Gouverner une crise sanitaire par le savoir et l’incertitude : le cas des agrégats de « bébés nés sans bras » en France
Abstract
In the fall of 2018, France discovered, through the media, that unexplained grouped cases of babies born without arms existed in several places in the territory. What is more, after having investigated without finding a common cause for the aggregates, the health authorities declared that there was no point in continuing the research. All the ingredients for a health crisis were present, but it was not taken into account for a reason that had nothing to do with the small number of cases listed (fifteen) but which was rather due to the difficulties of establishing cause and effect relationships in the field of environmental health, to which this case belonged. This story shows a salient aspect of the contemporary government of health crises: the way in which the authorities put forward both the state of knowledge and the doubts as justifications for their action. This article is devoted to such a government of health crises in and through scientific knowledge and their share of uncertainty.
Keywords
