Carcinogenic residues of global biomedicine in Senegal

Dr Noémi Tousignant will host this STS Research Seminar. The event will consist of a live online talk (40 minutes), followed by a Q&A session. To receive the joining instructions, please email sts@ucl.ac.uk.

In the early 1950s, academic clinicians in Dakar began investigating the puzzlingly high number of fatal liver cirrhosis and cancer cases they saw on hospital wards. More than half a century later, Senegalese are still dying of liver damage. In the intervening decades, biomedical and agronomic scientists defined the main causes of these deaths – namely, chronic hepatitis B infection and the consumption of aflatoxin, the metabolite of a fungal crop contaminant – and developed technologies for their control including vaccines, drugs, diagnostic and regulatory testing and detoxification. In this talk, I consider how to narrate the persistence of Senegalese liver disease and deaths as part of a global history of technoscientific progress, failure and inequality. Describing how Senegalese persons, tissues, institutions and crops have been implicated in generating liver cancer knowledge and protection, I argue that ongoing West African hepatic/carcinogenic susceptibilities and exposures can be conceptualised as residues of global biomedicine.