Enticott Gareth, Maye Damian
School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom.
Countryside and Community Research Institute, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, United Kingdom.
Front Vet Sci. 2020 Aug 28;7:577. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2020.00577. eCollection 2020.
Whatever we read about Covid-19, the word unprecedented is not far away: whether in describing policy choices, the daily death tolls, the scale of upheaval, or the challenges that await a readjusting world. This paper takes an alternative view: if not unpredictable, the crisis unfolding in the United Kingdom (UK) is not unprecedented. Rather, it is foretold in accounts of successive animal health crises. Social studies of biosecurity and animal disease management provide an "anticipatory logic" - a mirror to the unfolding human catastrophe of Covid-19, providing few surprises. And yet, these accounts appear to be routinely ignored in the narrative of Covid-19. Do social studies of animal disease really have no value when it comes to guiding and assessing responses to Covid-19? To answer this question, we describe the narrative arc of the UK's approach to managing Covid-19. We then overlay findings from social studies of animal disease to reveal the warnings they provided for a pandemic like Covid-19. We conclude by reflecting on the reasons why these studies have been paid minimal attention and the extent to which the failure to learn from these lessons of animal health management signals a failure of the One Health agenda.
无论我们读到关于新冠疫情的什么内容，“史无前例”这个词总是近在咫尺：无论是描述政策选择、每日死亡人数、动荡规模，还是等待着一个正在重新调整的世界的挑战。本文提出另一种观点：如果说英国正在发生的这场危机并非不可预测，那它也并非史无前例。相反，它在一系列动物健康危机的描述中早有预兆。生物安全和动物疾病管理的社会研究提供了一种“预期逻辑”——一面映照新冠疫情这场正在上演的人类灾难的镜子，没有什么令人惊讶之处。然而，在新冠疫情的叙述中，这些描述似乎经常被忽视。在指导和评估对新冠疫情的应对措施方面，动物疾病的社会研究真的毫无价值吗？为了回答这个问题，我们描述了英国应对新冠疫情的过程。然后，我们叠加动物疾病社会研究的结果，以揭示它们对像新冠疫情这样的大流行病所发出的警告。我们最后反思了这些研究为何很少受到关注，以及未能从这些动物健康管理的教训中吸取经验在多大程度上表明了“同一个健康”议程的失败。
