What is it about?
This chapter examines changes in the public perception of tick-borne diseases as a risk to human health from the 1950s to the early 2000s. The topic is approached from the perspective of the history of medicine and health in the Finnish context. Tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) was discovered in Finland as early as the 1950s, but it was the awakening to the prevalence of Lyme borreliosis in the 1990s that led to a full-blown tick scare. The chapter asks why the public has become more afraid of tick-borne diseases than scientific experts believe it should be. The obvious explanation would be the proliferation of both ticks and tick-borne diseases. However, this chapter shows how the image of tick-borne diseases has also been influenced by social factors, ranging from scientific knowledge and individual experience to health policy priorities and the changing disease spectrum – not to mention the way tick-borne diseases have been reported in the press.
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Why is it important?
We tend to think of diseases as purely biological phenomena, but it is important to recognise how our perceptions of them are also influenced by social and cultural factors. Accordingly, this article aims to analyse how the public image of tick-borne diseases and their dangers has been socially constructed.
Perspectives
I hope that this Finnish case study will be of interest to a wider audience of researchers and others interested in the history of medicine and health. After all, diseases as biological phenomena are similar all over the world, but what makes them interesting to historians is the cultural and social meanings attached to them, which vary from country to country and culture to culture.
Suvi Rytty
University of Turku
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Social Construction of Tick-Borne Diseases from the 1950s to the Twenty-First Century: a View from the History of Medicine, November 2024, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004715448_012.
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