Virulent Zones is an impressively timely book in two senses. Its relevance to our present condition would be obvious even without the epilogue, which explicitly places the book's analysis of influenza research in the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the context of COVID-19. It also comes at the crest of a wave of recent anthropological scholarship on human-animal relations and epidemic prevention in China.Footnote ¹ In the book, Lyle Fearnley argues that the search for the origins of influenza pandemics in China changed scientists’ understanding of the disease itself, leading them toward an ecological view of influenza. He draws on World Health Organization archives, interviews, and scientific literature in Chinese and English, as well as ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing and Jiangxi's Poyang Lake, a site where duck farming practices and the intersection of wild and domestic birds posed apparently ideal conditions for epidemic genesis. Theoretically, Fearnley makes sophisticated use of the concept of scientific displacement, in which the production of knowledge both depends on and results in responses to unexpected events. Fearnley suggests that in a nonlaboratory setting at Poyang Lake, displacements of scientific inquiry led scientists to learn from poultry farmers and veterinarians.

The book has three parts. The first focuses on how China was identified as a probable origin point for influenza pandemics in the twentieth century, following the 1947 establishment of the World Influenza Center and subsequent development of a global laboratory network of influenza research (the World Influenza Programme). Laboratory work on viral phylogenetics combined with broad claims about agricultural practices in South China, specifically the cultivation of free-grazing ducks, to produce claims about China as a disease epicenter; the development of spatial models of influenza epidemics in the early 2000s turned this ideological claim into a research object.

In part two, Fearnley examines how scientific models of viral origins justified interventions into Chinese agriculture, focusing on biosecurity programs advanced by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and PRC. Fearnley suggests that these programs intersected with the rural and agricultural transformations that China underwent in the post-Mao era in unexpected ways, translating pandemic preparation into the “idiom of rural development” (p. 67). The FAO, as well as the Veterinary Bureau of the PRC, proposed that industrialization of rural Chinese agriculture would also improve its biosecurity. Fieldwork at Poyang Lake reveals that the economic pressures incurred by pandemic prevention paradoxically elicited responses by duck farmers that increased the risk of pathogenesis, as they resorted to free grazing in order to cut feed costs. As the FAO and other international teams conducted their own research at Poyang Lake, they developed a new concept of “farmed wild birds” that better represented the interspecies relationships and practices there; this notion “transposed the conceptual boundary between wild and domestic from a spatial setting or habitat to the bird itself” (p. 117).

Part three considers the geopolitical implications of research in the People's Republic of China for issues of bio-sovereignty, which Fearnley argues led to a displacement of research toward new forms of scientific collaboration and communication. Using a case study of the FAO Emergency Center for Transboundary Animal Diseases established in Beijing in 2006, Fearnley suggests that senior technical director Vincent Martin employed two contrasting tactics to gain access to the epidemic epicenter: affinity, involving the cultivation of relationships to facilitate exchange of information and materials, and stratification, in which Martin demonstrated the insignificance of territorial boundaries to questions of epidemic risk and biosecurity. Programs at the center to train state veterinarians in epidemiological expertise and methods suggest a troubling tendency toward what Fearnley calls “technical detachment from human attachment” (p. 190), in which state vets’ specialized knowledge but lack of familiarity with rural communities contrasts with informal “duck doctors” who have minimal expertise but deep ties to farming networks.

In the last section, Fearnley discusses extensively a set of maps made by Martin, which bypassed controversies by using models of risk distribution in place of outbreak reports as a means of guiding biosecurity interventions. This is a compelling argument—yet the maps themselves do not appear in the book, which generally makes good use of visual materials. Their lack of inclusion is understandable for a range of possible reasons; one wonders whether that exclusion might constitute an interesting point about bio-sovereignty. Also, how does the “search for the epicentre” that Fearnley describes connect to other searches for the origins of pandemics in individual superspreaders? Rich McKay has recently shed light on stigmatizing discourses of “Patient Zero” that arose in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.Footnote ² How do the scaled-up efforts to demarcate zones of risk traced so carefully by Fearnley connect to ever-growing concerns with identifying the individual, episodic origin of epidemics? These questions indicate the rich potential of the ideas articulated so lucidly by Fearnley in this excellent book.