ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how social and biological processes have come to function as mirror images of each other, the one borrowing from the discursive repertoire of the other. A businesswoman returns to Minnesota from a trip to southern China suffering from a cold-like illness. Pandemic narratives, such as Contagion, encapsulate a deep-seated anxiety about the inherent ambiguity of communication summarized in the word ‘contagion’ that simultaneously denotes a disease object and the process of its diffusion. The Global Viral Forecasting Initiative was set up by the US virologist Nathan Wolfe in 2008 as a non-profit organization to develop an early-warning system for pandemics by monitoring viral activity in sentinel sites where highly pathogenic viruses, such as the human immunodeficiency virus and Ebola, had spilled over from their natural reservoirs into human populations. Environmental transformations, changing human demographics, and intensifying patterns of global trade are producing new stress points, opening up the space for ‘viral traffic’.
