Neglected malarias: The frontlines and back alleys of global health

Abstract

Among the public health community, 'all except malaria' is often shorthand for neglected tropical diseases. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's cause ce´le`bre, malaria receives a tremendous amount of funding, as well as scientific and policy attention. Malaria has, however, divergent biological, behavioural and socio-political guises; it is multiply implicated in the environments we inhabit and in the ways in which we inhabit them. The malaria that focuses our attention crops up in the back alleys of Dar es Salaam, brought into being by local labour and municipal governance -a version of malaria that, we argue, is increasingly excluded in current eradication campaigns. This article considers the cycles of public health amnesia, memory and neglect that construe the parasitological exchange between man and mosquito. It begins by exploring the political concerns and technical capacities that have transformed malaria into a global enemy. Combining these historical accounts with ethnographic material, we suggest how malaria is disentangled from or conflated with particular places. Ultimately, our aim is to reflect upon the relationship between scale of malaria control and its social consequence, attending to the actors and relations that fall outside of contemporary global public health policy.

Global Health and Geographical Imaginaries

“…The second is the anthropological and geographical research that is deeply sceptical of the global and celebrates the local, emphasising resistance to, mistranslation and reappropriation of biomedical and public health discourses by community leaders, doctors and patients in particular places (e.g. Kelly and Beisel, 2011;Livingstone, 2012;Lawhon and Herrick, 2013) authorities across the globe to know about and prepare against pandemics 'in real-time' as they unfold (e.g. Weir and Mykhalovskiy, 2010;Caduff, 2014).…”

Circulating Ignorance: Complexity and Agnogenesis in the Obesity “Epidemic”

“…Such framings recast not just what is known (or not yet known) but also what is knowable. My article draws on recent work on the social construction of ignorance (Croissant ; Geissler ; Kelly and Beisel ; McGoey ; Pinto ; Proctor ) to argue that the field of evidence in obesity science is fashioned in a way that deflects attention (and responsibility) away from questions of food production, distribution, and marketing and continues to frame the problem as one of individual responsibility. I analyze the variegated forms of un/knowing that arise from my observations concerning the operational problems of contending with complexities and uncertainties in the field of obesity science to attend to the politics at stake in the maintenance of distinctions between knowledge and ignorance.…”

Markets and Mutations: mosquito nets and the politics of disentanglement in global health

“…(ii) In combination with this, a shift towards fragmentation of actors, a new dominance of public-private initiatives and other parastate actors over national actors (Geissler, 2013(Geissler, , 2015Rees, 2014), and a move towards 'projects' as units of action has been observed (Whyte et al, 2013;Krause, 2014b). (iii) Underlying is an uneven geography of ''the global health complex'' (McGoey et al, 2011): of technology transfer and travelling models (Behrends et al, 2014), of colonial and postcolonial power relations (Keller, 2006), of continued neglect (Kelly and Beisel, 2011) and unequal collaborations and experiments in global health science (Rottenburg, 2009;Crane, 2013;Geissler and Okwaro, 2014).…”

“…Focusing on mosquito nets and their effects on local economies and ecologies, I provide an ethnographic account of what the proliferation of a global health logic, or as Redfield puts it, the foregrounding of moral and medical values (see above, Redfield, 2012), might render invisible or neglect (Kelly and Beisel, 2011). I suggest framing the potential of mosquito nets in terms of 'nets distributed, lives saved' renders economic and ecological consequences of mosquito nets a ''hinterland'' (Law, 2004).…”