A game of scale. How influenza became the object of international cooperation

Influenza was among the first diseases for which the World Health Organization (WHO) established a surveillance program, designating a World Influenza Centre (WIC) at the National Institute for Medical Research in London in 1947, even before the official establishment of the multilateral agency. Advances in virological knowledge resulted in the recognition of the "need for international collaboration" (as stated in a note of the Fourth Session of the WHO Interim Commission) to adequately control the pandemic threat posed by the disease. However, this scientific "need" had to be materially pursued through the establishment of a network - which would later be called the Global Influenza Surveillance Network (GISN) - and a global governance framework for the exchange of information, researchers, and virus strains, during a period of intense international conflict such as the Cold War, and also in a context marked by the emergence of new actors through the process of decolonization. This thesis reconstructs the history of WHO influenza surveillance and its relationships with other major programs, organizations, and foundations between 1947 and the first years of the 1980s, a period when studies on the ecology of diseases, on the one hand, and molecular biology, on the other, profoundly altered the scientific framework through which the disease was understood and managed. Drawing on sources from the WHO, the Wellcome Collection, and the British National Archives, supplemented by French sources (particularly from the Institut Pasteur), U.S. sources (particularly from the Rockefeller Foundation), and other documents consulted in Rome, at the Italian central archives, and at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the thesis traces the history of how the WHO's program on the disease evolved in relation to the challenges, difficulties, and key moments in an arena of international relations strongly marked by geopolitical, strategic, and even ideological competition, as was indeed the case during the Cold War and the era of decolonization. This study employs a range of methodological approaches that have been developed in the context of research on the history of transnational science, and it adopts the theoretical framework of the history of science diplomacy. The study demonstrates how influenza surveillance became "global" not because of the epidemiological characteristics of the virus, but through a long process of negotiation concerning the conditions for the circulation of information and strains. This process unfolded over time across various diplomatic channels, not limited to the official bilateral ones and those of the multilateral system of United Nations agencies, but involving scientific institutions and even individual scientists as well.