Pathogenic Metabolisms: A Rift and the Zika Virus in Mato Grosso, Brazil

Abstract

The Zika virus in Brazil is often portrayed as emerging in and more severely inflicting the country’s impoverished coastal urban areas. However, the virus also impacted residents in wealthier and more rural areas. To understand how the Zika virus moved to seemingly less likely places, I bring political ecological approaches to health and disease into conversation with scholarly accounts of metabolic rifts. Making an incorporated comparison of the ways in which global finance and the Brazilian state shaped the relationship between urban and rural areas, I demonstrate how the era of modernist urban industrialisation resulted in the creation of more traditional spaces of Zika emergence in the country’s urban impoverished areas and the shift towards neoliberal agricultural extractivism resulted in the creation of seemingly more unusual spaces of Zika emergence in the wealthier less populated interior.

Urban political ecology: a critical reconfiguration

“…Epidemiological insights into urban space require a political ecology of cities and urbanization, not an overarching focus on the latter to the relative exclusion of the former. The specific pathogens associated with urban environments such as dengue, chikungunya, and Zika illuminate multiple domains of inequality and corporeal vulnerability (see Kaup, 2021;Patchin, 2020). The control of Zika, for instance, has led to militarized biopolitical interventions in Brazil, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere through the enactment of high-profile aerial insecticide spraying and other measures.…”

THE ZOONOTIC CITY: Urban Political Ecology and the Pandemic Imaginary

“…The principal vector for Zika is the highly adaptable mosquito Aedes aegypti , which is also a carrier for dengue, yellow fever, and Chikungunya, and has been steadily extending its global range in response to climate change, urbanization and the international trade in tyres, potted plants and other items that can form micro niches for larval development (see Kraemer et al ., 2019 ). Yet as Brent Kaup ( 2021 ) has pointed out in the case of Brazil, the spread of Zika, a disease first recognized in the country in 2015, involves a number of factors extending beyond the socio‐ecological or topographic characteristics of poorer urban neighbourhoods. In particular, Kaup ( 2021 : 568) stresses metabolic interactions between ostensibly urban and rural spaces across a diverse set of spatial scales, drawing insights from political ecology to explore the wider impacts of ‘neoliberal agricultural extractivism’.…”

“…Yet as Brent Kaup ( 2021 ) has pointed out in the case of Brazil, the spread of Zika, a disease first recognized in the country in 2015, involves a number of factors extending beyond the socio‐ecological or topographic characteristics of poorer urban neighbourhoods. In particular, Kaup ( 2021 : 568) stresses metabolic interactions between ostensibly urban and rural spaces across a diverse set of spatial scales, drawing insights from political ecology to explore the wider impacts of ‘neoliberal agricultural extractivism’. Other mosquito species such as Culex pipiens , the vector for West Nile virus and Saint Louis encephalitis, have also advanced in response to ecological opportunities provided by dilapidated infrastructure systems, half‐finished construction sites, abandoned swimming pools, and other sources of standing water (see, for example, Filipović, 2021 ).…”

“…Potentially dangerous zones of zoonotic transfer are not, however, restricted to the global South: the H1N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009 originated in North American factory farms whilst variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease was traced to the UK beef industry using contaminated animal feed after deregulation in the 1980s (see, for example, Smith and Bradley, 2003; Mena et al ., 2016). Elevated levels of zoonotic risk associated with capitalist agriculture unsettle ideologically driven variants of the pandemic imaginary based on the exoticization of distant locales, the castigation of small‐scale producers or a reliance on racialized topographic stereotypes such as the ‘Asian city’ (see Karesh et al ., 2012; Peckham, 2015; Harrison, 2016; Lynteris, 2019; Kaup, 2021).…”

Between the colossal and the catastrophic: Planetary urbanization and the political ecologies of emergent infectious disease

“…In the context of EIDs, processes of extended urbanization are implicated not only in the human-to-human circuits of disease transmission on which the Keil group focuses their investigations. Just as importantly, prior to the fateful moment of zoonotic spillover, the distinctive patterns and pathways of extended urbanization of the neoliberal era have engendered new circuits of multispecies, animal-to-animal disease transmission (both enzootic and epizootic) in which pathogens are dislodged from nonhuman hosts in “wild” or “remote” forest environments and projected into zones of hinterland industrialization and associated circuits of capital (Kaup, 2021). Here, in a global network of industrial farms, feedlots, slaughterhouses, and meat-processing facilities, both landscapes and animals are artificially homogenized into high-volume, rapid-throughput monocultures.…”