Local Biologies, Leaky Things, and the Chemical Infrastructure of Global Health

This article examines how two chemical substances are woven into the infrastructure of global health as well as into the social lives of health workers in urban Nicaragua. One chemical is temephos, an organophosphate used to control mosquitoes. The other is chlorine-based products, which are used to disinfect surfaces and water. While global health projects tend to treat these substances as stable objects, there are three ways in which they might be understood as leaky things, implicated in fluid social interactions. First, global health chemicals are tracked through rigid accounting, but because of numerical leakages, they become vehicles for fashioning new forms of concern. Second, chemicals leak structurally: They can be dissolved and reproduced at a molecular level, although that dissolution is never absolute, and that reproduction is not everywhere the same. Third, chemicals leak in a sensory fashion. Sensory interactions with chemicals produce an entanglement of knowledge about bodies and environments.