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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Recurso digital |
| Jezik: | |
| Izdano: |
Zenodo
2025
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| Online dostop: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17760496 |
| Oznake: |
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Kazalo:
- The recurring nature of global pandemics highlights a disturbing pattern: humanity's collective failure to retain and apply lessons from past outbreaks. This phenomenon, termed historical amnesia, poses a significant threat to modern public health preparedness and response. This paper explores the mechanisms through which societies forget the devastating impacts of previous pandemics, leading to a "contagion of forgetting" that manifests in underfunded public health infrastructure, inadequate policy responses, and a lack of public engagement when new crises emerge. Drawing on historical case studies from the Black Death to the 1918 influenza pandemic and recent events like COVID-19, we analyze the sociological, psychological, and political factors that contribute to this amnesia. We specifically posit that the "contagion of forgetting" offers a novel analytical lens, moving beyond mere passive amnesia to emphasize the active, systemic, and self-perpetuating mechanisms by which societies shed inconvenient memories, creating a vulnerability that actively spreads across crises and generations. The paper argues that national commemorations of pandemics are rare, contributing to their decay from public memory. We posit that this cyclical forgetting is not merely passive but is actively shaped by narratives that prioritize economic recovery or political expediency over sustained vigilance. Understanding this contagion of forgetting is crucial for developing robust, resilient, and equitable strategies to confront future pandemic cycles, advocating for proactive memory-keeping mechanisms to foster a more historically informed public and policy framework.