1. Fear and the Coming Plague:
What American Media tells us
about Infectious Disease
Meg du Bray

2. “The miracle of antibiotics and other medical victories
(such as the eradication of naturally occurring
smallpox in 1977) seemed to have made infectious
diseases a relatively minor inconvenience in the global
North…in 1969 the Surgeon General had called the
problem of infectious disease in the United States
‘marginal’…”(Wald 2008:29-30)

3. The media is increasingly responsible for warning us
about the “…potential devastation, potential catastrophe,
[and the] imminent moment of life and death resulting
from a successful virus, whether the SARS virus of 2003
or HIV/AIDS of the last three decades…” (Magnusson
and Zalloua, N.d.:1)

4. “…the media are likely to play an especially important role
in times of confusion and uncertainty, since the public,
and even policy makers, often find that they lack
information and turn as a result to various forms of media
for help in making sense of the events occurring around
them” (Buus and Olsson 2006:78)

5. “…metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of
mere words….on the contrary, human thought processes
are largely metaphorical” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:6).
“Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social
realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future
action. Such actions, will, of course, fit the metaphor. This
will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make
experience coherent” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:157).

6. “The idea of society is a powerful image. It is potent in
its own right to control or to stir men to action. This
image has form: it has external boundaries, margins,
internal structure. Its outlines contain power to
reward conformity and repulse attack” (Douglas
1966:114).

7. Ebola
• “Symbolising Ebola as essential to Africa as a
whole...implies that such disasters [are]
incontrovertibly African, rather than European” (Joffe
and Haarhoff 2002:961)
• “It hit the hospital like a bomb. It savaged patients
and snaked like lightning out from the hospital”
(Preston 1994:69).
• “People eat wild primates and other bush meat
because they are poor and hungry and the animals
are freely available to anyone with a gun” (Waltner-
Toews 2007:129)

8. SARS
• “…the SARS coronavirus is believed to emanate from palm civet cats
or raccoon dogs that populated the live animal markets in
Guangdong Province, China…Such ‘exotic’ animal species are used in
both food and traditional medicine in southern China, but contact
with these species in live animal markets facilitates the zoonotic
transfer” (Ali and Keil 2006:497)
• “Researchers had suggested that certain individuals might be ‘super-
spreaders’ – that is, people who were spraying out extra-large
numbers of viruses” (Waltner-Toews 2007:120)
• “These types of ethno-cultural linkage…have implications for the
microbial traffic of the SARS virus – both in relation to the microbial
traffic between global cities, as well as to the lateral spread of the
disease within particular local diaspora communities commonly
nestled within global cities” (Ali and Keil 2006:500)

9. Securitization of Health
• “In terms of actors, if a threat is to be securitised at the
global level, it is reasonable to state that United States
involvement, either in the form of initiating the
securitisation, or actively supporting the actors involved
in securitisation, is essential” (Abraham 2011:799)
• “‘Marburg and Ebola are not as significant threats as
smallpox would be, but one could wreak incredibly
human health tragedies in this country and couple
probably create a huge economic burden even if the
disease didn’t spread like wildfire’” (Grady 2005:A9)
• “Nearly everyone interviewed raised the parallel [of
SARS] to smallpox and other possible bioterror weapons”
(Perez-Pena 2003:N35)

10. Conclusions

11. Citations
Abraham, Thomas
2011 The Chronicle of a Disease Foretold: Pandemic H1N1 and the Construction of a Global Health
Security Threat. Political Studies 59:797-812.
Ali, S. Harris and Keil, Roger
2006 Global Cities and the Spread of Infectious Disease: The Case of Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto, Canada. Urban Studies 43(3):491-509.
Buus, Stephanie and Olsson, Eva-Karin
2006 The SARS Crisis: Was Anybody Responsible? Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management
14(2):71-81).
Douglas, Mary
1966 External Boundaries. Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History 4:484-493.
Grady, Denise
2005 New Vaccines Prevent Ebola and Marburg in Monkeys. New York Times, June 6:A9
Joffe, Helene and Haarhoff, Georgina
2002 Representations of far-flung illnesses: the case of Ebola in Britain. Social Science and Medecine
54: 955-969.
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark
1980 Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London.
Magnusson, Bruce and Zalloua, Zahi
N.d. Introduction: The Hydra of Contagion. Unpublished book, Departments of Politcs and World
Literature, Whitman College.
Perez-Pena, Richard
2003 Battle Plan for SARS: Preparing, and Awaiting a Fateful Sneeze. New York Times, May 18:N35.
Preston, Richard
1994 The Hot Zone. Random House: New York.
Wald, Priscilla
2008 Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke University Press: London.
Waltner-Toews, David
2007 The Chickens Fight Back. Greystone Books: Toronto.