Epidemiological Obfuscation: Historical and Contemporary Case Studies

Epidemiology ostensibly exists to reveal and ascribe features to burdens of disease at a population level. However, as the designated arbiter of visibility in public health, it is well-positioned to also obscure burdens of disease with significant implications for both social justice and disease control. This edited volume brings together empirical accounts of epidemiological obfuscation developed by public health researchers from diverse fields, including medicine, history, anthropology, sociology, epidemiology, and rhetoric. In reading across these rich accounts, we begin to characterise what epidemiological obfuscation is, the situations in which it occurs, and the practices underlying it. As such, the book serves not only as a catalogue of independently interesting and robustly developed accounts of important episodes in the history and contemporary practice of epidemiology but also as a foundational body of scholarship on this central but oft overlooked aspect of epidemiology, namely, its ability to obscure as well as elucidate.

Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license and Introduction, Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 are available open access under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0.

Freya L. Jephcott is a Senior Research Associate in medical anthropology and epidemiology at the University of Cambridge and a Senior Lecturer in Global Health at the University of Sydney. She convenes the Hidden Epidemics and Epidemiological Obfuscation Research Network and Outbreak Ethnographies project. In addition to her research, Freya also does intermittent applied epidemiological work for Médecins Sans Frontières and the World Health Organization.

Hillary A. Ash is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Saint Louis University (USA).

Coreen McGuire is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Durham University (UK).