Center, Internet, Wildlife Damage Management
Human–Wildlife Interactions
Review: Arresting Contagion: Science, Policy, and Conflicts over Animal Disease Control
Date of this Version
Fall 2015
Document Type
Article
Citation
Human–Wildlife Interactions (Fall 2015) 9(2): article 18
doi: 10.26077/8ryv-6k13
Special topic: Connections between IPM and WDM
Abstract
An enduring struggle has long ensued among science, public policy, and animal diseases in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American agriculture included a cultivation process that placed humans into new, simplified relationships with animals, insects, and the land. Disease often became a hidden, but powerful, member of this production ecosystem. Extension science, technological advancements, domestication of animals, and harnessing natural resources all made farms very busy, but vulnerable, places. Although many historians, biologists, pathologists, toxicologists, and agriculturalists have studied the environmental, scientific, economic, and cultural realms of agricultural disease, few have combined these fields in an effort to look beyond professional boundaries to how science, politics, policy, and production intersect.
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Arresting Contagion makes clear that diseases David D. Vail is an assistant professor in the Richard L. D. and Marjorie J. Morse Department of Special Collections, and serves as public services archivist at the Kansas State University. His specialties include environmental history, agricultural history, history of science and technology, and public history. He also holds an ancillary position with Kansas State Univeristy’s Geography Department and is a member of the Kansas Humanities Council Board of Directors. in humans have an applicable environmental, agricultural, and political history. Olmstead and Rhode offer a sound investigative model that merges historical sources, scientific studies, economic data, and public health policies that can assist current human–wildlife damage management efforts.