par Wallace, Robert G;Kock, Richard;Bergmann, Luke;Gilbert, Marius ;Hogerwerf, Lenny ;Pittiglio, Claudia;Mattioli, Raffaele;Wallace, Rodrick
Référence Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm, Springer International Publishing, page (55-68)
Publication Publié, 2016-01
Partie d'ouvrage collectif
Résumé : A recent study introduced a vaccine that controls Ebola Makona, the Zaire ebolavirus variant that has infected 28,000 in West Africa. Here we propose even such successful advances are insufficient for many emergent diseases. We review work hypothesizing Makona, phenotypically similar to much smaller outbreaks, emerged out of shifts in land use brought about by neoliberal economics. The epidemiological consequences demand a new science that explicitly addresses the foundational processes underlying multispecies health, including the deep-time histories, cultural infrastructure, and global economic geographies driving disease emergence. The approach, for instance, reverses the standard public health practice of segregating emergency responses and the structural context from which outbreaks originate. In Ebola’s case, regional neoliberalism may affix the stochastic “friction”of ecological relationships imposed by the forest across populations, which, when above a threshold, keeps the virus from lining up transmission above replacement. Export-led logging, mining, and intensive agriculture may depress such functional noise, permitting novel spillovers larger forces of infection. Mature outbreaks meanwhile can continue to circulate in the face of even efficacious vaccines. More research on these integral explanations is required, but the narrow albeit welcome success of the vaccine may be used to limit support of such a program.