How Did Infectious Diseases Become Wild?: Plague, Yellow Fever, and Disease Ecology in the Brazilian Hinterland (1920-1975)

The project aims to understand how infectious diseases became wild. It will focus on Brazil, a country that was pitted against an unprecedented sanitary phenomenon between 1920 and 1975: the wild diseases. Plague and yellow fever, two urban diseases, progressively advanced towards the Brazilian hinterland, where they infected rural populations and wild animals, such as rodents, marsupials, and primates. The history of diseases moving from cities to wild spaces complexifies current mainstream interpretations about emerging infectious diseases. Exploring this difference, the project asks: which knowledge about wild diseases emerged in Brazil? How did Brazilian health authorities control wild diseases? What were the social and environmental consequences of anti-wild disease measures in Brazil? In reconstructing the epistemological, political, social, and environmental dimensions of wild diseases in Brazil, the project will advance empirical knowledge on the history of disease ecology from a Global South perspective. Conceptually, the project will construct the idea of ‘wild disease knowledge’ to describe both the medicalisation of wild spaces and how the study of diseases in wild spaces transformed medical theory and practice. By achieving these empirical and conceptual aims, the project will be relevant for social scientists, medical and public health experts.