Epidemic Roots

Abstract

We may think of epidemics as unusual events, moments when disease organisms cross boundaries between habituated and non-habituated populations. We should rather consider an alternative view: that epidemics have their deepest foundations in ‘normal’ social and economic life. This is because pathways of infection are mapped on to social, cultural and economic relations between groups of human beings in ways that are sometimes simple, but more often not simple. As we all share the same world, but unequally, so we are differentially exposed to disease organisms, and for that matter to many non-infectious illnesses.