Vaccine Anxieties explores how parents understand and engage with childhood vaccination in contrasting global contexts. This rapidly advancing and universal technology has sparked dramatic controversy, whether over MMR in the UK or oral polio vaccines in Nigeria.
Combining a fresh anthropological perspective detailed field research, the book examines anxieties emerging as highly globalised vaccine technologies and technocracies encounter the intimate personal and social worlds of parenting and childcare, and how these are part of transforming science-society relations. Reflecting critically on stereotypes that pass for ‘explanations’ of public engagement, Leach and Fairhead suggest routes to improved dialogue between health professionals and the people they serve.
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