Feb 11 @ 4pm, Heidi Tworek (UBC) will be presenting “Communicating Quarantine: How Wireless Technology Helped to Create World Health.”
February 11 @ 4pm, Heidi Tworek, Assistant Professor, Department of History and Graduate Program in STS, UBC, will be presenting “Communicating Quarantine: How Wireless Technology Helped to Create World Health.”
How and why did communications become central to disease prevention? Does spreading information about potential epidemics like Ebola or Zika stoke fear or prevent it? These seem like contemporary questions, but they have historical origins. In the 1920s, the League of Nations Health Organization became the first international institution that tried to contain disease through rapid information dissemination. Officials saw communications as the key to preventing epidemics and created the first global standardized information system on health. These interwar experiences framed the World Health Organization’s information system and our current philosophy of health communications.
