Imagining Health Disasters (2013)

“Zylberman examines how the concept of health security has developed over the last thirty years, focusing nowadays on global pandemics and the threat of bioterrorism... https://booksandideas.net/Imagining-Health-Disasters.html

...Such threats, which transcend national borders, require new surveillance systems to be put in place and call into question the very nature of state sovereignty.”

“What was before a question of recording the number of cases within a certain territory in order to map the risk faced by a population now involves anticipating potential future health emergencies by tracking microbes across the entire planet...

“Zylberman’s historical study follows how the ideas and techniques which led to this transformation have developed over time.”

“His study questions the concept of public health security, one which has featured on the French political scene since the creation of health security agencies at the end of the 1990s.“

“The aim at that time was to protect the public from various health risks associated with medicines, food products and the environment.“

“However, the ongoing implementation of this specifically French model for intervention, based on the precautionary principle, should not blind us to how strange the union between health and security really is, or to the very many ways in which it might manifest itself.”

“The use of terms such as “health security”, “human security” or “biosecurity” implies that nation states no longer hold exclusive authority over the implementation of security measures in the face of these new threats.“

“And yet, far from weakening the state, this new definition of security allows it to intervene wherever any biological threat might exist. The history of health security is thus a global one, based heavily on this new understanding of state authority.”

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Further commentary on Zylberman by Giorgio Agamben: