First World Health Assembly, Geneva, 1948. Members of the Chinese Delegation.

First World Health Assembly, Geneva, 1948. Members of the Chinese delegation. Source: WHO Library, Geneva.

Project (2021-2023)

Twentieth-Century Health Diplomacy and Antimicrobial Resistance

This historical project aims to investigate the global health emergency of antimicrobial resistance within the diplomatic and political activities of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the World Health Organization (WHO). The project’s central hypothesis suggests that major global sanitary emergencies such as epidemics, endemics, and pandemics are the effect of both disrupted environmental equilibria and increasing diplomatic tensions as well as the resulting lack of international sanitary coordination. The project is framed within the global coordinating sanitary activities of the WHO, and the food production activities of the FAO, which are used both to control the manufacturing and use of antibiotics as well as the epidemiological surveillance of antibiotic resistance. These activities represent a sensitive matter for both economic development and the national security of members states of UN agencies.

This project is hosted by the Lise Meitner Research Group to further and refine arguments related to the changing geopolitical role of Chinese scientific and technological development.

First World Health Assembly, Geneva, 1948. Members of the Chinese Delegation.

First World Health Assembly, Geneva, 1948. Members of the Chinese delegation. Source: WHO Library, Geneva.

Publications

D’Abramo, Flavio (2022). “Antibiotic Resistance, Planetary Health and Themimetic Trap: A Historical Account of Present-day Sanitary, Environmental and Social Crises.” Postcolonial Studies 25 (3): 321–339. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2021.1963093.

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D’Abramo, Flavio (2021). “The Past and Present of Pandemic Management: Health Diplomacy, International Epidemiological Surveillance, and Covid-19.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2, Article 64). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00416-4.

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D’Abramo, Flavio, Annemieke Bont, and Lisa Nüßlein (2022). “Biomolecular Prospecting, Informative Gaps, and the Cancer Clinic: A Qualitative Fieldwork and an Epistemological, Historical and Ethical Analysis of Informed Consent for Clinical Trials for Monoclonal Antibodies and Biobank Research.” Frontiers in Genetics 13 (Article 872211). https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.872211.

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D’Abramo, Flavio, Giuli Gandolfi, Gerardo Ienna, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, and Charles Wolfe (2021). “Political Epistemology of Pandemic Management.” Mefisto. Rivista di medicina, filosofia, storia 5 (1): 121–145.

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