The slippery geographies of polio

Social geography(ies) III

“…If we think about the bugs as more than simply the insects that share our world and focus on the bugs that survive through our bodies themselves, we are pushed to further ask, as social geographers, how bugs, such as viruses or bacteria, see the world humans are co-creating. As Del Casino et al (2014: 546) argue: Polioviruses…do not rely on the ocularcentric spatial imagination of human beings…Polioviruses know how to negotiate the negative spaces between human vision and the bodies and ecological landscapes that afford them their capacity for life. Put another way, polioviruses maintain themselves by seeping through the boundaries – real or imagined – we use to contain them.…”

“…If human inequality is one of the sociospatial contexts that provide space for the proliferation of various sorts of bugs, then the human response to that spread is equally important to social geographers. This is particularly true as we come to realize that the mosquito’s ‘micro-brewing spaces continually defy human control and eradication’ (Shaw et al, 2013: 260) and ‘that our global ecologies and geopolitical realities are so highly integrated that viruses, such as polio, can take advantage of this integration to survive’ (Del Casino et al, 2014: 547). Shaw et al (2013) push social geographical theory to consider not the question of bug eradication but how social geographers might ‘see the world through the perspective of ticks and mosquitoes’ (p. 263).…”

“…1 With its potential to spread via multiple vectors – from mosquitos to humans and from human to human – it has repositioned ‘the viral’ as an ongoing concern of both regional and global human health. 2 The Zika outbreak follows on the heels of the Ebola epidemic that swept through western Africa just a few years earlier and can be situated against the backdrop of the global health community’s failure to eliminate polio from the planet by its 2013 target (Del Casino et al, 2014). Social and natural scientists are further warning of a more intense set of viral futures as climate change reorganizes the map of where certain bugs – not just insects, but also a wider range of bugs, such as viruses, bacteria, and parasites, which operate within and beyond the human body – can live and thrive (Kiritani, 2013; Boeckmann and Joyner, 2014; Butterworth et al, 2016).…”