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Rhodes John , The End of Plagues: The Global Battle Against Infectious Disease (New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan , 2013), pp. xxii, 235, $27.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-137-27852-4.
Book Review
Ideologically, infectious diseases are a threat to neoliberalist ideals of individualism because the risk of infection reveals that the boundaries of the self are permeable and that we are inescapably interconnected. Mandatory vaccination rubs up against an individual's right to make his or her own medical decisions. Recently in the media, deaths that could have been prevented through vaccination have reached headlines worldwide, with contemporary dissent for vaccines under intense scrutiny. The End of Plagues by John Rhodes is a timely publication that shows that misinformed dissent for vaccines has existed ever since the very first vaccine was administered in 1796.
While issues of personal liberty are at the forefront of debates about vaccination in developed countries, such issues are eclipsed in developing countries by more prominent discussions about access to resources. In settings where infectious diseases are endemic, Rhodes builds a favourable argument for vaccination, framed primarily by biological risk-benefit analyses. The dominance of the biomedical discourse naturalises the endemicity of infectious disease without adequate emphasis on how endemics are socially, economically and politically produced. In this regard, The End of Plagues is not paradigm changing. Rhodes perpetuates a biologically reductive narrative that draws upon extensive training and experience in immunology and vaccine discovery. Facts and figures abstract disease and objectify the patients. That said, what Rhodes does, he does well. The book, from a strictly biomedical perspective, offers a great picture of how vaccines were constructed, how quality control measures came to be regulated and how effective vaccine delivery programs have been developed.
Commendably, Rhodes describes the social and economic crises that can negatively impact upon disease control programs in countries like India,...