Neoliberal Ebola

Neoliberal Ebola
Author: Robert G. Wallace
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2016-08-29
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 3319409409

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This volume compiles five papers modeling the effects of neoliberal economics on the emergence of Ebola and its aftermath. Neoliberalism is currently the world’s primary economic philosophy. It centers international relations around globalizing laissez-faire economics for multinational companies, promoting free trade, deregulating economic markets, and shifting state expenditures in favor of private property. The multidisciplinary teams represented here place both Ebola Makona, the Zaire Ebola virus variant that has infected 28,000 in West Africa, and Ebola Reston, which is currently emerging in industrial hog farms in the Philippines and China, within a multi-plank modeling framework. Using a stochastic extinction model that one group spatializes, environmental stochasticity across the ecologies in which Ebola evolves is treated as an ecosystemic prophylaxis. An agroecological logic gate is developed for epidemic control. A Black-Scholes model explicitly links economic margins across agricultural systems to success in biocontrol. This new control theory is further developed around the data-rate and rate-distortion theorems, a turbulence model, and cognitive symmetry breaking. Lastly, a model of pandemic penetrance is used to explore the domino effects of serious outbreaks amplifying through the cascades of disasters that can follow deadly pandemics. All the models presented are contextualized by socioeonomic geographies specific to outbreak locales.Together the models suggest shifts in regional agroeconomics under the neoliberal doctrine, driving deforestation and monoculture production, destroying the ecosystemic “friction” with which local forests typically disrupt Ebola transmission. The resulting collapse in such an ecological function accelerates pathogen spillover and propagation across the remaining host populations. The failure on the part of current control efforts to assimilate such a structural context may render even an efficacious vaccine dysfunctional. The authors propose an alternate science of disease and an adjunct program of interventions useful to researchers and public health officials alike.

The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism

The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism
Author: Rick Rowden
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1848136412

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'The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism' explores the history of and current collision between two of the major global phenomena that have characterized the last 30 years: the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases of poverty and the ascendancy of neoliberal economic ideas. The book explains not only how IMF policies of restrictive spending have exacerbated public health problems in developing countries, in particular the HIV/AIDS crisis, but also how such issues cannot be resolved under these economic policies. It also suggests how mounting global frustration about this inability to adequately address HIV/AIDS will ultimately lead to challenges to the dominant neoliberal ideas, as other more effective economic ideas for increasing public spending are sought. In stark, powerful terms, Rowden offers a unique and in-depth critique of development economics, the political economy dynamics of global foreign aid and health institutions, and how these seemingly abstract factors play out in the real world - from the highest levels of global institutions to African finance and health ministries to rural health outposts in the countryside of developing nations, and back again.

Understanding West Africas Ebola Epidemic

Understanding West Africas Ebola Epidemic
Author: Ibrahim Abdullah
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2017-10-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1786991713

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From 2013 to 2015, over 11,000 people across West Africa lost their lives to the deadliest outbreak of the Ebola virus in history. Crucially, this epidemic marked the first time the virus was able to spread beyond rural areas to major cities, overturning conventional assumptions about its epidemiology. With backgrounds ranging from development to disease control, the contributors to this volume - some of them based in countries affected by the Ebola epidemic - consider the underlying factors that shaped this unprecedented outbreak. While championing the heroic efforts of local communities and aid workers in halting the spread of the disease, the contributors also reveal deep structural problems in both the countries and humanitarian agencies involved, which hampered the efforts to contain the epidemic. Alarmingly, they show that little has been learned from these events, with health provision remaining underfunded and poorly equipped to deal with future outbreaks. Such issues, they argue, reflect the wider challenges we face in tackling epidemic disease in an increasingly interconnected world.

Blind Spot

Blind Spot
Author: M.D. Salmaan Keshavjee
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2014-08-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 052095873X

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Neoliberalism has been the defining paradigm in global health since the latter part of the twentieth century. What started as an untested and unproven theory that the creation of unfettered markets would give rise to political democracy led to policies that promoted the belief that private markets were the optimal agents for the distribution of social goods, including health care. A vivid illustration of the infiltration of neoliberal ideology into the design and implementation of development programs, this case study, set in post-Soviet Tajikistan’s remote eastern province of Badakhshan, draws on extensive ethnographic and historical material to examine a "revolving drug fund" program—used by numerous nongovernmental organizations globally to address shortages of high-quality pharmaceuticals in poor communities. Provocative, rigorous, and accessible, Blind Spot offers a cautionary tale about the forces driving decision making in health and development policy today, illustrating how the privatization of health care can have catastrophic outcomes for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Neoliberal Africa

Neoliberal Africa
Author: Professor Graham Harrison
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2010-03-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1848133219

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Neoliberalism has shaped African development for nearly thirty years. As such, it is not an economic 'shock' or a 'structural adjustment', but rather a historic shift in Africa's development politics and policy. This book explores the ways in which African countries have experienced the neoliberal project, highlighting how this project has gone beyond economic liberalisation and towards a bolder social transformation. As an ideology, neoliberalism projects an end-point not simply of a market economy but of a market society. After thirty years of projects, aid disbursement, technical assistance, and conditionality, this book maps out the extent to which African states have cleaved to neoliberal directives. It suggests that neoliberal 'progress' in Africa is notably limited in spite of the resources behind it and the lack of alternatives to it.

COVID-19 and the Case Against Neoliberalism

COVID-19 and the Case Against Neoliberalism
Author: Mark Boyle
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2023-01-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3031189353

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This book seeks to better understand the meaning and implications of the UKs calamitous encounter with the COVID-19 global pandemic for the future of British neoliberalism. Construing COVID-19 as a political pandemic and mobilising a novel applied political philosophy approach, the authors cultivate fresh intellectual resources, both analytical and normative, to better understand why the UK failed the COVID-19 test and how it might ‘fail forward’ so as to strengthen its resilience. COVID-19 they argue, has intercepted the UK government’s decades-long experimentation with neoliberalism at what appears to be a threshold moment in this model’s life course. Neoliberalism has served as a key progenitor of the country’s vulnerability: the pandemic has cruelly unveiled the failings of neoliberal logics and legacies which have placed the country at elevated risk and hampered its response. The pandemic in turn has attenuated underlying systemic maladies inherent in British neoliberalism and served as a great disruptor and potential accelerant of history; a consequential episode in the tumultuous life of this politico-economic model. To meaningfully ‘build back better’, a true renaissance of social democracy is needed. Drawing upon the neorepublican tradition of political philosophy, the authors confront neoliberalism’s hegemonic but parochial concept of human freedom as non-interference and place the neorepublican idea of freedom as non-domination in the service of building a new UK social contract. This book will be of interest to political philosophers, political geographers, medical sociologists, public-health scholars, and epidemiologists, to stakeholders engaged in the public inquiry processes now gathering momentum globally and to architects of build back better programmes, especially in western advanced capitalist economies.

Epidemic Illusions

Epidemic Illusions
Author: Eugene T Richardson
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262045605

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A physician-anthropologist explores how public health practices--from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment--help perpetuate global inequities. In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices--from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference--play an essential role in perpetuating a range of global inequities. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medical anthropology, and critical science studies, Richardson demonstrates the ways in which the flagship discipline of epidemiology has been shaped by the colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492. Deploying a range of rhetorical tools and drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, Richardson concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production.

The Ebola Pandemic in Sierra Leone

The Ebola Pandemic in Sierra Leone
Author: John Idriss Lahai
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2017-02-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 331945904X

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This book provides a timely examination of the Ebola pandemic in Sierra Leone from four different standpoints: 1) a social standpoint that focuses on the way in which the vulnerable Sierra Leonian population viewed the pandemic in light of their cultural beliefs, memories of past wars and narratives and actions of the government; 2) a good governance standpoint that exposes lapses in health governance and the general unpreparedness of the government and international community to deal with the outbreak; 3) a scientific research standpoint that looks at the role played by the Sierra Leone's Lassa Fever Research Laboratories as a main hub for the investigation, monitoring and evaluation of communicable diseases in the Mano River Union countries; and 4) an international politics standpoint that examines the development of a new bio-security international apparatus involving a wide range of international actors and institutions.

Neoliberal Globalization

Neoliberal Globalization
Author: Paul C. Mocombe
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2022-08-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527586634

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This work uses the theory of phenomenological structuralism to put forth the argument that neoliberal globalization represents a Durkheimian mechanicalization of the world via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism under American hegemony. It concludes that America attempts to “enframe” nation-states around the latter form of social integration via the systemicity of the dollar backed by the world’s commodities, which it privatizes. Amidst reactionary nationalism and fascism, which emerges to protect the citizenry of the world from the exploitative effects of the whole process, climate change threatens the American globalist project.

How Politics Makes Us Sick

How Politics Makes Us Sick
Author: T. Schrecker
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2015-05-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137463074

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Ted Schrecker and Clare Bambra argue that the obesity, insecurity, austerity and inequality that result from neoliberal (or 'market fundamentalist') policies are hazardous to our health, asserting that these neoliberal epidemics require a political cure.