An emergency of circulation: entry screening in the UK during the 2014 Ebola epidemic

ABSTRACT

The rise of emergency governance in global public health has driven a number of changes in this field. In this article, we investigate one of the practices of emergency governance – border screening – and identify a new form of screening that emerged in the UK during the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Analysing the UK’s deployment of Ebola entry screening and the public debate that emerged around it, we show how this technology was constructed to identify potentially risky individuals, assess their risk level and pre-accelerate future response to potential cases. Engaging with Foucault’s notion of a ‘crisis of circulation’, we argue that this approach expresses a response to an emergency of circulation: the alarming prospect of a concrete threat with the potential to infiltrate the population through circulation systems. We show that entry screening, in this case, addresses such a problem by enabling, rather than diminishing, circulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Entry screening
• Ebola
• UK
• emergency
• governmentality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This decision came two days after Public Health England (PHE) (2014a) stated that entry screening would not be introduced.

2. Governmental technology as the junction of technologies of power/domination – which objectivise subjects and cause them to submit to control – and technologies of the self – which allow individuals to act upon and transform themselves (Foucault, 1988).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.