CHE Environmental Colloquium – Viral Markets: Economics, the Environment, and Emerging Disease in the Twentieth Century

Speaker: Richard Keller, Professor of History and Medical History, UW–Madison

Environmental threats to human health have changed dramatically in the course of the past century. The cases of bubonic plague, HIV/AIDS, and Lyme Disease in particular help to illustrate the ways in which changes in human patterns of interaction with the environment — and specifically, the ways in which consumer markets have disrupted unstable ecologies — have opened new epidemiological pathways and presented new challenges to health and medicine in the United States and the wider world.