Tracing viral trajectories. Epistemic and bodily reservoirs in interspecies health

ABSTRACT Emerging infectious diseases draw critical attention to the human–animal interface for understanding and explaining global health crises. These include zoonoses that directly affect human health, as well as epizootic events in livestock and wildlife rendering economic and societal systems vulnerable. This paper traces the overlaps between three viral trajectories – that of African Swine Fever (ASF), AIDS, and COVID-19 – to show how technoscientific ways of knowing and responding to disease outbreaks frame certain forms of human–animal contact as risky and dangerous. We mobilize the notion of a reservoir, understood both as (surplus) bodies harboring infectious disease, and an epistemic pool of associations and response protocols accompanying health crises. Our point of departure is a short-lived hypothesis from the 1980s on the connection between AIDS and ASF, which marshalled racialized fears over undesirable interspecies contact. From there we inspect the tension between the epistemic and affective modes of causality in current and historical narratives, which seek the blame for disease in transgressions against nature. By focusing on how disease narratives spill over to social categories of race and class, our analysis questions the depictions of these transgressions from the standpoint of universal humanity.


Introduction: of men and pigs
In her 1989 book AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag makes a rather unexpected mention of African Swine Fever (ASF) in relation to the widespread beliefs about the geographical and zoonotic origins of AIDS.She looks into how the African source of the deadly disease played into the negative perceptions of the continent that portrayed AIDS as allegedly coming from 'dirty', 'backwards' and 'sexually promiscuous' practices of Africans: '[t]he subliminal connection made to notions about a primitive past and the many hypotheses that have been fielded about possible transmission from animals (a disease of green monkeys?African swine fever?) cannot help but activate a familiar set of stereotypes about animality, sexual license, and blacks'. 1 The relationship between porcine and human sexuality in Sontag's short mention remains unclear, given that ASF cannot be transmitted to humans.However, in the 1980s there was a short-lived hypothesis about the connection between ASF and AIDS that most probably informed Sontag's observation. 2e came across this moment in the history of the AIDS epidemic while working on an essay about control over porcine sex and bodies in hog breeding and wild boar hunting in times of the current ASF epidemic in Europe.Our research focused on narratives of purity marshaled in attempts to protect the Polish pork industry from ASF through biosecurity measures and thanatopolitical practices of culling infected farmed pigs and mass hunting of wild boars suspected of spreading the disease. 3Purification practices lend themselves to a fantasy of containment that led us to consider what kinds of metaphors and relations are afforded when different viral stories and spheres inconspicuously blend.The way narratives on AIDS and ASF briefly overlapped in a suspected zoonotic transmission brings to light the similarities in scientific responses to unknown pathogenic diseases.Over 30 years later, similar reactions of blame, fear, and repulsion with the inappropriate contact between humans and nonhuman animals play out in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As queer philosopher Alexis Shotwell reminds us, in her work on remembering activist responses to HIV and AIDS, 'it is difficult to perceive messy histories behind established disease categories at the point at which they are no longer emergent or in categorical crisis, but it is sometimes worth our attention to ask how they came to be what they are'. 4But what if there was an archive that would allow for such critical historical reflection on the empirical mechanisms of understanding diseases and devising measures to prevent their spread?Writing in the times of an acute ASF epidemic, an unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, and an ongoing AIDS global epidemic, we follow Shotwell's important remark to carefully unpack these culminating and overlapping disasters, while focusing on the interspecies aspect of both zoonotic and epizootic diseases.Interspecies health is meant to emphasize the complex entanglement of interdependencies between various species, their health, and, as will be shown, survival.Nobody's health functions independently of others, including other species, and as troubled as the category of species is, many of the systems of differentiation and valuation of bodies are more visible through its lens.In this essay, we explore how this critical moment when a virus jumps the species barrier or makes an incursion into a new geographical area is being constructed in science communication.What kinds of epistemic mechanisms are mobilized in such an event and what material effects do they bear?How do we come to understand diseases before their epidemiological story is (at least temporarily) fixed and medical or veterinary response becomes standardized?How are 'facts' of the disease constructed? 5These turning points redefine many existing human-animal relations and give way to novel entanglements of human and nonhuman bodies.
Tracing the looped character of intertwining emergencies, we employ the category of the reservoir 6 understood both as a material concentration of surplus bodies that act as a source of pathogenic agents, but also as an epistemic device for archiving the unraveling discourses that surround the viral trajectories we explore.As a vocabulary for capturing the emerging and dynamic processes of viral transmission, our use of the notion of reservoir is akin to what Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz call the 'material heuristic' when thinking with the category of saturation to account for moments of epistemic uncertainty in juggling the multiple and overlying agencies that characterize the current environmental and political condition. 7As material metaphors, both saturation and reservoir connote fluidity and liquid forms, whose boundaries may not be clearly delineated.The etymology of the term reservoir leads us to think about bodies of water, bodies of host organisms that contain a pathogen without suffering from the disease it may cause in other species, as well as of supply, reserve, or stock that can take the form of farmed animal bodies.In this diluted ontology, reservoirs promise to contain undefined or emerging phenomena in the name of security, but they are also a promise of danger to come.As such, reservoirs hold an affective tension between the fantasy of containment and a threat of infection by asymptomatic carriers of a pathogenic agent.Yet spillover events demonstrate that viral reservoirs are leaky containers.This paradox is mirrored in our mobilization of the epistemic reservoir as a heuristic tool for understanding the mechanisms behind disease etiology, given that viral reservoirs thrive in the realm of the unknown and expose the limits of knowledge.To add to the trouble these fluid categories cause, the notion of a disease reservoir in itself is never neutral, as it is usually traced to the disenfranchised, sexualized, and racialized human bodies, or those of nonhuman animals so easily made disposable.This troubling overflow of meanings makes the reservoir a useful analytic for understanding the co-presence and overlaps of different viral trajectories.
We follow these trajectories along the emergent ways of knowing that include assessing the risk, tracing origins, mapping transmissions, identifying vectors, and implementing surveillance and biosecurity measures.We then investigate the moment when the initial uncertainties about the source of a new outbreak and the level of threat it poses materialize in the treatment of 'other' bodies, human and nonhuman, varying from institutional violence and exclusions to physical attacks on the basis of race or class and mass culling of wild and domestic animals.Searching for incriminating agents of disease spread can, under some circumstances of acute inequality, become a technique of domination, in service of racist colonialist projects.Yet to effectively prevent disease spread, scientists need to find the mechanism of virus replication and its life cycle.In this double bind, the lenses of race, class, and gender, which can often propagate discrimination and various forms of violence when applied in health discourse, are nonetheless sometimes necessary to reveal how poor health outcomes are themselves results of systemic issues.One of the many increasingly debated examples of this is male bias in clinical studies, which leads to inadequate understanding and standard of treatment for non-cis-male bodies with the same condition. 8The entangled trajectories of the viral triplet of ASFV, HIV, and SARS-CoV-2 have several affective points of convergence in the ways in which they inspire fear and repulsion of the wrong kinds of bodies (human and nonhuman) coming into contact.Such a relational take on biological systems that include pathogens further implicates viruses as living processes 9 rather than stable entities with clearly defined boundaries.
Building on the pioneering work of Ludwik Fleck, historians of science usually unpack the concept of a given disease as one that 'must be investigated like any other case in the history of ideas, as being a result of the development and confluence of several lines of collective thought'. 10As such, knowledge about one disease is never completely independent from knowledge about other diseases.Zoonotic and epizootic outbreaks are not singular events, but rather coalescing series of events, drawing from the reservoir of the multispecies history of viral bodily relations that come to be defined as diseases.Epistemic reservoirs allow us to analyze the unexpected and emergent connections between various epidemic and pandemic events, as well as to attend to the social and political ramifications of their confluences.Thus, we highlight the convergence of food chains with supply chains 11 in order to point to the role of factory farming and globalized labor systems as the untold part of the origin story of overlapping epidemics.By carefully untangling the three viral storylines, we attend to the ways empiricism plays out in the epistemological choreography of re-knowing in which nonhumans become important historical agents.

The march of the pig plague
Sontag's commentary on the hypothetical zoonotic spillover of AIDS from pigs infected with ASF was spurred by a discovery made in 1986 by two medical researchers who searched for possible environmental causes of AIDS in Belle Glade, a migrant town in Florida with the highest infection rate per capita in the US at that time. 12Jane Teas, a pathobiologist, and John C. Beldekas, a chemical immunologist, associated the occurrence of 50 cases of AIDS in this poverty-stricken black community with their discovery of a backwoods swine farm with more than 150 domestic and wild pigs showing the ravages of a deadly disease, perhaps an unknown variant of African swine fever, as well as evidence of the virus believed to cause AIDS in humans. 13Common symptoms, transmission through blood, and the assumed origin of both diseases as deriving from African wildlife led the researchers to believe that the ASF virus could be a factor for AIDS transmission. 14Moreover, in their interview for The New York Times, the researchers advanced another theory stating that 'illegal immigrants from Haiti brought with them pigs infected with chronic, low-grade swine fever'. 15bandoned by the migrant workers, those pigs were suspected to assimilate with feral hogs roaming in the dense sugar cane fields around Belle Glade farmlands.Later, clinical studies were performed using blood samples collected from the pigs and humans that disproved the connection between the two diseases, 16 again reframing their origin stories.Nevertheless, Haitian immigrants remained a stigmatized group within the US's response to the AIDS epidemic, becoming one of the '4-H' risk groups among homosexuals, heroin users, and hemophiliacs. 17The deeply racist and classist ties made between ASF and AIDS that Sontag draws our attention to were tight, reminding us that the politics of purity 18 lurks behind many medical and veterinary practices. 19lthough ASF has not caused any zoonotic spillover, its incursion into Europe mobilized racial stereotypes of the kind Sontag points to in relation to the early accounts of AIDS, both anchored in a subliminal connection between the African provenience of the diseases and their assumed transmission vectors or practices portrayed as uncivilized.Endemic to sub-Saharan Africa, the ASF virus harbors racist rhetoric when spreading in Europe or North America, yet its origins are in fact linked to British colonial practices.It has been established that ASF mutated from a tick virus affecting warthogs once intensive pig farming was introduced in Africa. 20This directly links ASF to settler colonial practices in Africa.As we read in Bettina Stoetzer's report on the disease in wild boars for the Feral Atlas: ASF first appeared on the world stage in the context of British colonial pork trade and pig farming.While the virus most likely already existed among few warthogs and bush pigs in sub-Saharan Africa, it was first reported by British colonists as a disease of domesticated pigs in Kenya in 1910.As the British continued to import pigs from Europe to Kenya, and colonial farmers began to raise pigs more extensively, the virus soon entered the colonial commodity circulation of live pigs and meat and subsequently became chronic.Spreading among thousands of domestic pigs that lived in close proximity to 'native' feral hogs, ASF also proliferated via soft ticks.As outbreaks also appeared in South Africa in subsequent years, humans slowly took notice: the virus and the pigs (as well as the ticks!) had adapted to each other.Considering this colonial trajectory, perhaps the disease should more accurately be called British swine fever? 21e most recent outbreak of ASF in Europe occurred in 2007 and reached the European Union by 2014.It was first detected in Georgia, then started spreading through the Caucasus region, and reached Chechnya the same year.The disease was reported in Ukraine in 2012 and in Belarus one year later. 22By 2014, ASF was already rapidly spreading through Lithuania (January), Poland (February), Latvia (June), and Estonia (September).Based on genetic analysis, it is believed that ASF was transmitted to these countries from Russia. 23Most often it is impossible to trace the exact path of the virus as its reach expands, and whether it was being spread by migrating wild boars or, for example, humans feeding food waste to farmed pigs.It is believed the latter was the cause of the first ever ASF outbreak recorded outside of Africa, when in 1957 pigs near Lisbon were fed contaminated airplane food waste. 24The uncertainty about the pathways this disease takes and its sources in regions where it is not endemic fuels the xenophobic imaginary, both against the wild boars as dirty and unruly creatures, and farmers from these regions depicted as not civilized enough to be able to follow biosecurity measures.Similarly, the Haitian immigrants were identified as bringing infected pigs to Belle Glade and not containing them properly within the boundaries of controlled farmlands.
Since ASF could be labeled as an economic disease that poses a threat to the European pork industry by decimating porcine populations, biosecurity measures focus on protecting pig farms from contagion.However, the concentration of swine bodies in industrial farming as a contributing cause of the disease spread is largely excluded from official communication.Instead, the source of contagion is located outside the pig farm, and within wild boar populations perceived as vectors of transmission.In this way, industrialized livestock production implicates wildlife in viral trajectories.Farmed pigs, which belong to the human technoscientific domain, are threatened by the unruly microorganisms from the realm of uncontrolled nature.This viral trajectory implicates the materiality of factory farming as one of the culminating disasters contributing to the emergence of new epidemics, as concentrated bodies also constitute a viral reservoir, which leaks into the outside environment.

Transgressions against nature
A comparative study from 2008 shows that emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) 'are dominated by zoonoses (60.3 percent of EIDs): the majority of these (71.8 percent) originate in wildlife (for example, severe acute respiratory virus, Ebola virus), and are increasing significantly over time'. 25Certain populations of wild animals are monitored as reservoirs of pathogenic agents.In epidemiology, there are various competing definitions of a reservoir that focus either on the populations affected by the pathogen, its multiple hosts, or more broadly on the ecological systems that include the inanimate environment. 26According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest quotation of medical use of the term comes from an 1885 textbook in which a physician traced the source of a puerperal fever outbreak in his practice to his own gloves that 'had acted as a reservoir of the disease'. 27This identification of contaminated clothing as the source of disease follows the early modern understanding of contagion, and more specifically, the use of Latin word 'fomes' for inanimate objects sparking infections. 28Since the twentieth century, parasitologists, virologists, and bateriologists typically use the term reservoir in relation to living organisms.Although certain species can harbor a pathogen without being susceptible to the disease, reservoirs are defined more narrowly as specific populations that can be localized in their environments. 29ocused on monitoring zones of potential new outbreaks, this biomedical approach to identifying sources of novel pathogens stems from the post-Cold War public health campaign that utilized anxieties about globalization for the sake of national security and consolidated international efforts to prevent the emergence of the next global pandemic. 30The concept of emerging diseases crystallized within the biomedical community in response to the global HIV/AIDS crisis, 31 from which it has inherited certain epistemic pathways of causality and discursive figures such as patient zero, superspreader, or hotspot.This prophetic 'outbreak narrative' 32 strongly resonated with journalistic and fictional accounts on the next looming health disaster, and in its most popular zoonotic variant it featured nonhuman animals as host bodies of a pathogenic agent that 'knows no borders' and threatens national security.
Interestingly, a similar post-Cold War narrative is mobilized in the case of ASFV as infiltrating borders through the bodies of highly mobile and unruly wild boars, and thus, endangering national economic interests within the EU.This rhetoric becomes tangible when states decide to erect fences along their borders to prevent the spread of ASF, as has already happened in Denmark and Germany.In 2017, Polish authorities announced their plan to build an anti-boar fence along its eastern borders, but they eventually abandoned it.Five years later a 186-km border wall was completed on the border with Belarus; however, this barrier is not aimed at wild boar migration but rather at a human one. 33his border securitization was a direct response to an unfolding humanitarian crisis with Polish law enforcement stopping asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia from trying to enter the EU via Belarus.The unrealized anti-ASF fence and the completed anti-migrant wall converged in the same space, spurring a troubling conflation of people on the move with wild boars seen as vectors of a disease with an African provenance.The deferred collapse of sanitization and securitization targets racialized human and nonhuman bodies that are stopped at the gates of Fortress Europe.In this sense, the outbreak narrative lends itself to militarized defense technologies that often fuel racist and xenophobic responses to unwanted human or nonhuman mobility.
Although with each event threatening either human health or supply lines the rehearsed choreographies build up new layers, the reservoir acts as not only an archive of past experiences, fears, and failures but also a breeding pool, in whichmuch like in the viral reservoir of bodies -new mutations emerge.The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has already spawned a whole bestiary of possible sources and intermediate hosts of the rapidly mutating virus, from 'exotic' civets and pangolins to domestic cats and farmed minks.Highly adaptable, many coronaviruses are able to infect various species of mammals and exchange genetic information when they coinfect one host. 34Through this process of recombination novel strains can emerge, some of which are able to jump the species barrier. 35One of such zoonotic spillovers, it is now believed, is the source of the COVID-19 pandemic.The currently accepted theory is that the novel coronavirus classified as SARS-CoV-2 originated in bats and was transmitted to humans via an intermediate host, most probably the common palm civet or raccoon dog. 36hese cross-species leaps are possible because of the increasing spatial proximity between humans and wildlife -what would otherwise have been separate viriospheres 37 of different species, have now merged due to human populations encroaching on wildlife habitats. 38The most recent scientific version of the outbreak narrative identifies the root causes of zoonotic spillovers in anthropogenic changes to the natural environment, such as deforestation and biodiversity loss. 39Mobilizing the Anthropocene as another mode of disaster discourse might suggest that old explanatory models focused on nonhuman animals as dangerous disease vectors gave way to greater attention to human transgressions against nature.However, according to Kathryn Yusoff, the Anthropocene-era claim to universal humanity obscures 'the proximity of black and brown bodies to harm in this intimacy with the inhuman'. 40When translated into the zoonotic outbreak narrative, this racialized inhuman intimacy underlies the construction of the spillover moment as a risky interspecies contact that is typically traced to a specific geographical location.
This causal model for tracking the moment of zoonotic spillover is employed to allow for preventive measures such as surveillance and containment.It also positions certain nonhuman animals as sentinel organisms that need to be monitored to indicate the coordinates of the next outbreak. 41It is never certain if, or when, a particular reservoir will cause an acute disease in another species; reservoirs and the ecosystems they are connected to preserve the element of surprise.In this spirit, scientists have been studying bats as natural reservoirs of coronaviruses for a while now. 42Bats are hosts to a number of pathogens without being susceptible to them, but the exact mechanisms of further cross-species transmission are largely unknown.
The hypothesis on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in bats harbored a series of assumptions on the exact source of the spillover, usually locating it in the Chinese live animal markets as the already contested sites of unregulated and potentially contagious contact with wild-caught animals. 43According to anthropologist Christos Lynteris, who investigates prophetic and forensic properties of epidemic photography, 'centuries of anti-pestilential sanitary measures have imbued Western imagination with the idea that the sale of live animals within the city border (or more traditionally, walls) is unclean, polluting or infectious'. 44The so-called 'wet markets' in southern China have been on the radar of virologists and epidemiologists for over two decades as the suspected 'ground zero' of the next pandemic, especially after the SARS outbreak in 2003 that has been traced to civets sold in such bazaars.From there, the abject category of 'bushmeat' resurfaced in public discourse, with the evocative example of undercooked 'bat soup' as the oriental delicacy that supposedly sparked the global COVID-19 pandemic.In this sense, the transgression against nature is located in an intimate act of licentious consumption, which itself derives from colonial history of a disgust response to certain Chinese eating practices.However, this vision of dietary peril affords a double exclusion, as in China, the uneducated farmers are perceived as the main consumers of bushmeat, and thus figuring as 'animal -human bridges of contagion'. 45he alimentary interface becomes the key site for zoonotic spillover.By marking points of interspecies contact, food chains often feature in causality pathways critical for disease etiology.In epidemiological responses to emergent disease outbreaks, the production and consumption of food come under scrutiny.Whether looking into backwoods pig farms or exotic live animal markets, the risky interspecies contact seems to be typically located on the margins of the food industry.But the economic imperatives of industrialized farming and globalized food chains largely fall out of the inquiry.Such selective attention to liminal zones shows how epistemic reservoirs that attend to the emerging diseases are often defined through limit-cases and operate through wellestablished colonial epistemologies.One way to confront the racist structures embedded in single-source explanations of epidemics is to invoke global supply chains as part of their origin story.

When virospheres merge
Similar affective undertones weave through the three viral trajectories, expressed in reactions of fear and disgust with alien forms of interspecies intimacy.Whereas zoonotic 'spillover' connotes a dangerous excess, the language of viral jumps, transfers, incursions, and crossings constructs these entities as aliens infiltrating the well-established borders between species.The imagined species barrier is further challenged by shifting viral trajectories.Viruses can cross the species barriers also from humans to other animals in a process of reverse zoonosis (also known by the rather cumbersome name zooanthroponosis). 46This happened with SARS-CoV-2, and as a result, the species most severely influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of lives lost are mink kept on fur farms.Mink are highly susceptible to COVID-19, and it has been shown they can infect people back. 47So in fear of the fur farms becoming sites of a new, more dangerous mutation, all infected or suspect European mink have been culled.By February 2021 SARS-CoV-2 has been detected among farm mink in Spain, Denmark, the USA, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Greece, Lithuania, and Poland. 48By November 2020, 17 million minks had been culled in Denmark alone, after a mink-related variant of the virus was detected in humans.Because of the outbreaks, the Netherlands decided to speed up the permanent shutdown of its mink fur industry from 2024 to 2021, while both Denmark and Sweden canceled the 2021 mink breeding seasons. 49lthough gruesome photographs and videos of skinned bodies of mink after the fur has been harvested have become almost commonplace in the public discourse, the images of festering burial sites of these small mammals after the COVID-19 culls were in some ways even more shocking, as these were 'unproductive' deaths.The materiality and magnitude of these millions of dead bodies lay bare the biopower defining the relationships between humans and nonhuman animals marked by industrial capitalism.The ease with which animal lives can be disposed of when deemed necessary reiterates the acute exploitation of animal bodies in industrial farming, despite the neoliberal formulations of bans on inflicting 'unnecessary suffering'. 50As Neel Ahuja argues, 'the world history of disease control is, for the most part, the failed dream of species extermination' 51 woven into the state's growing ambitions to fully discern healthy and ill bodies, sanitary and infectious spaces. 52With the perception of threats to national health, the precarious pacts of 'no unnecessary suffering' come undone and mink bodies are sacrificed in hopes it will serve the greater good.
Despite the mink culls, by February 2021 the State Serum Institute in Denmark identified over 200 cases of humans infected with the mink-related variant of COVID-19, which possessed mutations that were feared to impact the effectiveness of the vaccine. 53As mutations are crucial to viruses spreading between species and we now know that SARS-CoV-2 mutates easily, 54 the merging of virospheres is a source of concern and of technoscientific justification of mass culls.A the time we are writing this, a COVID-19 vaccine for animals has been registered for use in Russia, 55 which is aimed at protecting both the interests of the farming industry and human health by slowing down the mutations.This human-animal interdependence further demonstrates how a pandemic is not a single-source event, but rather an ongoing exchange between bodies -of humans, animals, and viruses.Interspecies health is an asymmetrical relation, especially, where nonhumans are entangled into human infrastructures and systems of production.
The mass culling of mink and the Russian veterinary vaccine point to an important site for the merging virospheres, which tends to be overlooked in the mainstream discussion on the source of the pandemic, namely, the industrial farm.COVID-19 is not limited to the realm of humans encroaching on the territory of wild nature, but also thrives within the reservoirs of highly concentrated bodies, human and nonhuman, on farms, and at meat-processing plants. 56Due to commercial interests, patent-protected vaccines are often a scarce resource available mostly to rich countries.Cycles of mutations take advantage of this slow vaccine rollout, and together with a host of socioeconomic factors exacerbate the pandemic.When the novel strains emerged they were first commonly referred to as 'South African', 'British', and 'Brazilian' variants in the media, and only later the World Health Organization decided to change the naming pattern to letters of the Greek alphabet to avoid stigmatization based on the suspected source of new mutations. 57Following the poignant suggestion of Bettina Stoetzer in relation to ASF, perhaps we should rename them as 'industrial farming', or 'capitalistimperialist' variants, to shift the focus (and blame) from geographical source of contagion towards systemic power relations that endanger interspecies health.
As these globally significant zoonotic events become more common, the multispecies perspectives on health have gained traction, among them, the One Health (OH) approach.There is a breadth of literature on the OH approach from the last 20 years, 58 including studies exploring the multispecies entanglements of the coronaviruses that caused the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS outbreaks. 59Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, this approach has gained a lot of momentum beyond life sciences.As Chris Degeling, Angus Dawson and Gwendolyn L. Gilbert describe it, OH operates under the premise that prevention and 'zoonotic disease control programs are most effective when the broader socioeconomic and ecological determinants of health are included'. 60They further argue that it is an essentially normative approach, which requires critical consideration of issues usually excluded from medical debates, such as education, inequality, and access to space and resources. 61But those are categories referring to human health only, in which animals might even hide under the 'resource' category.The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the need for heightened consideration of the environmental and ecological aspects of One Health, also known as 'extended OH'. 62The most recent iteration of this line of thought, impacted by the debates about the Anthropocene, is known as the 'planetary health' approach, which has already been institutionalized as a collaboration between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lancet Commission. 63The self-containment and special brand of circularity of global capitalism should not be lost on one venturing into this debate.
SARS-CoV-2's high cross-species transferability has led to suggestions that it might be the first pandemic to become a panzootic. 64However, we should also consider the different ways in which global epidemic events overlap temporarily as viral ranges expand geographically.A recent report on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic considers the outbreak of ASF in China as an ecological event that contributed to the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. 65In the spirit of extended OH or planetary health approaches, the authors hypothesize that the mass culling of pigs infected by the ASFV resulted in significant disruption of pork supply in 2019, followed by soaring pork prices across China that pushed some of the low-income consumers to alternative meat sources, including wildlife. 66Such a perspective suggests that supply chains, rather than biological bodies, become key sites for identifying factors of viral transmission and determining causal pathways.This means that the way we define a viral reservoir should become more system-oriented, especially if we followed the heuristic materiality of water reservoirs, which are always connected to entire hydrological networks -both above and below ground.

Conclusions
Over 30 years after Sontag published AIDS and Its Metaphors, we find ourselves looking for new metaphors and drawing from the epistemic reservoirs of past epidemics, many of which never truly went away, only were sent beyond the horizon of the western world.Their presence there fuels the hegemonic discourses that, according to Bharat Jayram Venkat, are 'organized around a figure of universal history that is imagined to culminate in a hygienic utopia'. 67Tracing the trajectories of three viral diseases we observe time and again that the same scenarios play out at moments of uncertainty.This looping effect, which links ASF, AIDS, and COVID-19, reveals the epistemic mechanisms behind the ongoing search for origins, monitoring transmissions, and surveillance of new diseases.These mechanisms are materialized when certain human and nonhuman bodies come under scrutiny as bridges for spillover events or become stigmatized as disease vectors.In this essay, bats, civets, and wild boars teach us how in times of culminating disasters wildlife comes to discursively represent a hazardous reservoir of pathogenic agents, while farmed pigs and minks are rather understood as valuable, yet disposable surplus bodies.This demonstrates how the imagined realm of 'untamed nature' still functions as a major source of uncertainty, while the seemingly controlled technosphere of agriculture often escapes critical scrutiny in this viral choreography.The food chains that come under the spotlight are the liminal and marginal wet markets, whereas it is the global capitalist forms of industrialized farming that ought to be investigated.As the notion of herd immunity maintains its momentum in the public health discourse, we need to acknowledge that pigs and minks are part of our herd too. 68hen it comes to humans, what the viral trajectories in question share are the causal pathways in which the pre-existing social inequalities are mapped onto affective narratives of blame-ascription that disproportionately impact the lives of marginalized groups in a health crisis.To better understand this process of re-knowing and avoid repeating the forgotten failures in disease etiology, we mobilize the category of epistemic reservoirs that function as archives from which those creating new knowledge can draw.However, this epistemic reservoir in itself does not filter what -often inadvertently -ends up inside it, requiring constant suspicion towards its contents and leaky boundaries.The failures must be remembered and their lessons relearned.Stories about them need to be retold, because, as Fleck reminds us, 'whether we like it or not, we can never sever our links with the past, complete with all its errors'. 69Such perspective allows for analyzing reservoir organisms and populations as historical actors intertwined in broader ecosystemic and infrastructural networks, whose agency needs to be considered when balancing out the benefits of interspecies health.As habits of historicity and empiricism coalesce in their insistence on origin stories, causality, and certainty, epistemic reservoirs are tools for critical analysis of the prevailing socio-material conditions of technoscientific knowledge production in particular historical settings.