was with great delight that I accepted the invitation by the University of Cambridge’s Centre Mouse monoclonal to IgM Isotype Control.This can be used as a mouse IgM isotype control in flow cytometry and other applications. for Research in the Social Sciences Arts and Humanities (CRASSH) to participate and contribute in a thematic analysis of events and epidemic crises and exploring the dialectics of events and process. interpersonal perceptions of epidemic outbreaks in the process of preventing and made up of them. In this paper I will attempt to describe the relevance and the realities of anthropological critique of epidemiology using three of the papers presented at the “Dialectics of Events and Crisis ” conference Lynteris’ ‘Epidemics as Events and as Crises’; Caduff’s ‘Data-mining Crowd-sourcing and White Noise’ and Meinert and Whyte’s examination of the ‘Projectification of the AIDS Epidemic in Uganda’. I will draw from my own experiences in Haiti first arriving in Haiti in April 2010 to IC-87114 IC-87114 coordinate the CDC’s public health response to the devastating January 12 2010 earthquake then months later at the heels of an outbreak of cholera to lead a team supporting establishment of cholera surveillance and coordinating the outbreak response. The destruction from the magnitude-7.0 earthquake was massive; Haitian government officials estimated that 230 0 persons died 300 0 were injured and more than 2 million were internally displaced. Precariously poor even prior to 2010 Haiti’s public health infrastructure was all but decimated. Not ten months later the inadvertent introduction of toxigenic into Haiti in October 2010 resulted in the world’s largest national cholera epidemic in recent memory (Ryan 2011) at a time when Haiti had no system capable of providing timely surveillance on a wide range of health conditions. IC-87114 (CDC 2010). One upside was that these events brought resources IC-87114 and the opportunity was seized. As Dowell explains in a Perspective that he wrote at the one-year anniversary of the earthquake while the cholera outbreak was ongoing (Dowell 2011). In his paper ‘Epidemics as Events and as Crises’ Lynteris not only draws out several important notions about the distinction of epidemics as events and epidemics as crises but also offers a historical framework for the evolution of the notion of public health IC-87114 as a responsibility of a state and how the plague epidemics in Manchuria (examined first as Examined from different angles scholars converge on the fact that this 1910-11 Manchurian plague epidemic markedly influenced the formation of the Chinese state and public health’s responsibility to respond to and control the epidemic effectively bringing into focus “the nature of quarantine enforcement during the outbreak” (Cheng 2010) and as a “defining moment in the ushering in of modern medicine and public health in China.” (Summers 2012). Are then epidemics to be considered advantageous or detrimental to [public health] progress? In other words are outbreaks simply a necessary milestone in a guided evolutionary process? The first Manchurian plague epidemic was an event in so far as it generated a radical rupture ushering China into the global age of biopolitics” posits Lynteris. Is it then an “event” such as an epidemic that validates or invalidates the state’s preparedness capacity and ability to respond by putting the state’s responsibility for public health to the test? In invoking Foucault’s analysis of Hippocratic medicine to underline the homonymy between and (anc. Greek for ‘judgement’) as an intrinsic feature of the disease process Lynteris focuses on the temporality of the revelation of a disease/crisis as inherently and fundamentally tied to the susceptibility and vulnerability of a populace or environment to the disease in question. The probability of the exact conditions being satisfied for an infectious vector underlying a potential outbreak to evolve into a crisis embodies both the of putting the preparedness conditions to test and the (anc. Greek for ‘crucial moment’) of the susceptibility and vulnerability both being present. The 2010 Haiti cholera outbreak was undeniably a “crisis” in the conventional sense of the term accounting for 57% of all cholera cases and 45% of all deaths from cholera reported to the WHO IC-87114 in 2010 2010 and 2011 (Barzilay 2013). Considered from the perspective of Foucault’s analysis of the interrelation between and resonated with me: what is justified. Technological mediations often in the form of crowd sourcing and data mining have had a pronounced effect on the information around epidemic events.