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This article explores the treatment of queer people as biosecurity threats during the 2015 outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in South Korea. The making of corporeal threats pivoted on the common biosecurity techniques of isolation and containment, of both virus and (potentially) infected, and mirrors the protracted treatment of people living with HIV/AIDS. However, in the aftermath of the MERS-CoV outbreak, queer and HIV/AIDS activists critiqued the methods of isolation that make people into threats and reify structural violence, articulating a radical form of relationality that draws infected and noninfected, humans and viruses, together. I argue that inviting relationality, activists mobilize the same biosecurity relations thought to be dangerous. The problem of proximity becomes not only the solution but also an activist tool of social justice. The MERS-CoV outbreak became an opportunity to illustrate a different kind of living, one predicated on what I call the human-virus hybrid: the social and microbial relationships between humans and viruses. Moving through the fields of biosecurity, human-microbe relations, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS, I proffer that the human-virus hybrid provides nuanced understandings of how people considered threats live during public health crises and find innovative methods of endurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Avian influenza outbreaks in Southeast Asia have focused an intense global spotlight on the entire region, specifically on China’s role in an adequate global health network which would be able to prevent or to contain a severe outbreak of the disease. Highly-publicized and politically-charged battles over samples of the H5N1 virus, transparency, timely case reporting, and China’s contribution to and cooperation with global institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO), have all emphasized the mounting political positioning of public health prevention measures. The language surrounding viral samples of avian influenza highlights the increasingly overlapping worlds of politics and public health. In an age of popularized discourses about national biosecurities, risk, and the growing threat of globalized, contagious disease, bird flu has been recast as a focal point of contention, a figurative space where the stakes are high — both for public health systems and the political structures which support them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]