Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China's Pandemic Epicenter By Lyle Fearnley,. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020. viii, 280 pp. ISBN: 9781478011057 (paper)

ABSTRACT

Laboratory work on viral phylogenetics combined with broad claims about agricultural practices in South China, specifically the cultivation of free-grazing ducks, to produce claims about China as a disease epicenter;the development of spatial models of influenza epidemics in the early 2000s turned this ideological claim into a research object. Using a case study of the FAO Emergency Center for Transboundary Animal Diseases established in Beijing in 2006, Fearnley suggests that senior technical director Vincent Martin employed two contrasting tactics to gain access to the epidemic epicenter affinity, involving the cultivation of relationships to facilitate exchange of information and materials, and stratification, in which Martin demonstrated the insignificance of territorial boundaries to questions of epidemic risk and biosecurity. Rich McKay has recently shed light on stigmatizing discourses of “Patient Zero” that arose in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.2 How do the scaled-up efforts to demarcate zones of risk traced so carefully by Fearnley connect to ever-growing concerns with identifying the individual, episodic origin of epidemics?