Paper short abstract:

An epidemic in a Venezuelan rainforest went unexplained for a year. This paper follows indigenous leaders investigating how rabid vampire bats and communicative inequities between indigenous patients and doctors, epidemiologists, and journalists thwarted diagnosis and deepened the epidemic's impact.

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes an inadvertent encounter in 2008 with a mysterious disease, spirits, chickens, vampire bats, clinicians, healers, epidemiologists, the international media, dying bodies, and indigenous leaders in the Orinoco rainforest of Venezuela. Indigenous leaders recruited Briggs, along with Clara Mantini-Briggs MD MPH, to join them in investigating an epidemic that had stumped clinicians and epidemiologists. Including two political leaders, a healer, a nurse, a physician, and an anthropologist, the team documented 38 deaths, presented a preliminary diagnosis, and took the results to the national government and the international media.

In 1992-1993, a cholera epidemic in the same area killed some 500 people and inscribed residents' status in biopolitical terms as unsanitary subjects, as purportedly incapable of understanding modern hygiene and medical discourse due to the persistence of a premodern culture. When physicians and epidemiologists failed to diagnose a new epidemic that started in 2007, parents pressed local leaders to conduct their own investigation. Collective forms of knowledge production that included indigenous healing, personal narratives, laments, epidemiology, and clinical medicine pointed to rabies as the pathogen and vampire bats as the vector. Beyond diagnosing the disease, the process pinpointed how inequities in the distribution of rights to communicate about health—from clinical encounters to epidemiological inquiry to health policies to news coverage of health problems—engenders persistent problems of global health and renders them more invisible and more intractable.