Introducing pandemic control theory

Abstract

Patterns of land use and the allocation of public health resources are matters of state policy and economic practice. The diseases that arise from such shifts in land use and resource allocation, including out of and along global circuits of capital, are outcomes of quintessentially cognitive processes operating at multiple levels of institutional organization. Travel networks underlying subsequent disease spread are themselves strongly defined by parent socioeconomies. Using multiple results from control theory to model the response of public health systems to the strain of epidemic outbreaks, we find that apparently “small” increments in socioecological expropriation can rapidly erode the ability of those systems to control deadly pathogens. It follows that a key step toward pandemic prevention is to reverse both neoliberal extraction, which cores out ecosystemic controls on pathogens of forest origins, and structural adjustment, which truncates programs in public and animal health.