In recent years, new disease threats--such as SARS, avian flu, mad cow
disease, and drug-resistant strains of malaria and tuberculosis--have
garnered media attention and galvanized political response. Proposals
for new approaches to "securing health" against these threats have come
not only from public health and medicine but also from such fields as
emergency management, national security, and global humanitarianism.
This volume provides a map of this complex and rapidly transforming
terrain. The editors focus on how experts, public officials, and health
practitioners work to define what it means to "secure health" through
concrete practices such as global humanitarian logistics, pandemic
preparedness measures, vaccination campaigns, and attempts to regulate
potentially dangerous new biotechnologies.
As the contributions show, despite impressive activity in these areas,
the field of "biosecurity interventions" remains unstable. Many basic
questions are only beginning to be addressed: Who decides what counts as
a biosecurity problem? Who is responsible for taking action, and how is
the efficacy of a given intervention to be evaluated? It is crucial to
address such questions today, when responses to new problems of health
and security are still taking shape. In this context, this volume offers
a form of critical and reflexive knowledge that examines how technical
efforts to increase biosecurity relate to the political and ethical
challenges of living with risk.
