EPICAST - The Sonar-Global podcast

Infectious diseases have often caused ‘panics,’ ‘moral panics,’ and/or general public anxieties, particularly when they are newly emergent. These are sometimes interrelated phenomena, that may also intersect with stigma and discrimination against specific groups of people. We are now all familiar with the panic that has ebbed and flowed as COVID-19 first emerged with little known about it or how it was transmitted. In this Epicast, we will look specifically at social science approaches to understanding moral panics and how they can emerge during epidemics using examples from HIV/AIDS in Ghana and COVID-19 in Canada.

Please see more here, for a link to referenced work by LGBTQI+ Ghanaians and allies: linktr.ee/killthehatebill

Music Credits to Joseph McDade https://josephmcdade.com/music – track names “Sunrise Expedition” and “Quiet Calculation”

This episode of EPICAST includes discussions with social scientists working with Sonar-Global on vulnerability assessments and community engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. We highlight the method of ‘vulnerability assessments’ and how they improve our understanding of vulnerability and social exclusion in the context of infectious disease threats. We also discuss work around community engagement and the importance of dialogue with people in need to identify adaptive public health models that improve lives before, during, and after, an epidemic. We include findings from Malta, Slovenia, and Denmark.

In January 2021, the WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that “we now face the real danger that even as vaccines bring hope to some, they become another brick in the wall of inequality between the world’s haves and have-nots” and that “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure” because of this. We know that the health of all countries depends on fully managing the pandemic everywhere and that a lack of vaccine equity across and within nations will have strategic and economic consequences for the entire world. In this Epicast, we explore social science perspectives on COVID-19 vaccine equity, from policy and social science questions around vaccine nationalism and COVAX, to issues of social justice.

Music Credits to Joseph McDade https://josephmcdade.com/music  – track names “Sunrise Expedition” and “Quiet Calculation”

This special Sonar-Global Epicast about antimicrobial resistance is a follow-up on the Sonar-Global Special-SOC AMR curriculum development meeting held in October 2019 in Amsterdam.

In the podcast, a number of participants share their thoughts on the question of why it is important to integrate the social sciences into AMR.

Epicast is a podcast series about epidemics from Sonar-Global. The aim of this podcast is to explore the social dimensions of infectious diseases outbreaks so that we can get better at controlling them. For this first episode, we will be focusing on the Coronavirus outbreak.