Millennium bugs and weapons of mass fear: Dialogs between science and popular culture in the 1990's

This dissertation explores the social and political dynamics underlying the representation of disease through a detailed study of media coverage of emerging infectious diseases and biological warfare. In this research I examine how infectious disease issues came to be hot topics in the Western media in the 1990s, and how they came to be viewed as a dominant threat to American society. A premise of this research is that emerging infectious diseases and biological warfare, as social and cultural constructs, cannot be fully understood in isolation from one another. A study of their interrelations can elucidate processes through which media draw upon given cultural creations, including other mass mediated phenomena, to re-deploy old ideas and create new ones. Thus my research on representations of emerging infectious diseases and biological warfare documents the transformation of one perceived threat to society into another. What began in the early 1990's as a growing fear of the threat of "killer viruses," became by the year 2000 a conviction that these microbes would be used as weapons against the United States unless dramatic protective measures were undertaken.; There are notable disjunctures between representations of epidemics and disease threats, and the actual outbreaks themselves, a point of considerable interest for this research. For example, the increase in media attention to Ebola virus actually preceded the actual 1995 outbreak of this disease in Zaire, which occurred a full 19 years after the most recent previous outbreak. Mass media, including the news, do not simply reflect reality, but also create it through the deployment of language and imagery. The signification of emerging infectious diseases, like that of AIDS, occurs primarily through the assignment and standardization of definitions and images, arrived at in a mass-mediated dialogue between science and popular culture. The meanings created in this process then serve as templates which frame related issues. Just as the AIDS epidemic provided a blueprint for the representation of emerging infectious diseases such as Ebola virus, hantavirus, and "mad cow disease," representations of these newer infectious disease threats heavily inform our understandings of germ warfare threats.