Cities and Disease

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course considers how the risk of disease for humans is defined by the interaction of humans and non-humans, such as mosquitoes and viruses. From this perspective of intersection, diseases such as malaria and dengue are as human-made as mosquito-made as virus-made. Human disease does not exist “naturally” prior to these intersections; for all life forms, diseases are relational. Thus, the knowledge base of the course concerns how the agents of disease actually live and die with each other, and how doing so produces disease, turns certain life forms into infecting agents, and creates opportunities for both infection and control.