Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases have become one of the key challenges for contemporary global society. The central claim of Pathological Lives is that any solution offered to these kinds of emerging and often communicable diseases requires a broad-based geographical scrutiny.

Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases have, for some at least, become key challenges for contemporary global society. They threaten progress in global health, compromise food security, and, along with climate change and global terrorism, seem to usher in a state of emergency and a radically uncertain future. The central claim of Pathological Lives is that any solution offered to these kinds of emerging and often communicable diseases requires a broad-based geographical scrutiny. The book marks an empirically and theoretically informed contribution to a world seemingly under constant microbiological threat, drawing together and extending empirically based geographical scholarship in human-environment relations, science and society, more than human geographies and spatial theory to understand and evaluate efforts at making life more secure. The focus is on the food and farming sector, where the generation and subsequent transmission of disease can reach pandemic proportions. The authors review current approaches to biosecurity or making life safe within those sectors, analyse underlying drivers and logics to existing programmes and ask whether the resulting solutions can succeed. They follow farmers, retailers and regulators, amongst others, asking how pathological lives can be successfully 'regulated' without making life more dangerous as a result.