ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Immunology in the Tropics: Malnutrition, Infection, and Immunodeficiency

• In Event: (Re)thinking Histories of Disease in the “Tropics” (II)

English Abstract

What is specific about the immunity of people in “the tropics”? This paper probes how World Health Organization scientists and public health officials approached this question as both a scientific problem of immunology and a political problem of postcolonial health in the 1960s and 1970s. Following research conducted at immunological research and training centers in postcolonial Nigeria, Lebanon, and India, it interrogates scientists’ and officials’ particular concern with the relationship between malnutrition and infection as a specific health problem of the tropics. In the 1960s, researchers established “synergy” between malnutrition and infection: each exacerbated the deleterious effects of the other. In 1972, WHO initiated a worldwide program surveying nutritional-immunological interactions to characterize the mechanism behind this synergy. In doing so, they imported the biomedical framework of genetic immunodeficiency into tropical malnutrition to refigure it as “acquired immunodeficiency,” thus naturalizing malnourished populations’ vulnerability to infection. However, primary health care researchers seeking to translate the synergy between malnutrition and infection from science to practice pushed back against this biomedical frame. A WHO-funded research team implemented healthcare practices addressing malnutrition and infectious diseases in rural Indian villages to argue that immunodeficiency was not a biomedical disease but a product of socioeconomic deprivation. The director of the team incorporated insights from this research to help draft the 1978 Alma Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care, in which WHO proclaimed that health was a collective socioeconomic right. This paper thus shows how tropical immunity was a crucial site of negotiating scientific and political frameworks for postcolonial health.

Author

• Anin Luo, Princeton University