Stanford University Press Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic

In February 2003, a Chinese physician crossed the border between mainland China and Hong Kong, spreading Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)―a novel flu-like virus―to over a dozen international hotel guests. SARS went on to kill about 800 people and sicken 8,000 worldwide. By July 2003 the disease had disappeared, but it left an indelible change on public health in China. The Chinese public health system, once famous for its grassroots, low-technology approach, was transformed into a globally-oriented, research-based, scientific endeavor. In Infectious Change, Katherine A. Mason investigates local Chinese public health institutions in Southeastern China, examining how the outbreak of SARS re-imagined public health as a professionalized, biomedicalized, and technological machine―one that frequently failed to serve the Chinese people. Mason recounts the rapid transformation as young, highly-trained biomedical scientists flooded into local public health institutions, replacing bureaucratic government inspectors who had dominated the field for decades. Infectious Change grapples with how public health in China was reinvented into a prestigious profession in which global impact and recognition were paramount―and service to vulnerable local communities was secondary. Review "Infectious Change brings us for the first time before a hitherto unacknowledged consequence of the 2009 H1N1 crisis, and, at that, in one of the most epidemiologically critical regions of the globe today. It is this invaluable insight that should hold the attention not only of medical anthropologists but also of the wider global health community." Author: Christos Lynteris Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly"This is an excellent, thought-provoking book, which will appeal to those with interests in contemporary China, medical anthropology, and histories of health and disease. It yields insights that will illuminate broader debates, such as those that pivot on the challenges inherent in promoting the "global" as a category in health." Author: Robert Peckham Source: Bulletin of the History of Medicine"In Infectious Change, Katherine A. Mason provides a captivating analysis of public health in China in the wake of SARS...Infectious Change is an insightful work that would be of interest to scholars of China and global health practitioners while also being accessible to a general academic reader. For China scholars, Mason makes a major contribution to the literature on public health." Author: Emilio Dirlikov Source: Anthropological Quarterly"In this defining ethnography of China's public health system and its complex relation to epidemics, Katherine Mason brilliantly describes health professionals, their struggles to be effective and ethical, the barriers they face, and how they animate the Chinese public health system as a lived reality. Infectious Change is an impressive contribution to both China studies and to medical anthropology!" Author: Arthur Kleinman, Director Source: Harvard Asia Center"Katherine Mason's book is an important contribution to the fields of Chinese studies and anthropology, joining a recent spate of excellent studies using the methods of anthropology to look at the intersections of public health, cultural practices and politics in China...Mason's book reminds us that implementing public health policy is never only about what is technically correct. It is about the cultural values and practices that govern relationships. It is also about understanding the power dynamics of the political system and generating the political will to construct an enabling environment and accountability mechanism to achieve it. In China, the tensions between centre and local are rarely resolved in favour of local and when new criteria for professional advancement are introduced, it results in the type of dysfunction so masterfully described by Mason." Author: Joan Kaufman Source: China Quarterly"Meticulously crafted, Infectious Chang