Pandemics, Epidemics and Their Classification Criteria: What Questions for Anthropology?
Pandemics, Epidemics and Their Classification Criteria: What Questions for Anthropology?

Summary/Abstract: Pandemics and epidemics are based on facts, statistics, and estimates translated into projections and epidemiological modeling. They are also the subject of representations and, in a correlative way, of significations. Thus, it is biological, epidemiological, and social criteria that generate the character of seriousness to which global public policies hasten to respond with significant financial support. Many of these are caused by pathogenic agents. Among those identified since the 1970s are the AIDS viruses, more recently COVID-19. However, non-infectious diseases are sometimes supported by narratives that portray them as epidemics or pandemics for example, the WHO has referred to diabetes as a new global epidemic, given its steadily rising prevalence rates worldwide. My aim is to question the central but also ambivalent role played by the production of statistics and quantitative data in qualifying a phenomenon as an epidemic or a pandemic on the one hand and by the collective feeling of uncontrolled and socially dangerous exposure to a risk on the other. I will discuss their performative effects and their symbolic function, using the illustrative case of diabetes. Like many chronic non-communicable diseases, diabetes is a financially under-supported disease in the context of national health systems particularly in low-resource countries, even though it causes millions of deaths. Driven by a desire to alert people to future global health problems, it is of interest to consider how some experts use the notions of contamination or contagion in their arguments and to understand their underlying representations.

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