Download or read book Plague Time written by Paul Ewald and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2002-01-08 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to conventional wisdom, our genes and lifestyles are the most important causes of the most deadly ailments of our time. Conventional wisdom may be wrong. In this controversial book, the eminent biologist Paul W. Ewald offers some startling arguments: -Germs appear to be at the root of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, many forms of cancer, and other chronic diseases. -The greatest threats to our health come not from sensational killers such as Ebola, West Nile virus, and super-virulent strains of influenza, but from agents that are already here causing long-term infections, which eventually lead to debilitation and death. -The medical establishment has largely ignored the evidence that implicates these germs, to the detriment of our public health. -New evolutionary theories are available, which explain how germs function and offer opportunities for controlling these modern plagues — if we are willing to listen to them. Plague Time is an eye-opening exploration of the revolutionary new understanding of disease that may set the course of medical research for the twenty-first century.
Download or read book The Great Manchurian Plague of 1910 1911 written by William C. Summers and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When plague broke out in Manchuria in 1910 as a result of transmission from marmots to humans, it struck a region struggling with the introduction of Western medicine, as well as with the interactions of three different national powers: Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. In this fascinating case history, William Summers relates how this plague killed as many as 60,000 people in less than a year, and uses the analysis to examine the actions and interactions of the multinational doctors, politicians, and ordinary residents who responded to it.Summers covers the complex political and economic background of early twentieth-century Manchuria and then moves on to the plague itself, addressing the various contested stories of the plague's origins, development, and ecological ties. Ultimately, Summers shows how, because of Manchuria's importance to the world powers of its day, the plague brought together resources, knowledge, and people in ways that enacted in miniature the triumphs and challenges of transnational medical projects such as the World Health Organization.
Download or read book Advances in Historical Ecology written by William L. Balée and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecology is an attempt to understand the reciprocal relationship between living and nonliving elements of the earth. For years, however, the discipline either neglected the human element entirely or presumed its effect on natural ecosystems to be invariably negative. Among social scientists, notably in geography and anthropology, efforts to address this human-environment interaction have been criticized as deterministic and mechanistic. Bridging the divide between social and natural sciences, the contributors to this book use a more holistic perspective to explore the relationships between humans and their environment. Exploring short- and long-term local and global change, eighteen specialists in anthropology, geography, history, ethnobiology, and related disciplines present new perspectives on historical ecology. A broad theoretical background on the material factors central to the field is presented, such as anthropogenic fire, soils, and pathogens. A series of regional applications of this knowledge base investigates landscape transformations over time in South America, the Mississippi Delta, the Great Basin, Thailand, and India. The contributors focus on traditional societies where lands are most at risk from the incursions of complex, state-level societies. This book lays the groundwork for a more meaningful understanding of humankind's interaction with its biosphere. Scholars and environmental policymakers alike will appreciate this new critical vocabulary for grasping biocultural phenomena.
Download or read book Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2005-04-04 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research examines current interdisciplinary research efforts and recommends ways to stimulate and support such research. Advances in science and engineering increasingly require the collaboration of scholars from various fields. This shift is driven by the need to address complex problems that cut across traditional disciplines, and the capacity of new technologies to both transform existing disciplines and generate new ones. At the same time, however, interdisciplinary research can be impeded by policies on hiring, promotion, tenure, proposal review, and resource allocation that favor traditional disciplines. This report identifies steps that researchers, teachers, students, institutions, funding organizations, and disciplinary societies can take to more effectively conduct, facilitate, and evaluate interdisciplinary research programs and projects. Throughout the report key concepts are illustrated with case studies and results of the committee's surveys of individual researchers and university provosts.
Download or read book Global Flu and You written by George Dehner and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2012-12-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all know the signs: chills, fever, sore throat, muscle aches, coughing. But while the flu may seem harmlessly similar to the common cold, influenza results in between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths every year in epidemics that can spread rapidly around the world. In pandemic years, the disease can kill millions. The recurrence of the Spanish flu virus, the appearance and spread of Bird flu and the unexpected Swine flu pandemic of 2009 have increased interest in and heightened concern about the dangers posed by flu. Drawing on his extensive research into influenza, the author makes clear that such epidemics are not a new phenomenon: humans share a long, complex history with the influenza virus. This comprehensive book traces the animal origins of the disease and outlines the social and cultural changes that have enabled it, over thousands of years, to mutate and evolve to become the endemic threat to human health it is today. In recent generations medical and scientific breakthroughs in studying and protecting against the virus have made rapid progress, providing governments with effective tools to safeguard public health. But modern social, demographic, economic and technological changes may also accelerate and amplify the impact of an influenza pandemic, potentially undermining the promise of these new protective strategies.
Download or read book Death in a Small Package written by Susan D. Jones and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the historical development of the lethal disease and its relationship with humanity. A disease of soil, animals, and people, anthrax has threatened lives for at least two thousand years. Farmers have long recognized its lasting virulence, but in our time, anthrax has been associated with terrorism and warfare. What accounts for this frightening transformation? Death in a Small Package recounts how this ubiquitous agricultural disease came to be one of the deadliest and most feared biological weapons in the world. Bacillus anthracis is lethal. Animals killed by the disease are buried deep underground, where anthrax spores remain viable for decades or even centuries and, if accidentally disturbed, can cause new infections. But anthrax can be deliberately aerosolized and used to kill—as it was in the United States in 2001. Historian and veterinarian Susan D. Jones recounts the life story of anthrax through the biology of the bacillus; the political, economic, geographic, and scientific factors that affect anthrax prevalence; and the cultural beliefs about the disease that have shaped human responses to it. She explains how Bacillus anthracis became domesticated, discusses what researchers have learned from numerous outbreaks, and analyzes how the bacillus came to be weaponized and what this development means for the modern world. Jones compellingly narrates the biography of this frightfully hardy disease from the ancient world through the present day. “Death in a Small Package is interesting, well written, and accessible, presenting a worthwhile addition to the history of modern medicine and bacteriological science.” —Karen Brown, Isis
Download or read book Clio Meets Science written by Robert E. Kohler and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The everyday practice of historical scholarship is by necessity small-scaled and specialized. This essential volume for historians of science reveals how scholars in their everyday practice can work to maintain a sense of a larger purpose. The contributors were encouraged to expand their intimate experience with particular subjects to create works with a broad appeal to scholars in many disciplines. The essays are meant to be exemplars of a historiographical genre that achieve general interest in ways that are participatory, grass-roots, and non-directive.
Download or read book A History of Epidemics in Britain From A D 664 to the extinction of plague written by Charles Creighton and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Influenza written by William Ian Beardmore Beveridge and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Microbial Evolution and Co Adaptation written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2009-05-10 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Joshua Lederberg - scientist, Nobel laureate, visionary thinker, and friend of the Forum on Microbial Threats - died on February 2, 2008. It was in his honor that the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats convened a public workshop on May 20-21, 2008, to examine Dr. Lederberg's scientific and policy contributions to the marketplace of ideas in the life sciences, medicine, and public policy. The resulting workshop summary, Microbial Evolution and Co-Adaptation, demonstrates the extent to which conceptual and technological developments have, within a few short years, advanced our collective understanding of the microbiome, microbial genetics, microbial communities, and microbe-host-environment interactions.
Download or read book Animal Ecology written by Charles Sutherland Elton and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Insatiable Appetite written by Richard P. Tucker and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive and critical historical overview of the role played by the US as a developer and consumer of tropical nature. -- Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, LLC.
Download or read book General Virology written by Salvador Edward Luria and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Persistent Legacy written by Erin Heather McGlothlin and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New essays by prominent scholars in German and Holocaust Studies exploring the boundaries and confluences between the fields and examining new transnational approaches to the Holocaust.
