Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health

In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson makes a provocative claim- that public health science manages and maintains global health inequity. Richardson, a physician and and anthropologist, examines the conventional public health approach to epidemiology through the lens of a participant-observer, identifying a dogmatic commitment to the quantitative paradigm. This paradigm, he argues, plays a role in causing and perpetrating public health crises. The mechanisms of public health science--and epidemiology in particular--that set public health agendas and claim a monopoly on truth stem from a colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492.