This is a collection of articles that addresses the issue of gender-differentiated impact of natural disasters in countries across the world. It argues for the need to integrate gender perspectives into disaster management processes-both in terms of disaster response and disaster risk reduction.The book is divided into four sections. The first section, comprising four articles, seeks to understand the ramifications of gender relations in disaster situations. The second section, consisting of nine articles, looks at gender challenges and responses under various kinds of disaster situations. The third section has seven papers that review recent women's organized initiatives in natural disasters in different countries. The five articles put together in the fourth and final section of the bookunder the heading 'gender sensitive disaster risk reduction'-assess the processes through which gender sensitivity in disaster management can actually reduce the impact of natural disasters on affected communities.The primary premise around which the articles are woven is that the nature of risk and impact of any natural disaster is usually different for men and women, and so is the pattern of response to it. Most of these differences arise out of the prevailing gender differences in pre-disaster situations-some due to biological differences, but mostly due to socially constructed gender norms and practices.Several examples of this phenomenon is provided in the book's second section. Women are particularly vulnerable to floods, simply because in many communities women are not taught to swim. Moreover, they will not touch or be touched by a male, thereby making rescue work difficult during floods. In many developing societies, including those in South Asia, women are brought up with a socially ordained compulsion for overwhelming physical modesty and privacy, which hamper efficient rescue work and make life doubly difficult for women in the cramped post-disaster relief camps. Pregnant and lactating women and women with small children have additional problems, as evinced by research study in Bangladesh. In societies plagued by high levels of domestic violence against women in pre-disaster times, the incidence of violence is likely to rise substantially during natural disasters, as the articles from Sri Lanka and New Zealand testify. There are instances where such calamities are ascribed to the 'sins committed by the women' of the community, as the article reviewing the situation of women in earthquake-ravaged Pakistan reports, thereby adding insult and ignominy to the physical agony brought about by the natural catastrophe. Even in relatively affluent countries, women tend to bear a greater burden of the psychological stress brought about by disasters, as depicted in the paper from Canada.
Summary: The Semple antirabies vaccine was developed by David Semple in India in 1911. Semple introduced a peculiarly British approach within the Pasteurian tradition by using carbolized dead virus. This article studies this unique phase of vaccine research between 1910 and 1935 to show that in the debates and laboratory experiments around the potency and safety of vaccines, categories like "living" and "dead" were often used as ideological and moral denominations. These abstract and ideological debates were crucial in defining the final configuration of the Semple vaccine, the most popular antirabies vaccine used globally, and also in shaping international vaccination policies.
From the late nineteenth century, colonial India experienced a sustained institutionalization of bacteriology. Several laboratories were established starting with the Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory at Poona (1890); the Bacteriological Laboratory at Agra (1892); the Plague Research Laboratory in Bombay (1896); the Pasteur Institutes of India at Kasauli (1900), Coonoor (1907, Rangoon (1916), Shillong (1917 and Calcutta (1924); and the Central Research Institute (CRI) established at Kasauli in 1905. With the setting up of these institutes, issues of laboratory research and ethics assumed critical dimensions in India. The institutes needed and used massive animal resources. To give one example, the production of a single (Semple) vaccine in one Pasteur institute required six thousand rabbits annually.1 This paper seeks to situate animal experimentation in Indian laboratories within the social history of colonialism.How did science harness its beasts of burden in the Empire? The paper argues that animal experimentation in Indian laboratories needs to be seen within a context in which Indian animals became subjects and resources of the British Empire. The process was a complex one, since debates about animal experimentation in Indian laboratories were shaped both by late Victorian moralities and by Hindu animal sensibilities growing around the contemporary Cow Protection movement. British attitudes towards the local animal population in India reflected their attitudes to the local human population; a mixture of romanticism and authoritarianism. Animal experimentation was legitimized and legalized in colonial India through processes by which the British assumed moral and political agency, by designating Indians as cruel and childlike. No animal experiment legislation was ever introduced in British India, despite a strong movement in favour of it. More importantly, the anti-vivisection movement died out in twentieth-century India almost as rapidly as it had arisen, although sentiments towards animals remained strong and politically volatile. Science, particularly bacteriology, came to the colony in the guise of a positive moral force. This secured immunity from alternative moral critiques of its methods, and as a result a potentially explosive circumstance was mitigated through a moral and political resolution. The issue was not just about the establishment of the Pasteurian method in the colony, but about developing colonial research institutions as establishments of cure and consensus. This reflected not just the genesis of a particular research institution or tradition, but the consensual and simultaneous building of a society, its morality and its scientific tradition.
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