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I HAVE BEEN INVITED to make some remarks pertaining to the general issue of the future of sociological theory. Within this context I will confine my remarks to two questions. [...]

A disease outbreak is an emergent product of social and ecological processes. To more fully understand disease outbreaks and their response, we must therefore consider how these dual processes interact in specific locales within the context of an increasingly urbanized world. As such, in this paper we examine the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak and its response in West Africa by adopting the lenses of two approaches that are usually treated separately – namely, urban political ecology (UPE) and urban political pathology (UPP). The UPE approach sheds light on how the material/biophysical basis of the EVD outbreak was influenced by the socio-political-economic and vice versa. The UPP approach gives us insight into how the EVD response was influenced by broader socio-political-economic forces, particularly the historical legacy of colonialism. Through the adoption of this dual lens we are able to gain greater insights and a more comprehensive understanding of the EVD outbreak and response in West Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The prejudicial linking of infection with ethnic minority status has a long-established history, but in some ways this association may have intensified under the contemporary circumstances of the "new [...]

The socio-political context of modern environmental health disasters tends to be defined as being outside the scope of official public health and epidemiological investigations into the causes of such disasters. On the other hand, popular accounts of these disasters tend to focus exclusively on the role of particular individuals and/or political actors, while minimizing the role of ecological factors. It is argued that an exclusive focus on either set of causal factors gives an incomplete or distorted picture of the origins of an environmental health disaster. In this paper, a socio-ecological analysis is developed to demonstrate how the largest outbreak of waterborne E. coli O157:H7 in Canadian history was the emergent product of a complex interplay and intertwining of social and ecological processes. The socio-ecological autopsy approach that is developed here traces the social and ecological chain of events that ultimately led to the outbreak and demonstrates, in particular, the need for investigative analysis to focus on the socio-ecological 'incubation' of an environmental health disaster. Drawing from both the social sciences (particularly. the sociology of disasters and organizational sociology), and from the ecological sciences (particularly disease ecology), the analysis developed here responds to the call for the application of a more transdisciplinary approach to the study of contemporary environmental health problems. Keywords: Disease outbreaks; Environmental health; Disaster incubation; Agroecosystem, new and emerging diseases; E. coli O157:H7; Canada

Une perspective de la construction sociale sert de cadre a l'analyse des controverses sur la gestion des risques qui ont ete provoquees a la suite d'un incendie majeur dans une [...]

Charles T. Adeyanju, Deadly Fever: Racism, Disease and a Media Panic. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2010, 136 pp. $15.95 paper (978-1-55266-341-7) In this empirically detailed and theoretically informed case study, Charles [...]

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