Afterword: Disease Reservoirs and Spatial Imaginaries in the Time of COVID-19

Disease reservoirs, as the contributions to this multidisciplinary special issue show, form heterogeneous epistemic objects related to disease maintenance, which have attracted an array of epidemiological concerns, biopolitical interventions, and metaphorical investments over the past 150 years. The latter, as Richard McKay’s article in this special issue shows, was far from an idle trope, with both medical experts and law enforcement apparatuses mobilizing reservoir metaphors in order to frame and blame vulnerable communities and individuals. Thinking with reservoirs thus requires both historians and anthropologists to take ethnographically and historically seriously specific epistemic, semantic, and biopolitical iterations of the disease reservoir. And, at the same time, it requires a degree of epistemological reflexivity. Whether we analyze, for example, Guarani approaches to understandings of rats as reservoirs of leptospirosis by the Brazilian state in the 2020s (Silva Santos, this issue) or Charles Elton’s rodent bait station as an “ecological” means of rat control (Kelty, this issue), we need to reflect seriously on the fact that we are doing this from within the context of a global pandemic that is creating its own epistemological and biopolitical affordances around configurations of humans and nonhumans as disease reservoirs.

The challenge is paramount, as it is now clear that whatever the original animal reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID’s causative pathogen) may have been, the virus has come to spread – or “spillback” – from humans back to nonhuman animals. It was already noted in early 2020 that humans were infecting other animals with COVID-19, most worryingly large numbers of farmed mink in Denmark and the Netherlands (ECDC 2021). But it was the discovery that large numbers of white-tail deer in Utah are infected with the disease (Kuchipudi et al. 2022) that really set off the alarm that COVID-19 spillback may be creating vast reservoirs of the disease among nonhuman animals across the globe, which may lead to the emergence of new variants of the disease and threaten humans with recurring pandemics. What is even more worrying is that very few countries have the capacity to investigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to non-domesticated animal populations, and those that have that capacity are neither interested in doing it themselves nor in facilitating others to do it, thus creating an epidemiological blind spot of global proportions.

Yet what is striking is the lack of media attention or indeed public opinion interest in these disease reservoirs and their consequences for global health. This may be contrasted to the heated interest and debate over the “origins” of COVID-19, which is dominated by two master narratives at opposite spectrums of the science/anti-science spectrum: the lab-leak conspiracy theory, which assumes SARS-CoV-2 to have been manufactured/modified at and escaped/leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s maximum-security (BSL-4) laboratory, and the scientifically backed zoonotic hypothesis, which assumes SARS-CoV-2 to be a naturally emerging virus that spilled over from nonhuman animals to humans in the context of Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood and Wholesale Market.

Why is it that so much media and public attention is attracted to an emergence event that took place in the past and not about an ongoing process of viral emergence? On one level, it is precisely the originary nature of the COVID-19 debate that drives its impact on social imaginaries. For the question of origins is not simply one that distributes epidemic blame in a time past, but also one that has the power to determine the very being of the virus – what I have elsewhere called the “imperative ontology” of COVID-19, or what COVID must be (Lynteris 2020). On the basis of this ontology, determining COVID-19’s origins is imagined to hold the key to the “secret” of the pandemic, and to thus have not simply anticipatory but indeed predictive capacities, consistent with the much broader field of enunciation that Caduff (2014) has termed “pandemic prophecy.” The idea that a remote event in the past can reveal not only an essential truth about the present but also how things will unfold in the future is consistent with a much broader “passion for origins” in the West, which manifests itself in ways as diverse as the family-tree craze in the US, Freudian theories about the “originary scene,” or seeking to explain complex current affairs through remote but singular “originary moments” in history (e.g. the invasion of Ukraine seen as a result of Vladimir Putin’s Fall of the Berlin Wall experience). Origins play a prominent role in the realm of what I have coined the “pandemic imaginary,” having been configured by virus-hunter narratives, pandemic videogames, movies, and novels, as well as preparedness campaigns as a “key” to understanding and resolving pandemics (Lynteris 2019).

The same cannot be said to be true about farmed mink or white-tail deer as reservoirs of SARS-CoV-2. These animals are generally seen as unfortunate victims of the pandemic, but becoming reservoirs of the virus is usually perceived as of no consequence to the pandemic itself. Such reservoirs are, in other words, more often than not approached as epidemiological dead ends: results of the pandemic that have no impact on its further development. It is as if once a virus has escaped its original/originary nonhuman realm, its zoonotic potential exhausts its emergence potential. Here one may diagnose, following Anders’s (2002) discussion on nuclear war in the 1960s, a profound “apocalyptic blindness” or an “imaginary deficit,” which does not allow people to realize the pandemic potential of a virus becoming reestablished in new animal populations across the globe.

This is surprising as disease reservoirs have played an important role in the ways in which diseases have been invested with a catastrophic potential since at least the 1890s, and as they have been more recently systematically mediatized through pandemic apocalypse films (Lynteris 2016). At the same time, in the age of Emerging Infectious Diseases, framing reservoirs is a powerful means of attracting scientific attention and funding. Emmanuelle Roth, in her article in this special issue, shows how the heavily mediatized “uncovering” of bats as both origins and reservoirs of Ebola in West Africa functions so as to transform an epidemiological heuristic (as no concrete evidence for this relation exists) into an outbreak narrative fetish. What is it then that fosters this peculiar lack of interest in or concern about SARS-CoV-2’s anthropozoonotic reservoirs? What I want to suggest in this Afterword as a provocation for further reflection and discussion is this: what is fostering this “imaginary deficit” is the fact that the new SARS-CoV-2 reservoirs (white-tail deer being the exemplar at the moment of writing) lack a key characteristic of what generally constitutes disease reservoirs as potent players in both our epidemiological reasoning and in our pandemic imaginary: a clearly identifiable and blamable spatiality.

Emerging in the sixteenth century in French as a term used to describe a storehouse, or a space for reserving, keeping, or retaining resources (grain, water, or other) for future use, the reservoir is a term that continues to be mainly used to describe such receptacles, especial aquatic ones. The spatial affordances of the term when used to describe microbes, and manner in which framings of animal and human reservoirs become entangled with the spaces that they occupy (or are imagined to occupy) become clear in several of the articles in this special issue. Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, in his article on sylvatic plague, shows how this key epidemiological notion for the framing of reservoirs of the disease emerged in direct relation to the framing of a specific type of space as “a generic space of plague maintenance.” Through its association with colonial ideas about emptiness, configuring “desertic” space as the space of global plague maintenance functioned as a catalyst in epidemiological reasoning, imagination, and blame. In another article of this special issue, Jack Greatrex’s examination of British colonial medical definitions of rodent reservoirs of scrub typhus in the Federated Malay States in the 1920s is revealing of a different method of spatialization. Contrary to the prevailing historiography which has put emphasis on colonial concerns about the tropicality of the environment in Southeast Asia, Greatrex argues that typhus was located “in the specific spatial configurations of landscapes transformed by socio-economic activity” such as plantations, “mining land and grazing grounds” which were in turn imagined to be “transforming jungle creatures into epidemic threats.” At the same time, as Freya Jephcott’s article in this special issue shows, within Emerging Infectious Disease frameworks, landscapes such as the Ghanaian forest examined in her study, can become configured as reservoirs of outbreak-causing zoonotic diseases even when they do not actually exist anywhere other than in the spatially inflected epidemiological imagination of outbreak responders.

The spatialization of disease reservoirs, as shown by historians, anthropologists, and geographers, has been accompanied since the late nineteenth century with aggressive spatial interventions that have more often than not pathologized and violently disrupted or destroyed the ways of life of racialized and classed Others (e.g. Biehler 2013; Bigon 2016; Kelly and Lezaun 2014; Mavhunga 2018; Shaw and Jones 2010). However, the configuration of disease reservoirs did not simply lead to framing and intervening in one type of space or spatial patterns per disease, e.g. rat harborage for plague or urban water pools for malaria. Instead, depending on the context of their iteration, epidemiological framings of disease reservoirs led to and depended upon multiple (in some cases synergetic, in others antagonistic) spatial framings. To take the example of plague during the third plague pandemic (1894–1959), configuring the disease’s reservoirs was a thoroughly spatial process of epidemiological reasoning, which involved the “becoming-reservoir” of different spaces across different epidemic contexts. In Inner Asia, for example, problematizations of Siberian marmots (tarbagan) as reservoirs of plague led to complex investigations of marmot burrows, which were dug out, measured, scrutinized and mapped by a series of medical scientists from around the globe (Lynteris 2018). In Madagascar, where human corpses were framed as potential plague reservoirs of plague by Pasteurian doctors, it was the space of Malagasy reburial rituals (famadihana) that attracted a similar epidemiological attention (Poleykett 2018; Sodikoff 2019). In the Dutch East Indies, by contrast, it was bamboo and bamboo-built structures that came to be intensively and violently framed as conduits of plague by colonial doctors, leading to the destruction of thousands of indigenous houses (Meerwijk 2021).

Epidemiological concerns over plague’s reservoirs during the third pandemic generated a constellation of spatial framings that targeted both natural and built environments of suspected reservoirs, in ways that consistently targeted the lifeways of colonized, indigenous communities. Attributing blame for disease maintenance on nonhumans almost always involved blaming, animalizing, and pathologizing racialized, gendered or classed human others and their ways of life. It thus attracted political investment by imperial and capitalist world systems, and formed part of broader discourses of domination that helped usher in and render such scientific narratives hegemonic in the public sphere. Since the bacteriological-sanitary synthesis that led to the emergence of epidemiology at the end of the nineteenth century, the configuration of such spaces of microbial maintenance or preservation has consistently become entangled with frameworks of class, gender, and racial otherness.

For a “disease reservoir” to function as a source of public concern, it needs to be associated not only with an animal species or population but also with an identifiable and blamable space in which this species or population resides, and which is in turn associated with a human target of othering, domination and/or exploitation. Yet, I would like to argue, for this concern to be affected, a “disease reservoir” also needs to be associated with a spatialized understanding of epidemiological time. What Charles Rosenberg’s key essay on epidemics (Rosenberg 1989) most pointedly missed in its dramaturgical analysis of modernity’s key epidemic novel, Camus’ The Plague, is the book’s rat arch. Rats, like everything else in The Plague, function on several symbolic and allegorical levels (Davis 2007; Smith 2016). But they also function as an indicator of the received image of what constitutes a disease reservoir. The Plague offers, in other words, a useful snapshot of the concept of the disease reservoir as it had become stabilized by the 1940s, and, due to the massive success of the book, a subtle but pervasive disseminator of this idea. A key moment in Camus’s novel concerns the transformation of rats from reservoirs into spreaders of the disease. This is affected by rats coming out of their hiding places and quite dramatically manifesting their illness in a scene that repeats itself with small variation twice in the first part of the book: “From basements, cellars and sewers they emerged in long unwavering files into the light of the day, swaying helplessly, then did a sort of pirouette and fell dead at the feet of horrified onlookers” (Camus 1960:15).

The scene itself relies on the trope of the “staggering rat,” established in missionary accounts of plague in the Southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan in the 1870s, which in ways that are too complex to detail here found its way in medical plague narratives and established itself as a recurring trope in the literature around the third plague pandemic. What signals the transformation of rats from reservoirs of plague – that is from receptacles of the disease – into its spreaders is their movement from hidden, secret, underground spaces (which are supposedly their true habitats) onto open, surface-bound ones, abandoning their key “character” – invisibility, secrecy, stealth – and revealing themselves to their human antagonists. This trope is nested in Pasteurian ideas about diseases like plague “lurking” or “hiding” during inter-epidemic periods of disease quiescence, only so as to gather force, come up into the light and strike back at humanity (Lynteris 2017). With the floorboards of homes in Oran becoming a veritable stage of plague’s return, Camus’ narrative invites us to imagine the hidden world of “basements, cellars and sewers” where rats lurk, harboring and percolating disease. This is, in other words, a bacteriological-sanitary hybrid narrative that spatializes what, following Smith (2013), we can call our concerns and fears of diseases as entities residing at the edge of scientific sight: enemies of humanity known and shown only at moments of their resurgence, but unknown and unseen in their realm proper, the “reservoirs” (species and spatial at one and the same time) where they prepare their next strike.

It is such spatial attributes that the anthropozoonotic reservoirs of SARS-CoV-2 seem to be lacking, and which could in turn be the reason why they fail to function in terms of our epidemiological reasoning and pandemic imaginary. For the space occupied by white-tail deer in North America is neither identifiable and blamable within racial, gender, or class narratives of otherness nor does it fit well within imaginaries of tropical wilderness or with narratives of lurking microbes or more broadly spatialized understandings of the relation between disease quiescence and outbreak.

If we are, to paraphrase Lachenal (2020:671), to “emancipate” our understanding of disease reservoirs from a set of “narrative tropes cemented by centuries of intertextuality,” we need to begin by reflecting on the spatial imaginaries sedimented in the intersection between epidemiological reasoning and pandemic imaginaries about disease maintenance. Rather than drawing “lessons from history,” this epistemologically reflexive approach could allow us to understand the limitations of the “disease reservoir” as a notion that carries pronounced spatial overtones, which are deeply rooted in colonial reasoning about and imaginations of infectious diseases.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors for bringing together this special issue on disease reservoirs and for their feedback on my reflections on the articles contained therein.

Additional information

Funding

Research leading to this article was funded by the Wellcome Trust [grant ID 217988/Z/19/Z] for the project “The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis.”

Notes on contributors

Christos Lynteris

Christos Lynteris is a social anthropologist working on the anthropological and historical examination of epidemics, zoonosis, and epidemiological epistemology. He is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK, currently leading a Wellcome-funded project on The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis.