With the debate on health care in full heat, Columbia alumnus Philip Alcabes proposed a fundamental reevaluation of our reactions to disease in general.  His presentation of our anxiety may prove constructive in our attempt to resolve today’s pressing medical concerns.

All thoughts of a heat wave seemed to have evaporated as a crowd settled in for wine and a reading at the soothingly-lit Half King, its walls covered in a fresh photo exhibit.  Trained epidemiologist and author of Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu, Philip Alcabes offered excerpts and a dynamic discussion on the evening of August 17^th.

“To encourage a kind of critical skepticism” was a goal of the book Philip Alcabes mentioned in an interview before the reading.  He said he would like to see people “think about epidemics and what claims are made about epidemic threats.”  His archival research and previous work on AIDS came together in Dread, which traces the history of epidemics and their reception in societies.

Alcabes began the reading with a timely evocation of swine flu and drew a parallel between its reception with that of cholera in the nineteenth century and of AIDS in the twentieth.  Even as they ate dinner, listeners encouraged the writer to expound on the unsanitary living conditions prevalent during cholera’s march across the globe.  This factual depiction of the spread of disease provides a marked contrast with its politicized presentation in both England and the United States, as demonstrated in the chapter on cholera in the book, published by PublicAffairs this April.

Alcabes read pages on the reception of AIDS, from details on the Center for Disease Control’s report that “AIDS could be read in terms of risk groups [that] included: ‘Homosexual or bisexual males – 75%, intravenous drug abusers with no history of homosexual activity – 13%, Haitians with neither a history of homosexuality or intravenous drug abuse – 6%,” to an account of attempts to close baths and gay bookstores to contain the disease.   The targeted information publicized on AIDS and the efforts to curb its spread seem to imply that “AIDS would not be ordinary,” as Alcabes wrote in the book.

Even as audience members jokingly proposed blaming managers of the Chinatown bus for the spread of swine flu, the gravity of Alcabes’ research was evident in the thought-provoking comments and questions raised by the end of the reading.  Mentioning the myriad of anxieties characterizing local evening news coverage, a man asked, “Why do people love this so much?”

The discussion illuminated factors ranging from profitable machinery designed during epidemic threats, the role of government, the Foucauldian concept of control, and society’s obsession with its own vulnerability.  Alcabes proposed an alternative to the strong influence of officials on health policy: “People should be given all the information they need and be helped to implement this information if they want.”

Handing in his Master’s thesis at Columbia’s School of Public Health just as the AIDS virus landed in the United States, Alcabes proceeded to earn a Ph.D. in infectious-disease epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.  His career includes currently teaching at Hunter College of the City University of New York and the Yale School of Nursing, and writing for the Washington Post, The American Scholar, Chronicle of Higher Education and Virginia Quarterly Review.  More information on Philip Alcabes and Dread can be found at philipalcabes.com.