This article compares the management of highly pathogenic avian influenza in France and African swine fever in Italy, asking how experts have qualified these epizootics as endemics. While farmers perceive wild animals as threatening their domestic animals, hunters and wildlife managers understand the behaviour of wild animals as a potentiality for regulation. This distinction between wild and domestic is ignored by small-scale farmers who are often hunters, but it is reinforced by trade unions supporting industrial farming and by health authorities at provincial, national and European Union levels. Animal activists, on the other side, trouble this distinction because they take the perspective of animals as sentient beings, endowing them with rights or souls by their feeling of compassion. Epizootics thus produce a wide range of perspectives across and beyond wild/domesticated dichotomies as viruses reveal different aspects of relations between humans and animals.

The One Health (OH) framework has gained prominence in recent years, promoting an approach integrating the health of humans, animals, and the environment. However, its implementation as it pertains to the microbial world has largely prioritized zoonotic diseases, antimicrobial resistance, as well as pandemic preparedness and management, narrowing its ecological scope and confining microorganisms to the realm of pathogens. We explore the historical development of OH to identify key gaps and limitations and argue for the integration of microorganisms as ecologically constitutive, critical to sustain life processes and ecosystem functioning. We provide actionable recommendations, beginning with a shift in how microorganisms are conceptualized, extending to the development of microbial metrics and culminating in proposals for microbial governance to address current shortcomings and inform future policymaking. Collectively, these measures aim to strengthen the OH framework in confronting global challenges, including biodiversity loss and climate change, while aligning with its broader commitments to health and sustainable development.

This article presents the perception and management of avian influenza outbreaks in three cities in 2005, the year when the H5N1 virus spread from south China, where it emerged in 1997, to Europe, and where it was expected to arrive in America, where it finally arrived in 2022. Using the tools of Claude L & eacute;vi-Strauss in his 1962 book, La pens & eacute;e sauvage, the article describes how relations between humans and birds (wild and domestic) account for the ways in which the same virus is governed differently in these three cities. If we start from how each city perceives the beings that populate its environment, and particularly the birds that carry warning signals about the threats that affect them in solidarity with humans, we see that these cities interpret differently the threat of a pandemic to which it is exposed, long before the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2010 and the SARS-Cov2 pandemic in 2020. Hong Kong interprets it in terms of the anxiety of the Hong Kong population and Australian experts about the consequences for the British colony to return to Chinese sovereignty. Istanbul interprets it in terms of its unique position at the crossroads between the Christian and Muslim worlds and the glorious memory of its role as an imperial capital. New York interprets it through the trauma of September 11, 2001, but also of the West Nile crisis that largely prefigured it two years earlier.

There is increasing evidence that interactions between microbes and their hosts not only play a role in determining health and disease but also in emotions, thought, and behavior. Built environments greatly influence microbiome exposures because of their built-in highly specific microbiomes coproduced with myriad metaorganisms including humans, pets, plants, rodents, and insects. Seemingly static built structures host complex ecologies of microorganisms that are only starting to be mapped. These microbial ecologies of built environments are directly and interdependently affected by social, spatial, and technological norms. Advances in technology have made these organisms visible and forced the scientific community and architects to rethink gene-environment and microbe interactions respectively. Thus, built environment design must consider the microbiome, and research involving host-microbiome interaction must consider the built-environment. This paradigm shift becomes increasingly important as evidence grows that contemporary built environments are steadily reducing the microbial diversity essential for human health, well-being, and resilience while accelerating the symptoms of human chronic diseases including environmental allergies, and other more life-altering diseases. New models of design are required to balance maximizing exposure to microbial diversity while minimizing exposure to human-associated diseases. Sustained trans-disciplinary research across time (evolutionary, historical, and generational) and space (cultural and geographical) is needed to develop experimental design protocols that address multigenerational multispecies health and health equity in built environments.

The introduction of the special issue "Disease Reservoirs: Anthropological and Historical Approaches" sets out the origins and trajectories of disease reservoir frameworks. First, it charts the emergence and elaborations of the reservoirs concept within and across early 20th-century colonial contexts, emphasising its configuration within imperial projects that sought to identify, map and control spaces of contagion among humans, animals, and pathogens. Following this, it traces the position the reservoir framework assumed within post-colonial practices and imaginaries of global health, with particular reference to the emerging infectious disease paradigm. The introduction shows that, in contemporary usages, while the concept continues to frame animals, humans and their bodies as containers of previously identified pathogens, it also emphasises the imperative of anticipating as-of-yet unknown diseases, harboured in the bodies of certain animals, through networks and techniques of surveillance. Consequently, the introduction argues that the notion of disease reservoirs remains intimately intertwined with concerns over the classification, organization, and management of peoples, pathogens, animals, and space. Finally, the introduction outlines the seven papers that form this special issue, stressing how they dialogue, complement, and challenge previous historical and anthropological approaches to disease reservoirs, with an eye to opening up new avenues for cross-disciplinary exploration.

Two different kinds of collections have been used to anticipate influenza pandemics: viral strains and bird specimens. These collections have been organized in museums and data banks to fill the gaps when specimens were decaying or when viral strains were missing. This article asks how collecting practices changed when such collections integrated specimens from China, considered a reservoir of influenza viruses and bird species, following a recurrent critical trope that Chinese specimens were missing. The article shows that techniques for hunting viruses and birds were used to accumulate information so as to mitigate the global threat of species extinction. It suggests that in sentinel territories, museums transform samples and specimens into signs and images of future catastrophic events

While the health crises of the last twenty years have highlighted China's wet markets as potential transmission sites for zoonotic pathogens such as influenza viruses or SARS coronaviruses, Chinese consumers have maintained a demand for freshness and proximity that drives them to these markets rather than to supermarkets. Based on a literature review and a survey in the city of Chengdu, this article shows the differentiation of forms of wet market (retail or wholesale) and slaughtering practices according to the rural areas in which they are located. It highlights the fact that the control of zoonotic risks in these markets takes place more generally in a context of privatisation and transformation of relations between town and country, which delegates the responsibility of control to merchants and increases the uncertainty of sellers about the possibility of selling their animals on a regular basis.

This article studies how zookeepers and wildlife rescuers build relations with bats using experimental apparatuses such as cages. Arguing that interspecies communication with bats as reservoirs of infectious diseases can be described through material environments, such as a bat shelter in Ghana and a bat refuge in Australia, rather than in the short contacts between bats and ‘virus hunters’, it questions how humans can take the perspective of bats in contemporary assemblages of biosecurity. While bat keepers in Accra take the perspective of bats through the viruses they carry as a colony, in a cynegetic logic of storage, bat carers in Australia take the perspective of bats by sharing bodily fluids, in a pastoral logic of care. What is shared in the interspecies communication is framed by the material design of the biosecurity apparatus.

Lucien Levy-Bruhl made a trip around the world in 1920 which led him to take part in colonial controversies about vaccination in the Philippines. This article questions the meaning of such a controversy within the framework of a positivist anthropology that claims to totalize "primitive" and "civilized" modes of thinking in for a typical sociologist. By mobilizing the figures of Jules Verne and Alfred Dreyfus, the article shows that the tour of the social world can be restored from the accidents that interrupt its completion. The philosophical project of a "logic of feelings" that has motivated French anthropology since Auguste Comte can then be reformulated from an investigation of the sentinels who anticipate accidents from past experience. Such a project provides meaning to the Dreyfus Affair up to the anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss.