Health & place
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Responses to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and criticisms of those responses, were framed by issues endemic to the meeting of 'health' and 'security' as governing domains. Offering an editorial introduction to the selection of papers in this special issue, it is suggested that existing scholarship in the emerging field of 'health security' can be categorized according to realist-advocacy, historical-analytic, problematization and critical-inequality approaches. In contributing to this literature through an event-based focus on the pandemic, the papers embrace the opportunity to examine health security architectures acting and interacting 'in the event', to not only speculate over the possible implications of this governing trope, but to review them. Questions of the scales of governance and associated forms of expertise, the implications of differing modes of governance (from preparedness to surveillance to forms of intervention), and the role of health inequalities in the patterning of the pandemic are identified as key themes running across the papers.
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Although the term biosurveillance is employed with increasing frequency there remain variances in way in which the concept is both understood and practiced in the US and the UK, respectively. In this paper I begin by exploring the different epistemological and geographical approaches to biosurveillance that are employed in each locality, paying particular attention to the scales at which they, respectively, operate. ⋯ I contend in this paper, and illustrate through a study of the techniques of surveillance employed during the recent H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic, that these different 'registers' of biosurveillance are now being bought into the same frame of reference to create new, ever more robust and finely calibrated systems of biological surveillance. In thinking through the political implications of the emergent collision, I outline here, employing work from Cooper, Katz, and Lyon how biosurveillance is becoming progressively domesticated and reflect on the potential this has for creating new, expansive, and very pervasive, forms of biological 'governmentality'.
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We seek to map and describe variation in geographic access to the set of 189 specialist adult inpatient hospices in England and Wales. Using almost 35,000 small Census areas (Local Super Output Areas: LSOAs) as our units of analysis, the locations of hospices, and estimated drive times from LSOAs to hospices we construct an accessibility 'score' for each LSOA, for England and Wales as a whole. ⋯ That subset is then filtered according to the deprivation score for each LSOA, in order to identify those LSOAs which are also above average in terms of deprivation. While urban areas are relatively well served, large parts of England and Wales have poor access to hospices, and there is a risk that the needs of those living in relatively deprived areas may be unmet.
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The first cases of swine flu in the UK were detected on 27th April 2009. Two weeks later Birmingham became a "hotspot" for the HIN1 pandemic in England. ⋯ The imposition of a single national approach to managing the pandemic and a disregard for the role of local authorities seriously impaired the ability of local agencies to respond in a flexible, timely and pragmatic way to the rapidly emerging situation. Future planning for pandemics must recognise that global epidemics are curbed at the local level, and ensure that any response is proportionate, flexible and effective.
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This article explores how the 2009 pandemic of swine flu (H1N1) intersected with issues of biosecurity in the context of an increasing entanglement between the spread of disease and the spread of information. Drawing on research into metacommunication, the article studies the rise of communication about ways in which swine flu was communicated, both globally and locally, during the pandemic. ⋯ Findings show that the interaction between traditional and digital media as well as the interaction between warnings about swine flu and previous warnings about other epidemics contributed to a heightened discourse of blame and counter-blame but also, more surprisingly, self-blame and reflections about the role the media in pandemic communication. The consequences of this increase in metacommunication for research into crisis communication are explored.