Fragments of the Forest: Hot Zones, Disease Ecologies, and the Changing Landscape of Environment and Health in West Africa

ongoing

Why have certain regions, like West Africa, rich in biodiversity, also become identified as emerging disease hotspots in scientific and popular understanding? VIRHIST aims to discern the ecological, economic, political and social forces at play that have simultaneously turned certain regions into profitable sites of natural resource extraction, productive enclaves of biomedical research, and hot zones of pandemic threats. At its core, the project seeks interrogate how Western economic interests tied to natural resource extraction in West Africa produced new understandings about the ecology of disease, while simultaneously creating new environments and species relationships--in the laboratory and on the plantation--that eliminated certain diseases, but also creating conditions of possibility for other pathogens to thrive. VIRHIST offers a groundbreaking approach, stimulating cross-fertilization and interaction across the fields of environmental history, medical history, and STS, to develop new perspectives on the history of environment and health. Through a focus on three bloodborne diseases—yellow fever, hepatitis B, and Ebola— at three distinct moments in West African history, VIRHIST advances the following research objectives: 1) Identify and substantiate the intended and unintended changes in disease ecologies produced through industrial plantations and biomedical interventions; 2) Interrogate the shifting ethics and economics driving emerging infectious disease research in West Africa in an age where biosecurity, surveillance, and pandemic anxieties mobilize significant resources and attention; and 3) Investigate the changing ethical, commercial, legal, and political standards that have shaped the collection and extraction of natural resources—from rubber, to chimpanzees, to viruses—in conservation and disease hotspots of the world.