Editors' Introduction: The Politics of Infectious Disease

ABSTRACT

To take but a few cases, it is impossible to grasp the rationales used during the Atlantic Slave Trade without tracing the corresponding voyages and reproductive habits of the female Aedes aegypti, the mosquito responsible for transmitting yellow fever and for which Africans were conveniently considered immune (Watts, 1999 228–9);nor is it possible to understand the role of colonial medicine in the ‘Scramble for Africa' without decrypting later boasts such as that from the French Governor of Morocco who intended to ‘cure the diseases that for so long have corrupted this people' (Rieff, 2002 63). While the murder of polio vaccinators in Pakistan is cloaked in anti-Western conspiracy theories, there is also a broader scepticism that questions the priorities of international donors, not to mention a clear political failure on the part of the State, that should not be glossed over (Khan and Constable, 2019). Much like the previous article, she points to ‘political, social and economic grievances' that crystallised around a response where the population suffered from ‘long-standing health needs, the cancellation of the elections, and coercive practices of the armed forces and police'. [...]this is hardly helped by MSF's own contradictions in adopting the World Health Organization's approach of ‘go big and go fast' and attempting to maintain relevance to an increasingly controversial response strategy, all the while struggling to preserve a degree of independent action that held no interest to local power brokers.