Anmerkungen:
Also issued in print: 2023. - Includes bibliographical references and index. - Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on March 28, 2023)
Beschreibung:
Constance A. Nathanson and Henri Bergeron focus on the profoundly troubling story of how blood banks and blood products manufacturers and distributors, as well as the authorities charged with regulating them in France and the US, knowingly allowed blood contaminated with HIV to be distributed to hemophiliacs and others needing transfusions in the early to mid-1980s. Based on detailed, lively, and exciting comparative analysis, the book explains why this drama became a political crisis in France and not in the United States. The authors use this comparison to advance more general ideas of how political crises are socially produced and to raise questions about disease policy and politics in the two countries.
"When does epidemic disease disrupt society to the point where it becomes a political crisis? In the early 1980s, almost unnoticed in the larger drama that was AIDS, over half of hemophiliacs and a larger number but smaller percentage of blood transfusion recipients were infected with toxic blood-blood that was contaminated with HIV. The French public's "discovery" of this catastrophe in the early 1990s created a transformative political crisis; this same discovery in the United States went largely unnoticed. This book presents a detailed case comparative analysis not only of the catastrophe itself and its multiple retrospective interpretations but also of its intimate connection to the history and organization of blood as a consumer product in each country. It answers the question of how and why disease morphed into crisis in France and not in the United States and draws on that answer to develop a more general sociological theory of the social production of political crisis. In so doing, it raises questions about the curious immunity to human suffering as a policy engine in the United States, about the often reiterated weakness of civil society in France, and about theorizing alternative epidemic trajectories"--