Contemporary history of the NHS seminar series
We welcome all those interested in, or working on, the contemporary history of the National Health Service. Meetings are held once a month on Mondays between 1 and 2.30pm in the CHSTM Seminar Room, 2.57 Simon Building (see how to find us for directions).
Please contact the co-ordinator, Dr Stephanie Snow, for details of upcoming seminars, or if you have any queries about seminar arrangements.
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Programme for January - May 2012
16 January
Gareth Millward, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Invalid definitions: who was "really" disabled, 1965-1995?
27 February
Michael Bresalier, CHSTM
'Forecasting' flu: the moral and political economy of global influenza control
Michael's abstract:
For over sixty years, the World Health Organization has coordinated the global surveillance of influenza viruses. Throughout its existence, the WHO’s Influenza Programme has been vital to both predicting annual outbreaks and major pandemics and to systems of vaccine production around the world. Yet, equally so, the Programme has been predicated on two contradictory economies: a moral economy, in which participating laboratories and researchers freely share virus samples, information and material practices, and a political economy, in which WHO freely provides virus subtypes to national and transnational pharmaceutical manufacturers, who use them to make and supply vaccines according market forces and the demands of first-world public health systems. The contradictions between these two economies recently became the focal point of international controversy. In 2006, Indonesia refused to provide WHO with samples of (avian) H5N1 and other strains, arguing that virus sharing should include a reciprocal exchange of vaccines. As a result of the controversy, WHO took the dramatic step of initiating efforts to improve access to influenza vaccines in the developing world.
In this paper, I show that the contradictions highlighted by the virus sharing controversy were not new, and need to be understood as part of the history of the organisation of the Influenza Programme. To make this point, the talk concentrates on the first decade of the Programme, from its inception in 1947 to its first significant test during the 1957 ‘Asian’ influenza pandemic. I highlight how the problems of virus surveillance and vaccine production were practically linked together and then came to be governed by two different exchange economies. I argue that contradictions between these economies meant that inequalities in access to crucial biomedical resources – particularly viruses and vaccines – became a structural part of global approaches to influenza control through the second half of the twentieth century
19 March
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16 April
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20 May
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