Download or read book From Biochemical Flows to the Disease-poverty Nexus written by Narmadha Senanayake and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Struggles over environmentally induced diseases are struggles over the very nature of what exists and how we know the nature of the phenomenon. -- Kroll-Smith, Brown, and Gunter (2000, 27). This thesis draws on a case study of Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Etiology (CKDu) in north-central Sri Lanka to examine the explanatory possibilities and policy implications that flow from conceptualizing the disease as a historically rooted and emergent problem. To this end, I first harness tools and insights from the growing field of historical political ecology to excavate the overlapping histories of agricultural "modernization" in areas with high rates of CKDu endemism. I argue that contemporary environmental explanations of the mystery disease cannot be divorced from the historical processes that have transformed bodies and environments in Sri Lanka's North Central Province for the greater part of the 20th century. Through a review of existing histories of the North Central Province and long-term census data, I situate CKDu and the myriad debates that surround it within the overlapping chemical and socio-economic legacies of various agricultural development interventions in the region. Through this analysis, I also show how the lived experience of the disease is entangled with long-standing conditions of poverty and political marginalization. To complement this line of inquiry, this study marshals insights from critical political ecology and science and technology studies (STS) to examine existing explanatory frameworks of CKDu. Drawing on a review of scientific and medical literature together with 56 open-ended interviews, I posit that conventional explanatory models provide important but partial insights into the complex biophysical changes and local environmental experiences that give rise to and result from CKDu. As a result, this thesis uses a different approach arguing that many environmentally induced diseases, like CKDu, can be constructively re-conceptualized as "emergent" problems which arise through dynamic, contingent, and synergistic interactions.By adopting a more expansive and historically rooted perspective on CKDu, this work argues that it is possible to break the policy paralysis that has accompanied scientific uncertainty about the disease and its cause. Conceptualizing CKDu as an emergent process widens the lens of policy intervention to encompass the many interlinked problems that communities in CKDu endemic areas do not disaggregate from their experience of illness. Crucially, it allows policy makers currently grappling with the epidemic to shift from a singular focus on identifying and eliminating a "discrete" cause of the disease towards addressing multiple and compounding harms (social, ecological, and chemical), the wider contaminated environment, and the considerable experience of environmental suffering in CKDu affected communities.