The Social Production of Crisis : Blood, Politics, and Death in France and the United States

In The Social Production of Crisis, Constance A. Nathanson and Henri Bergeron focus on the profoundly troubling story of how blood banks and blood products manufacturers and distributors, as well as the authorities charged with regulating them in France and the US, knowingly allowed blood contaminated with HIV to be distributed to hemophiliacs and others needing transfusions in the early to mid-1980s. Based on detailed, lively, and exciting comparative analysis, the book explains why this drama became a political crisis in France and not in the United States. The authors use this comparison to advance more general ideas of how political crises are socially produced and to raise questions about disease policy and politics in the two countries.

When does epidemic disease disrupt society to the point where it becomes a political crisis? In the early 1980s, almost unnoticed in the larger drama that was AIDS, over half of hemophiliacs and a large number of blood transfusion recipients were infected with toxic blood contaminated with HIV. The French public''s "discovery" of this catastrophe in the early 1990s created a transformative political crisis; this same discovery in the United States went largely unnoticed. In The Social Production of Crisis, Constance A. Nathanson and Henri Bergeron focus on a profoundly troubling story to present a detailed case comparative analysis not only of the catastrophe itself and its multiple retrospective interpretations but also of its intimate connection to the history and organization of blood as a consumer product in each country. They draw on secondary sources, archival research, and interviews with key players to provide a historical, political, and social reconstruction of the HIV contamination of the blood supply to answer the question of how and why disease morphed into crisis in France and not in the United States. They also raise questions about the curious immunity to human suffering as a policy engine in the United States, about the often reiterated weakness of civil society in France, and about theorizing alternative epidemic trajectories. Investigating a series of morally shocking events, this book develops a sociological theory of how political crises are socially produced and raises questions about disease policy and politics in the US and France.