New books with a One Health theme
Assistant Professor Claas Kirchhelle, UCD School of History, is a historan of the biomedical sciences with an interest in the history of microbes, disease surveillance, and the development, marketing and regulation of antibiotics and vaccines.
Animal Welfare
His recent book, Bearing Witness, published by Palgrave Macmillan, is the biography of one of Britain’s foremost animal welfare campaigners and of the world of activism, science, and politics she inhabited. In 1964, Ruth Harrison’s bestseller Animal Machines triggered a gear change in modern animal protection by popularising the term ‘factory farming’ alongside a new way of thinking about animal welfare.
Here, Kirchhelle explores Harrison’s avant-garde upbringing, Quakerism, and how animal welfare debates were linked to concerns about the wider ethical and environmental trajectories of post-war Britain. Breaking the myth of Harrison as a one-hit wonder, Kirchhelle reconstructs Harrison’s 46 years of campaigning and the rapid transformation of welfare politics and science during this time.
Download Bearing Witness: Ruth Harrison and British Farm Animal Welfare (1920-2000) for free.
Antibiotic Stewardship
Published in 2020 by Rutgers University Press, Pyrrhic Progress: The History of Antiboitics in Anglo-American Food Production analyses over half a century of antibiotic use, regulation, and resistance in the US and British food production.
Mass-introduced after 1945, antibiotics helped revolutionize post-war agriculture. Food producers used antibiotics to prevent and treat disease, protect plants, preserve food, and promote animals’ growth. Many soon became dependent on routine antibiotic use to sustain and increase production. The resulting growth of antibiotic infrastructures came at a price. Critics blamed antibiotics for leaving dangerous residues in food, enabling bad animal welfare, and selecting for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria, which could no longer be treated with antibiotics.
Pyrrhic Progress reconstructs the complicated negotiations that accompanied this process of risk prioritization between consumers, farmers, and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. Unsurprisingly, solutions differed: while Europeans implemented precautionary antibiotic restrictions to curb AMR, consumer concerns and cost-benefit assessments made US regulators focus on curbing drug residues in food. The result was a growing divergence of antibiotic stewardship and a rise of AMR. Kirchhelle’s comprehensive analysis of evolving non-human antibiotic use and the historical complexities of antibiotic stewardship provides important insights for current debates on the global burden of AMR.
Download Pyrrhic Progress: The History of Antibotics in Anglo-American Food Production for free.
Dr. Kirchhelle's research is supported by a Wellcome Trust University Award in Humanities and Social Sciences.