Immunology in the Tropics: Malnutrition, Infection, and Health in a Welfare World

In 1971, the World Health Organization initiated an international immunological study on the relationship between nutrition and infection. Spanning four continents with field sites in India, Mexico, Lebanon, Guatemala, the Gambia and additional participating laboratories across North America, Europe, and Australia, the study was self-consciously global, attempting to understand regional variations in how malnutrition compromised the body’s ability to fight infection. WHO launched this study in the midst of famines ravaging Africa and Asia: the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70) broadcast images of starving children, blockaded in Biafra, to Western audiences, and droughts in the Sahel region and South Asia in the early 1970s left millions dead. As mass suffering from hunger and infection raised the ethical stakes of postcolonial health and livelihood, “immunity” became a site of contestation over the value of postcolonial life. This chapter traces international visions of postcolonial health by traversing field sites, laboratories, and public health conferences in Nigeria, India, Lebanon, Switzerland, and the USSR, where research and debates about the relationship between nutrition and immunity—such as this study—were conducted. Throughout the 1970s, Geneva-based scientists and officials put forth a biomedical vision of health by using laboratory experiments to characterize the myriad nutritional, environmental, and genetic factors that conditioned an individual’s immunity. In doing so, they naturalized postcolonial populations’ malnutrition, defining it as a type of “immunodeficiency” akin to a genetic condition. In contrast, postcolonial officials, gathered in Alma-Ata, Soviet Kazakhstan in 1978, asserted a vision of health that was integrated into national social and economic development; here, physicians in each given community determined the relationship between nutrition and immunity. 
 
The chapter thus addresses the question of what health means after decolonization by showing how Western and postcolonial actors placed the vulnerability of postcolonial life at different scales: the individual and the community.This chapter traces international visions of postcolonial health by traversing field sites, laboratories, and public health conferences in Nigeria, India, Lebanon, Switzerland, and the USSR, where research and debates about the relationship between nutrition and immunity—such as this study—were conducted. Throughout the 1970s, Geneva-based scientists and officials put forth a biomedical vision of health by using laboratory experiments to characterize the myriad nutritional, environmental, and genetic factors that conditioned an individual’s immunity. In doing so, they naturalized postcolonial populations’ malnutrition, defining it as a type of “immunodeficiency” akin to a genetic condition. In contrast, postcolonial officials, gathered in Alma-Ata, Soviet Kazakhstan in 1978, asserted a vision of health that was integrated into national social and economic development; here, physicians in each given community determined the relationship between nutrition and immunity. The chapter thus addresses the question of what health means after decolonization by showing how Western and postcolonial actors placed the vulnerability of postcolonial life at different scales: the individual and the community.
 
Pre-Circulated Paper
The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Sunaina Danziger.
 
Contact
Sunaina Danziger
sdanziger@princeton.edu