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9781421447575
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85412
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$49.95 USD, £41.50 GBP
v2.1 Reference

Nothing But Nets

A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects

How insecticide-treated bed nets became a staple of global public health initiatives and reshaped health practices in Africa and beyond.

Distributed to millions of people annually across Africa and the global South, insecticide-treated bed nets have become a cornerstone of malaria control and twenty-first-century global health initiatives. Despite their seemingly obvious public health utility, however, these chemically infused nets and their rise to prominence were anything but inevitable.

In Nothing But Nets, Kirsten Moore-Sheeley untangles the complicated history of insecticide-treated nets as it unfolded transnationally and in Kenya specifically—a key site of insecticide-treated net research—to reveal how the development of this intervention was deeply enmeshed with the emergence of the contemporary global health enterprise.

While public health workers initially conceived of nets as a stopgap measure that could be tailored to impoverished, rural health systems in the early 1980s, nets became standardized market goods with the potential to save lives and promote economic development globally. This shift attracted donor resources for malaria control amid the rise of neoliberal regimes in international development, but it also perpetuated a paradigm of fighting malaria and poverty at the level of individual consumers. Africans' experiences with insecticide-treated nets illustrate the limitations of this paradigm and provide a warning for the precariousness of malaria control efforts today.

Drawing on archival, published, and oral historical evidence from three continents, Moore-Sheeley reveals the important role Africans have played in shaping global health science and technology. In placing both insecticide-treated nets and Africa at the center of global health history, this book sheds new light on how and why commodity-based health interventions have become so entrenched as solutions to global disease control as well as the challenges these interventions pose for at-risk populations.

About the Author

Kirsten Moore-Sheeley (LOS ANGELES, CA) is an assistant professor of the history of medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Endorsements

"Nothing But Nets provides a fascinating account of the rise of insecticide-treated mosquito nets as an iconic global health technology. With a distinctive emphasis on the role that African scientists and citizens have played in developing, distributing, and mobilizing this technology, Moore-Sheeley brings to light novel documents related to the key randomized controlled trials of the nets and draws on original interviews and field work to build the most rigorous and synthetic account to date of this important topic."

- Anne Pollock, King's College London, author of Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery

"Moore-Sheeley deftly documents the meteoric rise of mosquito nets to the forefront of lifesaving interventions in global health, and the complex mix of epidemiological evidence and rhetoric fueled by political, social, and economic forces that vaulted them into this position. She offers a necessary corrective to the conventional understanding of this as a direct result of evidence-based decision-making."

- Peter Winch, Social and Behavioral Interventions Program, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

"Kirsten Moore-Sheeley's Nothing But Nets closely examines the complex history of the insecticide-treated bed net on its path to becoming a key global-health good. It makes an important contribution to critical global health studies and our understanding of the ongoing challenges to reduce malaria transmission in Africa."

- James L. A. Webb, Jr., author of The Long Struggle Against Malaria in Tropical Africa

"Nothing But Nets provides a fascinating account of the rise of insecticide-treated mosquito nets as an iconic global health technology, and with it the broader ascendance of a global health paradigm that centres individualized commodities. A must-read book for scholars and students in critical global health, and deserving of a very wide readership."

- Anne Pollock, King's College London
Johns Hopkins University Press
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