The potential importance of the built-environment microbiome and its impact on human health.

There is increasing evidence that interactions between microbes and their hosts not only play a role in determining health and disease but also in emotions, thought, and behavior. Built environments greatly influence microbiome exposures because of their built-in highly specific microbiomes coproduced with myriad metaorganisms including humans, pets, plants, rodents, and insects. Seemingly static built structures host complex ecologies of microorganisms that are only starting to be mapped. These microbial ecologies of built environments are directly and interdependently affected by social, spatial, and technological norms. Advances in technology have made these organisms visible and forced the scientific community and architects to rethink gene-environment and microbe interactions respectively. Thus, built environment design must consider the microbiome, and research involving host-microbiome interaction must consider the built-environment. This paradigm shift becomes increasingly important as evidence grows that contemporary built environments are steadily reducing the microbial diversity essential for human health, well-being, and resilience while accelerating the symptoms of human chronic diseases including environmental allergies, and other more life-altering diseases. New models of design are required to balance maximizing exposure to microbial diversity while minimizing exposure to human-associated diseases. Sustained trans-disciplinary research across time (evolutionary, historical, and generational) and space (cultural and geographical) is needed to develop experimental design protocols that address multigenerational multispecies health and health equity in built environments.

The government of masks in sentinel territories against Covid-19: Dakar and Seine-Saint-Denis.

The pandemic of Covid-19 has led to reluctance or resistance to wear a mask in countries that made it compulsory. The acceptance to wear a mask against respiratory diseases depends on conceptions of scientific authority and of the personality in the public space. It has material and symbolic dimensions that can be covered under the term "government of masks". We have questioned populations on these two aspects in territories we call sentinel because they are more exposed than others to emerging infectious diseases: Dakar (Senegal) and Seine-Saint-Denis (France). In France, school students have asked 250 people in public places on their perception of masks following a questionnaire, while in Senegal a team of master students went in 606 people's houses to ask questions following the same questionnaire. Despite these methodological differences, our results show that the perception of the State in these territories influences the uses of masks against Covid-19 at symbolic and material levels. While in Seine-Saint-Denis, the State provides more masks than in Dakar, the trust in the efficacy of mask wearing is lower. From a symbolic point of view, the mask is for many people an intrusion of the State into the private sphere, which hinders physical contact between family members. On the contrary, from the material point of view, the mask is a need that manifests the presence of the welfare State to watch over the health of the population. This comparative study suggests that a State that is at the same time coercive and protective produces a lower level of adherence to mask-wearing recommendations than a State where religious authorities are included in the prescription and where individuals contribute to making masks.

Introduction: Disease Reservoirs: From Colonial Medicine to One Health.

The introduction of the special issue "Disease Reservoirs: Anthropological and Historical Approaches" sets out the origins and trajectories of disease reservoir frameworks. First, it charts the emergence and elaborations of the reservoirs concept within and across early 20th-century colonial contexts, emphasising its configuration within imperial projects that sought to identify, map and control spaces of contagion among humans, animals, and pathogens. Following this, it traces the position the reservoir framework assumed within post-colonial practices and imaginaries of global health, with particular reference to the emerging infectious disease paradigm. The introduction shows that, in contemporary usages, while the concept continues to frame animals, humans and their bodies as containers of previously identified pathogens, it also emphasises the imperative of anticipating as-of-yet unknown diseases, harboured in the bodies of certain animals, through networks and techniques of surveillance. Consequently, the introduction argues that the notion of disease reservoirs remains intimately intertwined with concerns over the classification, organization, and management of peoples, pathogens, animals, and space. Finally, the introduction outlines the seven papers that form this special issue, stressing how they dialogue, complement, and challenge previous historical and anthropological approaches to disease reservoirs, with an eye to opening up new avenues for cross-disciplinary exploration.

Veterinary anthropology: Samples from an emerging field.

We contribute to the growing field of veterinary humanities by promoting collaboration between veterinarians and anthropologists. Veterinary anthropology as we propose it analyzes the role of animal diseases in social life while questioning notions of animal health and human health. We distinguish three ways for veterinarians to collaborate with anthropologists, which more or less follow a chronological order. One form of collaboration requires anthropologists to bring risk perception or local knowledge on zoonoses identified by veterinarians. A more recent form of collaboration integrates veterinarians and anthropologists around the view of animals as actors in infrastructures of security. Finally, we suggest that, as veterinary expertise and its roles in contemporary societies is becoming an object of anthropological enquiry, a new space for collaboration is unfolding that enables veterinarians to see themselves through that reflexive lens of anthropological attention. Veterinary anthropology can therefore be defined as an anthropology of veterinarians and with veterinarians.

Social representations of animal diseases: anthropological approaches to pathogens crossing species barriers.

Debates about emerging infectious diseases often oppose natural conceptions of zoonotic reservoirs with cultural practices bringing humans into contact with animals. This article compares the representations of cross-species pathogens at ontological levels below the opposition between nature and culture. It describes the perceptions of distinctions between interiority and physicality, between wild and domestic, and between sick and dead in three different contexts where human societies manage animal diseases: Australia, Laos and Mongolia. Our article also argues that zoonotic pathogens are one of the entities mobilized by local knowledge to attenuate troubles in ordinary relations with animals, and shows that the conservation of cultural heritage is a tool of mitigation for infectious diseases emerging in animal reservoirs.

TITLE: Représentations sociales des maladies animales : approches anthropologiques des pathogènes franchissant les barrières d'espèces. ABSTRACT: Les discussions sur les maladies infectieuses émergentes opposent souvent les conceptions naturelles des réservoirs de zoonoses et les pratiques culturelles qui rapprochent les humains des animaux. Cet article compare les représentations des pathogènes qui franchissent les barrières d'espèces à des niveaux ontologiques sous-jacents à l'opposition entre nature et culture. Il décrit les perceptions des distinctions entre intériorité et extériorité, entre sauvage et domestique, entre maladie et mort dans trois contextes où les sociétés humaines gèrent des maladies animales : l'Australie, le Laos et la Mongolie. Il montre également que les pathogènes zoonotiques apparaissent au milieu d'autres entités pour atténuer des troubles dans leurs relations ordinaires avec les animaux, et souligne que la conservation du patrimoine culturel peut être un outil de contrôle des maladies infectieuses qui émergent dans les réservoirs animaux.

The hygiene hypothesis, the COVID pandemic, and consequences for the human microbiome.

The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to affect the human microbiome in infected and uninfected individuals, having a substantial impact on human health over the long term. This pandemic intersects with a decades-long decline in microbial diversity and ancestral microbes due to hygiene, antibiotics, and urban living (the hygiene hypothesis). High-risk groups succumbing to COVID-19 include those with preexisting conditions, such as diabetes and obesity, which are also associated with microbiome abnormalities. Current pandemic control measures and practices will have broad, uneven, and potentially long-term effects for the human microbiome across the planet, given the implementation of physical separation, extensive hygiene, travel barriers, and other measures that influence overall microbial loss and inability for reinoculation. Although much remains uncertain or unknown about the virus and its consequences, implementing pandemic control practices could significantly affect the microbiome. In this Perspective, we explore many facets of COVID-19-induced societal changes and their possible effects on the microbiome, and discuss current and future challenges regarding the interplay between this pandemic and the microbiome. Recent recognition of the microbiome's influence on human health makes it critical to consider both how the microbiome, shaped by biosocial processes, affects susceptibility to the coronavirus and, conversely, how COVID-19 disease and prevention measures may affect the microbiome. This knowledge may prove key in prevention and treatment, and long-term biological and social outcomes of this pandemic.

A Genealogy of Animal Diseases and Social Anthropology (1870-2000).

Culling, vaccinating, and monitoring animals are the three main techniques used in contemporary veterinary public health to manage animal diseases that can be transmitted to humans. Each technique is underpinned by different ontological understandings of how microbes figure in relations between humans and animals. Therefore, animal diseases are not only a question for an applied anthropology but also involve the theoretical core of the discipline: that is, understanding how social causality emerges out of physical causality. To defend this argument, the article describes what Herbert Spencer wrote about foot-and-mouth disease; what William Robertson Smith thought about sacrifice in the context of bovine tuberculosis; how Emile Durkheim took vaccination for smallpox as a metaphor for the pathologies of the social; and what Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote about mad cow disease. The conceptions of the social in the writing of these four authors are analyzed through their understanding of the risk of transmission of animal diseases to humans, moving from prevention to precaution to preparedness.

Avian preparedness: simulations of bird diseases and reverse scenarios of extinction in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.

This article describes relations between humans, animals, artefacts, and pathogens in simulations of disasters, taking bird diseases in three Chinese sentinel posts as ethnographic cases. Drawing on distinctions between simulation, ritual, and play, it shows that the engagement of actors in the imaginary of simulations, which they describe as 'realism', reflectively reverses the oppositions between humans and nonhumans, active and passive, fiction and reality that shape ordinary life. Borrowing from the anthropology of hunting societies, it argues that simulations of bird diseases, considered as signs of future species extinction, rely on cynegetic techniques of power, in which humans and animals symmetrically shift perspectives, and not only on pastoralist techniques, in which humans are above the population they monitor and sometimes sacrifice.

SE PRÉPARER AUX CATASTROPHES AVEC LES OISEAUX SIMULATIONS DE MALADIES AVIAIRES ET SCÉNARIOS INVERSES D'EXTINCTION À HONG KONG TAIWAN ET SINGAPOUR: Résumé: Cet article décrit les relations entre humains, animaux, artefacts et pathogènes dans les simulations de désastres, en considérant les maladies qui affectent les oiseaux dans trois territoires sentinelles aux frontières de la Chine comme des cas ethnographiques. En s'appuyant sur les distinctions entre la simulation, le ritual et le jeu, il montre que l'engagement des acteurs dans l'imaginaire des simulations, qu'ils décrivent sous le terme de « réalisme ¼, renverse réflexivement les oppositions entre les humains and les non­humains, l'actif et le passif, la fiction et la réalité qui organisent la vie quotidienne. En empruntant les concepts de l'anthropologie des sociétés de chasseurs, il montre que les simulations de maladies aviaires, lorsqu'elles sont perçues comme des signes d'une potentielle extinction d'espèce, recourent à des techniques de pouvoir cynégétiques, dans lesquelles des humains et des animaux échangent symétriquement leurs perspectives, et pas seulement à des techniques pastoralistes, dans lesquelles les humains sont au­dessus de la population qu'ils surveillent et parfois sacrifient.

Feeding sentinels: Logics of care and biosecurity in farms and labs.

This article compares the treatment of living beings (unvaccinated chickens and infected cells) considered as sentinel devices in a farm and in a lab in Hong Kong. Sentinel devices are defined as living beings posted on a boundary from which they send signals of invisible threats. The ethnography looks at how they transform differences between ordinary lives and lives exposed, between good death and bad death, through the practices of those who feed them. In farms and labs exposed to Avian Influenza viruses, the logic of biosecurity intersects with a logic of care, blurring the distinction between self and other, friend and enemy through aesthetic judgments concerning what is a 'good death'. Metabolism and immunity are redefined when sentinels are fed to produce clear signals of the mutations of viruses.

[Food safety and animal diseases. The French Food Safety Agency, from mad cow disease to bird flu]. / Risques alimentaires et maladies animales : l'Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments, de la vache folle à la grippe aviaire.

Why has the French food safety agency been particularly mobilized on zoonoses like bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow disease") or highly pathogenic avian influenza ("bird flu") ? Because sanitary crisis make explicit an ambivalent relationship between humans and animals (animals being perceived alternatively as providers of goods and as bearers of threats), and to the circulation of life in general (the contaminated blood crises being due to the rapprochement of blood giving and blood receiving). The sociology of risks needs therefore to reintegrate the idea of an intention of the risk bearer (risk with enemy), and the sociology of alimentation needs to reintegrate the analysis of the conditions of production. Mad cow disease is the paradigmatic food safety crisis because it brings together the poles of production and consumption, of animals and humans. It therefore belongs to anthropology.