Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, United Kingdom.
Soc Sci Med. 2012 Jan;74(2):220-7. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.10.011. Epub 2011 Nov 18.
The liberalisation of the European aviation sector has multiplied paths of entry into the United Kingdom (UK) for the international traveller. These changing mobilities necessitate a reconceptualisation of the border as a series of potentially vulnerable nodes occurring within, and extending beyond, national boundaries. In this paper, we consider the border through the lens of port health, the collective term for various sanitary operations enacted at international transport terminals. In the UK, a critical player in the oversight of port health is the Health Protection Agency (HPA), which became a non-Departmental public body in 2005. A major part of port health is preparedness, a set of techniques aimed at managing, and responding to, emergencies of public health concern. More recently, certain jurisdictions have embarked on public health preparedness work across a number of different geographical scales. Using methods pioneered by the military, this form of 'distributed preparedness' is of increased interest to social science and medical scholars. With reference to case studies conducted in localities surrounding two UK regional airports following the 2009-10 H1N1 influenza pandemic, we consider the extent to which distributed preparedness as a concept and a set of practices can inform current debates - in the UK, and beyond - concerning interventions at the border 'within'.
欧洲航空领域的自由化使得国际旅行者进入英国（UK）的路径呈多元化发展。这些不断变化的流动态势需要重新将边界概念化为一系列潜在的脆弱节点，这些节点存在于、并延伸至国界之外。在本文中，我们通过港口卫生的视角来审视边界，港口卫生是在国际运输站实施的各种卫生行动的统称。在英国，港口卫生监督的一个关键角色是健康保护署（HPA），它于 2005 年成为一个非部门公共机构。港口卫生的一个重要部分是备灾，这是一套旨在管理和应对公共卫生紧急情况的技术。最近，某些司法管辖区已开始在多个不同的地理尺度上开展公共卫生备灾工作。这种形式的“分布式备灾”借鉴了军方的方法，引起了社会科学和医学学者的浓厚兴趣。参考了 2009-10 年 H1N1 流感大流行后在两个英国区域机场周边地区进行的案例研究，我们考虑了分布式备灾作为一种概念和一套实践，在多大程度上可以为目前在边界“内部”进行的干预措施提供信息——无论是在英国还是其他国家。
