Abstract
The need for new knowledge about lay representations of contagions, immunity, vaccination, common colds, and influenza has become clear after the A(H1N1) pandemic and the resulting challenges regarding pandemic preparedness. This article analyses written responses from 67 persons, mostly women, to a semi-structured questionnaire about colds and the flu. Three themes are discussed: “Common cold and flus as ritualized experiences”, “Me, my body, and my immune defense”, and “Regulations of space, place, and behaviors.” Overall, the narratives were about trust, value, and respect in the body, in lived experiences, and in the capacity to ‘help’ and ‘nurture’ the immune system, but also about the feeling of powerlessness when perceiving inadequacies in other people’s parallel interpretations and actions. Pandemic preparedness policies need to acknowledge the multiple ‘immunity talk’ in the responses to create productive, ongoing relations with the ‘Other’, that rely on people’s trust and resilience, rather than on people´s fear.
Highlights
On the cold winter days during my childhood in the 1950s in the north of Sweden, my mother’s voice echoed every time I went outdoors
The A(H1N1) experience and the global issue of pandemic preparedness need to be examined from new angles (Lohm, et al, 2015; HEG Expert Group, 2011), and this means that we need to know more about the general public’s representations of contagions, immunity, common colds, and influenza
How do people perceive the different infections and the immunological reactions they cause? Are common colds and influenza considered as problems to be solved by different strategies or technologies or do they represent something unavoidable (Davis et al, 2015) and inherent in human existence? What kind of measures do people take when on the one hand they are looking inwards – focusing on their own bodies and corporeal immunities (Davis et al, 2015) – and on the other hand when looking outwards on their bodily and spatial interactions with other people, spaces, and places? Does this entanglement of self-perceptions, experiences, recollections, beliefs, and actions have any bearing on pandemic preparedness?
Summary
On the cold winter days during my childhood in the 1950s in the north of Sweden, my mother’s voice echoed every time I went outdoors. In Sweden, the older generations, i.e. those born in 1950 or earlier, have lived through times of many colds, seasonal flus, and the last three pandemic influenzas, and a few of them even lived through the Spanish flu These generations have been intermittently subjected to several public health interventions and improvements, including child immunization, school health care, occupational health improvements, hygienic requirements, various kinds of diagnostic screenings, monitoring of risky behaviors, health controls, seasonal influenza vaccination, etc. The A(H1N1) experience and the global issue of pandemic preparedness need to be examined from new angles (Lohm, et al, 2015; HEG Expert Group, 2011), and this means that we need to know more about the general public’s representations of contagions, immunity, common colds, and influenza
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