Epidemic traces. Remains of infectious disease control in Africa, and how they shape future health.

Epidemics such as Covid-19 are experienced as events, which suddenly come and disappear again. But epidemics - and measures against them - leave permanent traces. For example, we live with cemeteries, hygiene rules and water supplies, which came about during the 19th century cholera epidemics; tropical diseases were fought after the war with persistent landscape changes and with insecticides, which are still found in soil, water and bodies; the large global vaccination campaigns against childhood diseases in the 70s built new routines and technologies; 2000s HIV programs created new hospitals and collective activist groups, which continued after the AIDS epidemic; and Covid-19 will leave, among other things, new digital control technologies and legislation. These tracks have effects, long after they were created. Infrastructure or medicine against a disease can be reused against new health problems; but epidemic traces can also create new diseases, if e.g. medicines lose their effectiveness or increase susceptibility to new diseases, when insecticides cause cancer, or when bad experiences with disease control leave persistent distrust of health institutions. In other words, epidemics overlap and interact over time, through their persistent tracks. EpiTraces combines social anthropology - which studies human life, relationships and institutions in the present - and medical history - which uses archives and oral testimony - to pursue how the traces of epidemics and disease control in Africa throughout the 20th century affect disease and health today and in the future. We will follow the tracks of exemplary epidemics such as sleeping sickness, malaria and river blindness, HIV, Ebola and Covid, in the present, and their diverse social, medical, political-economic and ecological effects. With this, the project contributes to a more nuanced picture of ongoing epidemics, such as Covid-19, cancer or diabetes, which will also benefit preventive strategies against them.