Placing pandemics: Geographical dimensions of vulnerability and spread

A prominent U.S. medical geographer explores the geographic dimensions of disease pandemics, examining their causes, movement over space, unequal impacts, and emergence of place-specific public health responses. She utilizes a political ecological approach to situate pandemics within a complex network of place-specific interactions among people, the physical and built environments, social institutions, and infectious agents that cause disease. The author also reviews the range of geographical strategies that governments and other institutions employ to control the spread of infectious diseases that include constructing, targeting, and manipulating place environments where diseases occur and people's interactions within them.