Abstract
The AIDS pandemic marked a turning point in the history of medicine. By the 1970s, the medical community believed antibiotics and vaccines had eradicated infectious diseases in the developed world. But in the 1980s, clusters of gay men in the United States began to die from rare conditions. The underlying cause of their mysterious deaths: an infectious disease that scientists could not explain using existing medical categories. To understand AIDS – and other novel threats like Ebola in Africa – researchers in the 1990s created a new branch of medicine: emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases (EID).
Peter Washer explains in this comprehensive book – a paperback with a new preface of the 2010 edition – how the field was formed and how its ideas came to be understood by policymakers, funders and citizens. As he persuasively argues, the creation of the field relied on communication. From 1989, researchers convened conferences with prominent speakers, contributed to reports from eminent bodies, published papers in influential outlets and created a dedicated journal. By the mid-1990s, EID was a fixture on scientific and political agendas. To spread EID’s ideas wider, scientists briefed influential journalists who argued that well-funded scientists protected citizens from horrific new microbial threats. Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague and Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone – both published in 1995 – stamped EID into public consciousness.
From the 1990s, media portrayals, argues Washer, education adviser at the UK’s Royal College of Radiologists, have been central to how citizens understand EID. At work in these portrayals are two mechanisms Washer identifies as othering and blaming. The early reporting of AIDS blamed the disease on homosexuals whose sexual practices were presented as deviant. The Western media blamed the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak on Chinese people who were presented as having poor hygiene habits. Without an other to castigate, blame is directed through news coverage on society’s leaders. Blame for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), for example, fell on the then UK Conservative government. The precise workings of these mechanisms, however, are not described in as much detail as the sections that document the history and birth of the field. Readers seeking to apply these concepts in their own work should consult Washer’s useful earlier papers on media portrayals of SARS, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and BSE. But overall, the book’s rich synthesis of studies from medicine, sociology and psychology makes it an essential reference point for scholars examining EID’s history and social impacts.