Last day!
PUBHLTH 405
Social History of Infectious Disease
University of Michigan School of Public Health
Jon Zelner
[email protected]
epibayes.io
Coming in for a landing
Everyone is susceptible to explanations that piggyback on our biases and emotions
No one died of stench in Victorian London. But tens of thousands died because the fear of stench blinded them to the true perils of the city, and drove them to implement a series of wrongheaded reforms that only made the crisis worse. (Johnson 2007, 12)
We have to understand infection inequity in terms of conflict and competing material interests between social and economic groups
Link and Phelan’s explanation of systemic racism as a fundamental cause of disease inequity.
Our interpretation of data is motivated and shaped by these biases
Snow and other showed us how to break down these misunderstandings by bricking together compelling explanations with diverse data sources.
Infection history may not repeat itself exactly, but it often rhymes
“A true epidemic is an event, not a trend.” (Rosenberg 2020)
Uncertainty breeds wrongheaded explanations that are easy to debunk in hindsight than in the heat of the moment
Scapegoats channel our anxiety and fear away from powerful people an institutions to weaker ones
Map and phylogenetic tree of early HIV-1 sequences which thoroughly debunk the “Patient Zero” theory of the origins of HIV in North America (Worobey et al. 2016)
When you hear we have the tools 🛠️ it’s important to ask who is telling you this and why…
Big, collective problems have to be addressed by big, collective action 🎬
ACT UP Protest at the FDA (1988)
At the beginning of the term, we asked: Why should we care about public health history?
“History sensitizes us to the interplay of the varied social, political, and economic forces that positioned public health at different moments in time, regardless of the areas of responsibility the field claimed at the time.” (Fairchild et al. 2010)
