear process of discovery than a constant displacement toward new questions about cause and context. As scientists strive to understand the environments from which the influenza virus emerges, the unexpected scale of duck farming systems and unusual practices such as breeding wild geese unsettle research objects, push scientific inquiry in new directions, and throw expert authority into question. Drawing on fieldwork with global health scientists, state-employed veterinarians, and poultry farmers in Beijing and at Poyang Lake, Fearnley situates the production of ecological facts about disease emergence inside the shifting cultural landscapes of agrarian change and the geopolitics of global health.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Lyle Fearnley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Singapore University of Technology and Design.
REVIEWS
“Readers will come away with a newly visceral understanding of the phrase One Health, as they journey with scientists and epidemiologists through the bodies and ecologies of animal viruses in China. This is a book that rearranges one's sense of scale and time, with a slow and massive build to the sharpness of crisis and the paradoxical enormous scale of the microscopic at play in every scene.”
-- Hannah Landecker, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
“Virulent Zones tells an intricate story about ways the sciences interlace with geopolitics, with profound impacts on public health at many scales. Lyle Fearnley also provides new perspective on how the sciences advance, both geographically and conceptually, through displacement rather than discovery. This important book will be of critical interest to anthropologists and historians of science, scientists, and those working to build transnational scientific and governance capacity.”
-- Kim Fortun, author of Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders
“Lyle Fearnley’s Virulent Zones offers a gripping anthropological account of the search for the origins of influenza pandemics in China…. Virulent Zones is an outstanding scholarly work as it unmasks the mechanism of virus hunting and disease control in China at a time of marketization and globalization. It allows for an alternative understanding of the interplay of science and everyday life. It is highly recommended reading not only for anthropologists but also for anyone interested in public health in contemporary China.”
-- Qiliang He East Asian Science, Technology and Society
"[A] compelling argument for the move away from older microevolutionary theories of pathogenesis, based on competition of hosts and parasites, toward a more systemic and rigorous reckoning—a dynamic configuration—of how environments and animal populations (human and nonhuman) connect up to promote viral innovation. . . . We can read [it] with profit to learn more about our current predicament, to see how historical perceptions and responses are repeated or modified as we come to terms with the pandemic that confronts us today."
-- Warwick Anderson Public Books
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I. Ecology 1. The Origins of Pandemics 27 2. Pathogenic Reservoirs 48 Part II. Landscape 3. Livestock Revolutions 65 4. Wild-Goose Chase 97 Part III. Territory 5. Affinity and Access 125 6. Office Vets and Duck Doctors 156 Conclusion. Vanishing Points 191 Notes 213 Bibliography 249 Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Nearby on shelf for Public aspects of medicine / Public health. Hygiene. Preventive medicine / Disease (Communicable and noninfectious) and public health:
Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China's Pandemic Epicenter
by Lyle Fearnley
Duke University Press, 2020 eISBN: 978-1-4780-1258-0 Cloth: 978-1-4780-0999-3 Paper: 978-1-4780-1105-7
Scientists have identified southern China as a likely epicenter for viral pandemics, a place where new viruses emerge out of intensively farmed landscapes and human--animal interactions. In Virulent Zones, Lyle Fearnley documents the global plans to stop the next influenza pandemic at its source, accompanying virologists and veterinarians as they track lethal viruses to China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang Lake. Revealing how scientific research and expert agency operate outside the laboratory, he shows that the search for origins is less a linear process of discovery than a constant displacement toward new questions about cause and context. As scientists strive to understand the environments from which the influenza virus emerges, the unexpected scale of duck farming systems and unusual practices such as breeding wild geese unsettle research objects, push scientific inquiry in new directions, and throw expert authority into question. Drawing on fieldwork with global health scientists, state-employed veterinarians, and poultry farmers in Beijing and at Poyang Lake, Fearnley situates the production of ecological facts about disease emergence inside the shifting cultural landscapes of agrarian change and the geopolitics of global health.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Lyle Fearnley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Singapore University of Technology and Design.
REVIEWS
“Readers will come away with a newly visceral understanding of the phrase One Health, as they journey with scientists and epidemiologists through the bodies and ecologies of animal viruses in China. This is a book that rearranges one's sense of scale and time, with a slow and massive build to the sharpness of crisis and the paradoxical enormous scale of the microscopic at play in every scene.”
-- Hannah Landecker, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
“Virulent Zones tells an intricate story about ways the sciences interlace with geopolitics, with profound impacts on public health at many scales. Lyle Fearnley also provides new perspective on how the sciences advance, both geographically and conceptually, through displacement rather than discovery. This important book will be of critical interest to anthropologists and historians of science, scientists, and those working to build transnational scientific and governance capacity.”
-- Kim Fortun, author of Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders
“Lyle Fearnley’s Virulent Zones offers a gripping anthropological account of the search for the origins of influenza pandemics in China…. Virulent Zones is an outstanding scholarly work as it unmasks the mechanism of virus hunting and disease control in China at a time of marketization and globalization. It allows for an alternative understanding of the interplay of science and everyday life. It is highly recommended reading not only for anthropologists but also for anyone interested in public health in contemporary China.”
-- Qiliang He East Asian Science, Technology and Society
"[A] compelling argument for the move away from older microevolutionary theories of pathogenesis, based on competition of hosts and parasites, toward a more systemic and rigorous reckoning—a dynamic configuration—of how environments and animal populations (human and nonhuman) connect up to promote viral innovation. . . . We can read [it] with profit to learn more about our current predicament, to see how historical perceptions and responses are repeated or modified as we come to terms with the pandemic that confronts us today."
-- Warwick Anderson Public Books
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I. Ecology 1. The Origins of Pandemics 27 2. Pathogenic Reservoirs 48 Part II. Landscape 3. Livestock Revolutions 65 4. Wild-Goose Chase 97 Part III. Territory 5. Affinity and Access 125 6. Office Vets and Duck Doctors 156 Conclusion. Vanishing Points 191 Notes 213 Bibliography 249 Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE