Website
Aktuelles

Events

Which Contagion is a 21st Century Threat?

Symposium and evening presentation on 28 March – on social and bio-political dimensions of epidemics

The theme “Attention: Contagious Disease!” – is from a science symposium and an open evening presentation organised for 28 March 2019 by the European Hanseatic Museum, Science Academy Hamburg, Willy Brandt House Lübeck and the Lübeck Centre for Cultural Studies & Research.

The Spanish flu has killed more people than the two world wars combined: more than a 100 million died globally from this virus between 1918 & 1920, while a third of the world’s population was afflicted. This centennial is the right time for a discourse on social and bio-political dimensions of historic and current epidemics. The two sections are named “Pest & Cholera – Epidemics in our Cultural Memory and as Sites of Prior Bio-Politics” and “Threat & Fear – On the Virality of a Contagion Discourse.”

Which Contagion is a 21st Century Threat?

Climate change and population growth, changing animal husbandry and land use, as well as the resistance of pathogens are the reasons why infectious diseases spread rapidly. Although medicine has made great strides in combating infectious diseases, they still threaten human lives. To identify future outbreaks of infections early, it is not enough to simply improve medical treatments around the world. It is imperative to concentrate on inter- and transdisciplinary research, since the lack of social science expertise would simply let many biomedical innovations fizzle away.

Lothar H. Wieler, slated to give the evening presentation, is the President of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, the federal government’s advisory institution for science and biomedicine in the field of public health. Wieler is a veterinary specialist for microbiology, having previously served as the Managing Director, Institute for Microbiology and Animal Epidemics at the Free University of Berlin.

back to