Malte reviewed Dead Epidemiologists by Rob Wallace
Review of 'Dead Epidemiologists' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
There's no grand story here about COVID-19 that you would not be able to tease out from reading a bunch of scientific paper abstracts and going back to the general theory advanced by Rob Wallace & co. for years. That is, the theory of how globalized industrial agriculture has created a veritable breeding ground for hyper-virulent diseases, and how we can only understand this "pandemic age" by understanding the workings of agricultural capital.
What I mean is there is no radically new material in this book that Wallace has not been dealing with before. But with this book we have the most up-to-date material by specialists in their field, doing their best to make it accessible for the lay reader and are independent enough to repeat the stories that make mainstream epidemiology uneasy.
A year into the pandemic, and the general public even in the most literate, overdeveloped countries of …
There's no grand story here about COVID-19 that you would not be able to tease out from reading a bunch of scientific paper abstracts and going back to the general theory advanced by Rob Wallace & co. for years. That is, the theory of how globalized industrial agriculture has created a veritable breeding ground for hyper-virulent diseases, and how we can only understand this "pandemic age" by understanding the workings of agricultural capital.
What I mean is there is no radically new material in this book that Wallace has not been dealing with before. But with this book we have the most up-to-date material by specialists in their field, doing their best to make it accessible for the lay reader and are independent enough to repeat the stories that make mainstream epidemiology uneasy.
A year into the pandemic, and the general public even in the most literate, overdeveloped countries of the world is still by large ignorant about the structural causes of the virus.
This is probably the best cross-disciplinary literature there is on the pandemic at the moment. In a year or two, perhaps more depending on how research into the origins of the virus will advance, it will possibly be surpassed. In all likelihood by the very same authors, as it seems (and this is part of the book's point) not a lot of other epidemiologists are working on it. Mainstream, well-funded and corporate epidemiology is fully occupied understanding how the fire is spreading through the building, instead of understanding what started the fire. As it is very likely that we will see other new hyper-virulent diseases come on the world stage, as long as the ecological fire walls are so weak and the food industry resembles a veritable petri dish for epidemics, it seems pretty important to do something about this.
This is not an easy read if you're not accustomed to reading some scientific literature, esp. in the biology department. But the way of theorizing is absolutely necessary to understand the big picture: we are lucky to have researchers with a popular ethic synthesizing the political economy of agriculture with technical fields like agroecology and farming, epizoology and evolutionary biology.