The immune self, hygiene and performative virtue in general public narratives on antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4769873
AutoresMark D M Davis (0000-0003-4075-0466, Monash University, autor de correspondencia), Davina Lohm (0000-0002-7161-9869, Monash University), Paul Flowers (0000-0001-6239-5616, University of Strathclyde), Andrea Whittaker (0000-0003-2662-8827)
Año2023
Volumen27
Número4
Páginas491-507
Fecha de publicación2023-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHealth An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health Illness and Medicine (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1363-4593 • E-ISSN: 1461-7196
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/13634593211046832
PMID34541910
OpenAlexW3199905209
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11
Referencias citadas34

This paper employs an assemblage lens to generate analyses of general public narratives on antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Global efforts to reduce AMR include communications aiming to promote general public awareness, provide knowledge, encourage careful antibiotics use, and discourage demands for them. These efforts are somewhat compromised by the assumptions they make of individual lack of knowledge and motivation and the manner in which the AMR problem is framed in isolation from the biological, social and economic structures that produce it. Conceptualising AMR as an effect of antimicrobial assemblages of which publics are but one part, we analysed interviews with the general public on the lived experience of infections, antibiotic treatments and AMR. Far from science and policy discourse on AMR, these narratives showed antibiotics to be partly solutions to the social and biomedical challenges of infection, framed by self-defensive immunity and hygiene, the affective benefits of 'immune boosting', and the imperative to sustain the moral standing of the healthy citizen. Failing public awareness and action on AMR can be attributed to public health messages that overlook the social, affective and moral dimensions of infection care and separate AMR from its socio-economic drivers

Aesthetics · Antibiotic resistance · Antibiotics · Antimicrobial · Biology · Epistemology · Hygiene · Narrative · Performative utterance · Sociology · Virtue · Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies · Empathy and Medical Education · Medicine · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Philosophy · Ecology · Microbiology