Virulent Zones : Duke University Press : 9781478011057 : 147801105X : 23 Oct 2020 : "VIRULENT ZONES is an ethnography of the search for the origins of influenza pandemics in rural China. In the early 1980s, Hong-Kong based virologists pinpointed southern China as an origin for influenza pandemics due to the region's entanglements of farming practices, animal husbandry, and wet-rice paddy landscapes. One example is Poyang Lake, which is not only China's largest freshwater lake, but a wintering site for hundreds of thousands of migratory birds and the home of large-scale duck farming. According to popular imaginings of pandemic epicenters, scientists go to a remote place and find a discrete origin for a virus, which can then be transported back into a laboratory for further research. But for anthropologist Lyle Fearnley, Poyang Lake exemplifies the importance of what scientists call the non-virological, or other factors outside of the virus that are crucial to understanding the virus' sp