On RIPE goodies

Stefan Elbe, who has previously had some fascinating stuff to say regarding the intersection between global health and IR theory, has written a review article on three recent books detailing the emergence of three different diseases. Published in last month's Review of International Political Economy (or the oddly acronym'd RIPE), the article delves through the supposition that the emergence of new diseases is primarily a function of economic globalisation.

The books* focus on SARS, avian flu and AIDS respectively - but each adopts a perspective which is decidedly geared towards economic explanations for disease emergence, epidemiology and geographic distribution. Some of these explanations are obvious, like the expansion of global air travel being a deciding factor in the panic over SARS; while others seem to be drawing the bow a fair distance. One of these involves an almost No Logo-esque expose of evil multinational poultry organisations, used in an attempt to indict the whole global capitalist system. The prose used here is, in parts, ridiculously lurid:

...mutant influenza of nightmarish virulence – evolved and now entrenched in ecological niches created by global agrocapitalism – is searching for a new gene or two that will enable it travel at pandemic velocity through a densely urbanized and mostly poor humanity. (Davis, 2005:8)

All of this will no doubt be familiar to epidemiologists and public health practitioners for whom the "social determinants of disease" have been a research topic of high priority for a decade or more. Tony McMichael's academic work in this area immediately comes to mind, as does Paul Farmer's activism.

Of course, the recognition that health is largely based on social and economic factors engenders, dare I say it, a role for political observers and analysts. In a global system of states it isn't a simple matter of applying a technical solution to our biological problems - it requires some degree of cooperation between states. That kind of cooperation is difficult to obtain, and a number of strategies are being floated as the best way to get government's to cooperate together (mostly involving 'securitisation' of the problem).

Elbe suggests that these strategies are working and are leading to a new global 'noso-politics' (thank Michel Foucault for that brilliant piece of linguistic barbarism). Essentially, Elbe argues that the new International Health Regulations's and the concurrent strengthening of the WHO's role in global disease surveillance and response is indicative of a new consensus - one where government's are beginning to recognise the need to secure the health of everyone in order to secure the health of their own citizens.

Me, embittered cynic that I am...I'm not so sure.

* '"The books" being:

• Thomas Abraham (2005) Twenty-First Century Plague: The Story of SARS, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Mike Davis (2005) The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, New York and London: The New Press
• Eileen Stillwaggon (2006) AIDS and the Ecology of Poverty, Oxford: Oxford University Press