How medicine becomes trash: disposability in health care

[...]since 2000 the US Food and Drug Administration has moved to regulate the reuse of single-use devices and a new global reprocessing industry has developed—valued at US$470 million per year as of 2018—to repatch single-use devices for reuse. More substantial attempts to transform medicine's culture of disposability face impediments that range from regulatory hurdles to public policy deficits, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has illuminated the vulnerabilities of dependency on a single-use supply chain. The circular life cycle of higher quality, reusable devices can lead to overall lower equipment costs. Take, for example, the response of the COVID-19 Unit at the University of Chicago Medical Center, Chicago, IL, USA, at the height of the first COVID-19 surge, when supply-chain bottlenecks reduced the availability of disposable N95 respirators for medical personnel.

Introduction: Reimagining Epidemics

Over the past year, historians of medicine have found our discipline invested with a new sense of relevance. In trying to make sense of epidemics past and present, many of us have been substantially influenced by Charles Rosenberg's 1989 Daedalus essay, "What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective." Writing in the middle of another unfolding global pandemic, Rosenberg suggested that all epidemics possessed similar forms of social choreography, and that applying a narrative framework could help to understand their sequence, structure, and social impact. This issue of the Bulletin offers contributions from thirteen scholars working in various geographic, chronological, and thematic areas that engage with Rosenberg's fundamental historical question about what defines an epidemic, although the question takes on different forms, and different forms of urgency, in each of their works.