Columbus, colonization, and biological reductionism

Today is Columbus Day, which marks 518 years since Europeans colonized the indigenous people of the Americas. The record of Christopher Columbus is covered well here can hardly be disputed. But biological reductionist theories have emerged to rationalize the genocide against First Nations, reducing mass epidemics to immunology, and explaining persisting health gaps with genetics. By ignoring the conditions that shape infectious and metabolic diseases, these theories provide a cover for colonization that blames indigenous people for illnesses imposed on them and detracts from basic demands for self-determination.

INFECTIONS: VIRGIN SOIL EPIDEMICS?
     The dominant theory to explain why so many indigenous people died of infections after the Europeans arrived is because Europeans brought new diseases. This theory is called “virgin soil epidemics”, or a more critical term of “biological imperialism”, both reducing mass epidemics to exposure to new microbes. While lack of immunity from prior exposure certainly plays a role in infections, reducing the epidemics to microbes and immunity is problematic.
     It plays on the notion of the “noble savage” and presents a romanticized version of First Nations as being free from illnesses. But infections were spread both ways: while the Europeans brought smallpox and plague they encountered syphilis, yet it was not the Europeans who were wiped out. Many deaths were also from hemorrhagic fever and tuberculosis, which were endemic to the Americas before contact but produced a much higher death toll after Columbus.
     Clearly it was not only microbes but also the unhealthy conditions imposed by colonialism: state violence, poverty, poor housing, malnutrition, lack of clean water, and the denial of self-determination. These factors, sustained for centuries, paved for the way for continual epidemics, but it was very convenient to ignore them. Instead, tuberculosis and its high mortality rates were dismissed as “racial traits” (see Maureen' Lux's Medicine that walks: disease, medicine, and the Canadian planins native people, 1880-1940 for an overview of how the Canadian state imposed conditions that led to epidemics, then blamed First Nations for being biologically inferior, and then quarantined them for being biological threats.)
     This deliberate denial of colonization and its impact of health persists today, resulting in further scapegoating for epidemics. While Health Canada notes there are 117 First Nations communities with boil water advisories, it blames the situation on “community decisions to lower or turn off the chlorinator”. This was clearly not the case during the huge E Coli outbreak in Kashchewan a few years ago. As others have noted with regards to clean water that

"With the federal government‘s responsibility of this community under the Indian Act, Environment Canada‘s responsibility under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and Health Canada‘s knowledge of the horrible water quality and severe health problems, it can be argued that its refusal to take responsibility of ensuring safe, clean potable water and proper wastewater systems is environmental racism. There is further argument that this is environmental racism when the federal government refused to act on its fiduciary responsibility and refusal to evacuate the First Nations‘ people in this community."

DIABETES:  A THRIFTY GENE?
     First Nations also get blamed for epidemic rates of diabetes, and biological reductionist theories have emerged to not only deny colonization but glorify it. The “racial trait” argument to explain tuberculosis has become the “thrifty gene” theory to explain diabetes. Since the biomedical model is ahistorical and oriented to the individual, it reduces illnesses to genetic factors and individual lifestyle choices, but how then to explain the high rates of diabetes amongst First Nations?
     According to the “thrifty gene” theory, indigenous people before Columbus had little food and adapted a gene to convert every spare nutrient to fat, but now this same gene in the context of a widely available “Western diet” leads to epidemic diabetes. This theory, also rooted in the idea of the “noble savage”, perpetuates without evidence the notion that First Nations had no stable food supplies before “western civilization”, and are now being killed with kindness.

INDIGENOUS RIGHTS DAY
     Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper claimed last year that “we have no history of colonialism”, and has refused to sign the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. The declaration states “Indigenous peoples have suffered from historic injustices as a result of their colonization and dispossession”. These injustices and their persistence have produced, and continue to produce, severe health impacts for indigenous people. Let’s follow the lead of those asking that Columbus Day be re-named Indigenous Rights Day, and support for self-determination that forms the pillar of a healthy society.

Whose "risky behaviour" is really spreading syphilis?

The US administration has apologized for intentionally infecting Guatemalans with syphilis. That’s right, from 1946 to 1948 American scientists intentionally infected 700 people in Guatemala—prisoners, soldiers, and psychiatric patients—with the infectious disease syphilis, in order to study the impact of penicillin. These days syphilis is blamed on people's "risky sexual behaviour"--especially men who have sex with men--so this story is an opportunity to review the history of syphilis scapegoats (and for links to other US human experiments, check out the recent entry from this wonderful blog).

SEXISM, RACISM
     In 1918, rather than divert military spending to jobs and healthcare, US President Wilson funded the creation of detention centres, some surrounded by barbed wire and guards, for the forced quarantine of tens of thousands of women convicted of prostitution. As one government official explained (and if you want to read an excellent history of this read this source of this link, Alan Brandt's No Magic Bullet: a social history of venereal disease in the United States):

“The prevention of society against moral and social murder committed by the prostitute are functions in part of the detention house and reformatory. These functions are inextricable related to the control of the dissemination of gonorrhea and syphilis through promiscuous prostitution.”

     African-Americans were also accused of spreading syphilis through promiscuity. Whereas the prison system treated poor women like criminals, the medical system treated poor blacks like guinea pigs. From 1932 to 1972, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment deliberately gave fake medicine to 400 poor black men in Alabama who had syphilis, in order to study the long term and lethal health effects of the untreated disease—which destroys the cardiac and nervous systems. Then men were told they were getting free healthcare for their “bad blood”, and were promised free money for burials if they consented to autopsy after dying.

HOMOPHOBIA
     The scapegoat for syphilis has shifted from women, to people of colour, and now to gay men. In 2003, Vancouver’s poorest neighbourhood was struck by one of the world’s largest outbreaks of syphilis. But instead of blaming poverty and healthcare cutbacks, the response was to blame gay men. A spokesperson for the BC Centre for Disease Control claimed that “we know it spreads very quickly in the gay community. Almost every other outbreak in the world is confined to that community”. Health Canada has issued similar homophobic and medically false statements, claiming that

“risky sexual behaviour among MSM (men who have sex with men) and other populations is a risking global trend. One reflection of this is the numerous outbreaks of infectious syphilis seen worldwide. In 1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that there were 12.2 million new cases of syphilis”.

     Mainstream medicine continues to view gay sex as inherently dangerous, leading to bans on blood donations from men who have sex with men (see my post on this issue), and ridiculous statements that syphilis is only spread by gay men. The actual WHO stats show that of 12.2 million new cases, 11 million are in the global south, and a majority are women. By blaming gay men of spreading syphilis, these statements ignore conditions of poverty and inequality that put both men and women at risk of syphilis. All the homophobic hysteria about “risky sexual behaviour” is redefining a broad public health concern as a behavioural problem of a minority group. Blaming syphilis on “risky sexual behaviour” is like blaming cholera on risky drinking behaviour or blaming tuberculosis on “risky breathing behaviour” and asking people to reduce their number of conversation partners. Living in poverty and not having access to healthcare or clean water isn’t an individual behaviour, it’s collective condition imposed on millions of people.

GLOBAL TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENT
     Millions die every year of infectious disease, not because of their individual behaviour but because they are kept in poverty and denied lifesaving medicine. Tuberculosis infects a third of humanity and remains a leading infectious causes of death 50 years after the discovery of curative treatment. Treatment also exists for malaria but lack of access to it is leading to widespread deaths. And HIV now infects 40 million people and is causing a reversal of life expectancy in countries where anti-retrovirals are not available. As a result we have a global Tuskegee experiment (for a great book on this topic, read this source, Paul Farmer's Infections and Inequalities), as six million people die every year from these three epidemics not because medicine doesn’t exist but because it is denied.
     The same governments that have given billions of dollars to banks, corporations, and the military have just intentionally underfunded the Global Fund for HIV, TB, and malaria. As Medecins Sans Frontieres announced last week, “Major donor countries have chosen to undercut the main international funding mechanism to save the lives of millions of people at risk of dying from AIDS, TB, and malaria.” The Global Fund required $20 billion to expand programmes, including $13 billion just to maintain the program, but have received only $11.7 billion. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently promised $18 billion for fighter jets, which could cover the $8 billion Global Fund shortfall twice over, or which could almost cover the entire Global Fund needs. But as MSF’s Dr. Jennifer Cohn declared, “world leaders have officially under-financed the Global Fund. This decision will result in the death of millions of people from otherwise treatable diseases.”
     This is the true risky behaviour that threatens public health, not diverse and healthy sexual expression but the deliberate maintenance of conditions that spread infections coupled with the deliberate denial of medicine to treat them.