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The Emergence of Antimicrobial Resistance as a Public Matter of Concern: A Swedish History of a “Transformative Event”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Hedvig Gröndal
Hedvig Gröndal*
Affiliation:
Upsala University, Sweden E-mail: hedvig.grondal@soc.uu.se
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Argument

This article examines how antimicrobial resistance (AMR) came to be constituted as a matter of public concern in Sweden in conjunction with the development of an inter-professional organization called Strama, founded to promote rational prescription of antibiotics. An outbreak of penicillin-resistant pneumococci in the mid-1990s was crucial for this development, because it brought attention to AMR as an urgent public threat. This outbreak fuelled the constitution of AMR as caused by consumption of antibiotics and as a matter of disease control. As a consequence, Strama was able to mobilize the Swedish health officers responsible for disease control. The outbreak is conceptualized as a “transformative event” – an event that makes an issue and its associated risks concrete and urgent. Transformative events play the crucial role of expediting the transformation of issues into matters of public concern.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 477 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

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