Biosecurity Dilemmas: Dreaded Diseases, Ethical Responses, and the Health of Nations by Christian Enemark

Author:Christian Enemark [Enemark, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Medical, Science, Ethics, Political Science, Security (National & International), General
ISBN: 9781626164055
Google: JiEQDgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 33255015
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Published: 2017-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Social Distancing as a Biosecurity Practice

In the absence of vaccines or therapeutic drugs, when confronting the spread of a dreaded disease the decision may be made to prevent or slow contagion by distancing people from each other. In this chapter, the discussion of social distancing as a biosecurity practice focuses on isolation and quarantine. Both of these centuries-old disease-control measures are conducive to being motivated by security concerns, and both infringe (for better or for worse) on individuals’ freedom of movement. Isolation involves separating people known to be infected with a contagious disease from healthy people; quarantine involves restricting the movement of healthy people who (might) have been exposed to a contagious disease. In both cases the duration of a person’s experience of social distancing should be commensurate only with the period during which transmission of the relevant microorganism to another person is possible.

Until 2003 it had been many decades since the use of isolation and quarantine had occurred regularly or on a large scale anywhere in the world. Thus, when these measures were implemented in response to SARS (a disease then unknown to medical science), the measures were unfamiliar and at times alarming to local populations. In China, for example, the SARS outbreak and the government’s response to it were associated with widespread civil unrest and subsequent damage to property. Communities set up blockades to deter outsiders from entering certain areas out of fear that they carried the disease, and on several occasions mobs attacked and burned quarantine centers that local authorities had established in their villages.33 This experience of confronting a deadly contagion, though unfamiliar in the early twenty-first century, is nevertheless directly comparable to historical circumstances in which only nonpharmaceutical measures were available to control a disease. Moreover, the reaction to SARS is a warning of the need to ensure disease-control efforts are not stymied by panic. This is important from a security perspective because, as Buzan and his coauthors have argued, security politics sometimes manifests as “panic politics.”34 Dreaded diseases are more likely to be framed and addressed in security terms, and the ethical concern that arises then is that emergency disease-control measures should not be ineffective, counterproductive, or unjust (negative securitization).

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