Uma História dos Caramujos em um Regime Vetorial de Doenças: Entre a Esquistossomose, a Big Pharma e a Tecnociência (1948-2022)

Abstract

The essay seeks to provide a history of snails, specifically those that are the intermediate hosts of Schistosoma, the parasite that causes schistosomiasis, considered endemic in Brazil and classified as a neglected tropical disease. The disease gained greater visibility from the 1940s onwards, with national and international mobilization, via the World Health Organization (WHO) and Brazilian parasitology researchers, around its framing as a public health problem. The argument is that there is a set of interactions between humans and this animal, in a “material and reciprocal agency” (Carlos Maia) that involves the snails’ responses to the demands placed by technoscience and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, which places this disease in a vector regime. Even though schistosomiasis is a disease linked to poverty and the ills of capitalism, there is a research and public health agenda that is molluscocentric. The very framing of the disease as “vector-borne diseases”, by the WHO, is an element of this centrality and how it orbits around the snail. Historical sources emanating from the WHO and the World Bank help demonstrate how international organizations engender forces on a global scale around this disease vector regime. We also covered other views and other horizons of agency with the animal, such as those promoted by the public health doctor Frederico Simões Barbosa (1916-2004). The essay concludes by demarcating the historicity of the interaction processes between humans and snails and how a disease is capable of demonstrating the multiple cultural, economic, political and ontological confluences between the two.