That was the story they wanted told. Starting with the science publications—through metaphor and narrative account—the story that they were telling that got picked up by journalists and eventually by popular fiction and film had a particular geography. It always began in the global South and migrated to the global North, which is historically not true, but that was the story. That was predominantly the case for a lot of these diseases, but it became a broader story. There was a kind of pathologizing of populations, people, places, even though the conference itself did not intend to do that. The story mutated just like our microbes mutate. As the story mutated, that began to be a convention of the story. There was always a kind of easy stigmatizing that happened. Of course, that was exacerbated because whenever there’s a crisis, any “us and them” gets more pronounced.
I’ll give you an example from the science that I think allowed this to happen and that is the metaphor of microbial warfare. You can say, “Oh well, it’s just a metaphor”—practically every article in these collections uses this metaphor of microbial warfare and also border-crossers. Microbes know no borders, they’re border-crossers and so on. Those two metaphors are characteristic of how something we say incidentally in our speech reveals a lot about how we’re thinking about the problem, even if we don’t know we’re thinking about it that way, and you see that as it gets picked up by mainstream media and popular fiction and film. There’s a battle between the enemy microbe and the heroic researchers and epidemiologists over the fate of humanity. These diseases are always catastrophic. They are species-threatening. There’s an apocalyptic quality to this. There’s this battle that happens and ultimately, in almost every case, it is resolved by epidemiologists and medical scientists and it’s eventually contained after much damage has happened and humanity gets a renewed sense of itself and a second chance. This outbreak narrative takes on, especially in its fictional forms, almost a mythic quality, [starting with] an apocalyptic threat and then a sense of renewal and rejuvenation and new start that comes out of it.
The problem is—in addition to all the potential stigmatizing that happens in the outbreak narrative and these pathologizations—ultimately the story affirms epidemiology and medical science as the only solutions. Animating the microbe and creating it as the enemy undercuts the message the participants in the 1989 conference were trying to convey, which is that human agency is responsible for the problem, and human practices have to change. A war implies an enemy that is causing the problem. Moreover, while scientific medicine and epidemiology is certainly part of the solution, their point is that human beings have to change their practices as well. It is a social, geopolitical, and economic problem as well as a medical one