Article
French
ID: <
10670/1.dmafob>
Abstract
Fuelled by warnings over pandemic risk, the threat posed by emerging viruses has nowadays acquired a kind of self-evidence. In order to understand how this threat was branded, this paper strives to describe the inception of a research network whose history stretches from the aftermath of World War Two through today. Straddling Egypt, the United States but also sub-Saharan Africa, this network garnered precious data that helped deciphering the identity and the ecology on viruses sparking subsequent concern among western countries. The Egyptian case shows that the current surveillance systems built to cope with emerging viruses can also be ascribed to the long-standing history of networks whose silent, albeit unabated, research lent to being epitomized by a new global threat in the late 1970s.