Development Studies Program, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines.
Department of Anthropology, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines.
Glob Public Health. 2022 Aug-Sep;17(9):1795-1808. doi: 10.1080/17441692.2021.1965181. Epub 2021 Aug 10.
With millions of cases and thousands of deaths every year in Asia and Latin America, dengue fever continues to be of global public health significance. This article uses the concept of 'medical populism' to analyse the political construction of the 2019 dengue epidemics in Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Honduras. Through this framework, we examine the narratives of these outbreaks by reconstructing how political actors simplified the discourse, spectacularised the crises, offered multiple knowledge claims, and forged divisions between the people and 'dangerous others'. Taken together, our case studies, obtained through government, journalistic, and scholarly sources, illuminate the role of medical populists (who are almost always politicians) in defining and responding to public health emergencies, underscoring the performative dimension of disease outbreaks. By detracting attention from less spectacular but more substantive policies and programs, these 'performances' of health crises perpetuate health inequities, especially in fragile democracies like the aforementioned Global South countries. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of medical populism to public health, health communications, and the inevitable recurrence of epidemics.
在亚洲和拉丁美洲，每年有数百万人感染登革热，数千人因此死亡，因此，登革热仍然对全球公共卫生具有重要意义。本文使用“医学民粹主义”的概念来分析孟加拉国、菲律宾和洪都拉斯 2019 年登革热疫情的政治构建。通过这个框架，我们通过重建政治行为者如何简化话语、夸大危机、提供多种知识主张以及在人民和“危险的他人”之间制造分歧，来分析这些疫情的叙述。总的来说，我们的案例研究来自政府、新闻和学术来源，阐明了医学民粹主义者（几乎总是政客）在定义和应对公共卫生紧急情况中的作用，强调了疾病爆发的表现维度。通过将注意力从不太引人注目但更实质性的政策和计划上转移开，这些健康危机的“表现”使健康不平等现象持续存在，特别是在上述脆弱的民主国家等全球南方国家。最后，我们反思了医学民粹主义对公共卫生、卫生传播以及流行病不可避免的复发的影响。
