Download or read book Plagues Pandemics and Viruses written by Heather E. Quinlan and published by Visible Ink Press. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 810 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pandemics can come in waves—like tidal waves. They change societies. They disrupt life. They end lives. As far back as 3000 B.C.E. (the Bronze Age), plagues have stricken mankind. COVID-19 is just the latest example, but history shows that life continues. It shows that knowledge and social cooperation can save lives. Viruses are neither alive nor dead and are the closest thing we have to zombies. Their only known function is to replicate themselves, which can have devastating consequences on their hosts. Most, but not all, bacteria are good for us. Some are truly horrific, including those that caused the bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic plagues. And viruses and bacteria are always morphing, evolving, and changing, making them hard to treat. Plagues, Pandemics, and Viruses: From the Plague of Athens to Covid 19 is an enlightening, and sometimes frightening, recounting of the destruction wrought by disease, but it also looks at what man has done and can do to overcome even the deadliest and bleakest of contagions. More than two years in the making, author Heather E. Quinlan was deep into her research and writing when COVID hit. She quickly saw the similarities to plagues from the past. Plagues, Pandemics, and Viruses: From the Plague of Athens to Covid 19 not only covers the history, causes, medical treatments, human responses, and aftermath of the world’s biggest pandemics, but it also draws parallels to the present. It chronicles the diseases that have inflicted man throughout the millennia, including ... The differences (and similarities) between COVID-19 and other coronaviruses The bubonic plague/black plague, which wiped out 30% to 60% of Europe’s population The devastation to the indigenous population during the European colonization of the Americas The 1918 Spanish Flu, which did not come from Spain How disease “inspired” The Canterbury Tales, Wuthering Heights, the pop art of Keith Haring, and other art and literature AIDS’ “patient zero” How climate change will affect future pandemics The aftermath of various pandemics Several modern diseases making a comeback ... and much, much more. Along with investigating some of history’s most notorious pandemics and diseases, Plagues, Pandemics, and Viruses takes a look at human resilience and what we’ve learned from the past. It looks at how science, the medical community, and governments have conquered or mitigated most epidemics even before they can turn into pandemics. It reviews the science of pandemics, preventative measures, and medical interventions and it includes an exclusive interview with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as other experts in the medical community. Richly illustrated, it also has a helpful bibliography and extensive index. This invaluable resource is designed to help you understand, and protect you from, plagues, pandemics, epidemics, viruses, and disease!
Download or read book The History of the World in 100 Pandemics Plagues and Epidemics written by Paul Chrystal and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “timely, topical, informative [and] exceptionally well written” history explores the impact of disease from prehistoric plagues to Covid-19 (Midwest Book Review). Historian Paul Chrystal charts how human civilization has grappled with successive pandemics, plagues, and epidemics across millennia. Ranging from prehistory to the present day, this volume begins by defining what constitutes a pandemic or epidemic, taking a close look at 20 historic examples: including cholera, influenza, bubonic plague, leprosy, measles, smallpox, malaria, AIDS, MERS, SARS, Zika, Ebola and, of course, Covid-19. Some less well-known, but equally significant and deadly contagions such as Legionnaires’ Disease, psittacosis, polio, the Sweat, and dancing plague, are also covered. Chrystal provides comprehensive information on each disease, including epidemiology, sources and vectors, morbidity, and mortality, as well as governmental and societal responses, and their political, legal, and scientific consequences. He sheds light on how public health crises have shaped history—particularly in the realms of medical and scientific research and vaccine development. Chrystal also examines myths about infectious diseases, and the role of the media, including social media.
Download or read book Viruses Pandemics and Immunity written by Arup K. Chakraborty and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How viruses emerge to cause pandemics, how our immune system combats them, and how diagnostic tests, vaccines, and antiviral therapies work. Throughout history, humans have contended with pandemics. History is replete with references to plagues, pestilence, and contagion, but the devastation wrought by pandemics had been largely forgotten by the twenty-first century. Now, the enormous human and economic toll of the rapidly spreading COVID-19 disease offers a vivid reminder that infectious disease pandemics are one of the greatest existential threats to humanity. This book provides an accessible explanation of how viruses emerge to cause pandemics, how our immune system combats them, and how diagnostic tests, vaccines, and antiviral therapies work-- concepts that are a foundation for our public health policies.
Download or read book On Pandemics written by David Waltner-Toews and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2020-05-28 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing important information about the coronavirus, this comprehensive, easy-to-follow primer on pandemics, epidemics, and the panics they ignite around the world also shares solutions for a safer, healthier future. “A quiet little gem of understanding in a cacophony of panic and fear.” —Quill & Quire, STARRED review Authored by a leading epidemiologist, this engrossing book answers our questions about animal diseases that jump to humans—called zoonoses—including what attracts them to humans, why they have become more common in recent history, and how we can keep them at bay. Almost all pandemics and epidemics have been caused by diseases that come to us from animals, including SARS, Ebola, and—now—Covid-19. Epidemiologist, veterinarian, and ecosystem health specialist, David Waltner-Toews, gathers the latest research to profile dozens of illnesses in On Pandemics. Chapters are broken into short, dynamic explainers, each one tackling a different disease. Readers will discover: Why zoonotic diseases jump from animals to humans—and why some decide to stick around for good. How governments have responded to pandemics and epidemics throughout history, for better or for worse. The role of climate change, industrialized farming, cultural practices, biodiversity loss, and globalization in making these diseases not only possible, but inevitable outcomes of our modern lifestyles. Coronaviruses, such as those that cause SARS and Covid-19, have likely made bats their home for centuries. Until SARS came along, we didn’t know they were there, nor do we know how many other death-dealing viruses might be living undetected in wildlife. On Pandemics shows the greater impact of animal-borne diseases on our world, and encourages us to re-examine our role in pandemics, if not for our own health, then for the health of our planet. Published originally in 2007 as The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases that Jump from Animals to Humans, this book has been updated in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Waltner-Toews makes truly entertaining reading.” —Globe and Mail “A page-turner presented with irreverent humour and many hair-raising anecdotes.” —Vitality Magazine
Download or read book Plagues and Pandemics written by Douglas Boyd and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2022-01-28 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of deadly diseases from throughout world history spanning from prehistoric civilizations to the twenty-first century. All you need for a plague to go pandemic are population clusters and travelers spreading the bacterial or viral pathogens. Many prehistoric civilizations died fast, leaving cities undamaged to mystify archeologists. Plague in Athens killed 30% of the population 430–426 BCE. When Roman Emperor Justinian I caught bubonic plague in 541 CE, contemporary historian Procopius described his symptoms: fever, delirium and buboes—large black swellings of the lymphatic glands in the groin, under the arms and behind the ears. That bubonic plague killed twenty-five million people around the Mediterranean. Later dubbed Black Death, it killed fifty million people 1346-1353, returning to London forty times in the next 300 years. The third bubonic plague pandemic started 1894 in China, claiming fifteen million lives, largely in Asia, before dying down in the 1950s after visiting San Francisco and New York. But it also hit Madagascar in 2014, and the Congo and Peru. The cause, yersinia pestis was identified in 1894. Infected fleas from rats on merchant ships were blamed for spreading it, but Porton Down scientists have a worrying explanation why the plague spread so fast. Any disease can go epidemic. Everyday European infections brought to the Americas by Cortes’ conquistadores killed millions of the natives, whose posthumous revenge was the syphilis the Spaniards brought back to Europe. The mis-named Spanish flu, brought from Kansas to Europe by U.S. troops in 1918 caused more than fifty million deaths. Fifty years later, H3N2 flu from Hong Kong killed more than a million people. One coronavirus produces the common cold, for which neither vaccine nor cure has been found, despite the loss of millions of working days each year. Chillingly, historian Douglas Boyd lists many other sub-microscopic killers still waiting for tourism and trade to bring them to us.
Download or read book Plagues Pandemics and Viruses written by Heather E. Quinlan and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plagues, Pandemics, and Viruses: From the Plague of Athens to Covid 19 is an enlightening, and sometimes frightening, recounting of the destruction wrought by disease, but it also looks at what man has done and can do to overcome even the deadliest and bleakest of contagions.
Download or read book Viruses Plagues and History written by Michael B. A. Oldstone and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Here, my previous edition of Viruses, Plagues, & History is updated to reflect both progress and disappointment since that publication. This edition describes newcomers to the range of human infections, specifically, plagues that play important roles in this 21st century. The first is Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), an infection related to Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). SARS was the first new-found plague of this century. Zika virus, which is similar to yellow fever virus in being transmitted by mosquitos, is another of the recent scourges. Zika appearing for the first time in the Americas is associated with birth defects and a paralytic condition in adults. Lastly, illness due to hepatitis viruses were observed prominently during the second World War initially associated with blood transfusions and vaccine inoculations. Since then, hepatitis virus infections have afflicted millions of individuals, in some leading to an acute fulminating liver disease or more often to a life-long persistent infection. A subset of those infected has developed liver cancer. However, in a triumph of medical treatments for infectious diseases, pharmaceuticals have been developed whose use virtually eliminates such maladies. For example, Hepatitis C virus infection has been eliminated from almost all (>97%) of its victims. This incredible result was the by-product of basic research in virology as well as cell and molecular biology during which intelligent drugs were designed to block events in the hepatitis virus life-cycle"--
Download or read book Viruses Plagues and History written by Michael B. A. Oldstone and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More people were killed by smallpox during the twentieth century--over 300 million--than by all of the wars of that period combined. In 1918 and 1919, influenza virus claimed over 50 million lives. A century later, influenza is poised to return, ongoing plagues of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis infect millions, and Ebola, Zika, and West Nile viruses cause new concern and panic. The overlapping histories of humans and viruses are ancient. Earliest cities became both the cradle of civilization and breeding grounds for the first viral epidemics. This overlap is the focus of virologist/immunologist Michael Oldstone in Viruses, Plagues and History. Oldstone explains principles of viruses and epidemics while recounting stories of viruses and their impact on human history. This fully updated second edition includes engrossing new chapters on hepatitis, Zika, and contemporary threats such as the possible return of a catastrophic influenza, and the impact of fear of autism on vaccination efforts. This is a fascinating panorama of humankind's longstanding conflict with unseen viral enemies, both human successes--such as control of poliomyelitis, measles, smallpox and yellow fever, and continued dangers--such as HIV and Ebola. Impeccably researched and accessibly written, Viruses, Plagues and History will fascinate all with an interest in how viral illnesses alter the course of human history.
Download or read book Plague Pestilence and Pandemic Voices from History written by Peter Furtado and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening anthology from the bestselling editor of Histories of Nations, exploring how people around the globe have suffered and survived during plague and pandemic, from the ancient world to the present. Plague, pestilence, and pandemics have been a part of the human story from the beginning and have been reflected in art and writing at every turn. Humankind has always struggled with illness; and the experiences of different cities and countries have been compared and connected for thousands of years. Many great authors have published their eyewitness accounts and survivor stories of the great contagions of the past. When the great Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta visited Damascus in 1348 during the great plague, which went on to kill half of the population, he wrote about everything he saw. He reported, "God lightened their affliction; for the number of deaths in a single day at Damascus did not attain 2,000, while in Cairo it reached the figure of 24,000 a day." From the plagues of ancient Egypt recorded in Genesis to those like the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages, and from the Spanish flu of 1918 to the Covid-19 pandemic in our own century, this anthology contains fascinating accounts. Editor Peter Furtado places the human experience at the center of these stories, understanding that the way people have responded to disease crises over the centuries holds up a mirror to our own actions and experiences. Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic includes writing from around the world and highlights the shared emotional responses to pandemics: from rage, despair, dark humor, and heartbreak, to finally, hope that it may all be over. By connecting these moments in history, this book places our own reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic within the longer human story.
Download or read book The Plague Year written by Lawrence Wright and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.
Download or read book Disease Control Priorities Third Edition Volume 9 written by Dean T. Jamison and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the culminating volume in the DCP3 series, volume 9 will provide an overview of DCP3 findings and methods, a summary of messages and substantive lessons to be taken from DCP3, and a further discussion of cross-cutting and synthesizing topics across the first eight volumes. The introductory chapters (1-3) in this volume take as their starting point the elements of the Essential Packages presented in the overview chapters of each volume. First, the chapter on intersectoral policy priorities for health includes fiscal and intersectoral policies and assembles a subset of the population policies and applies strict criteria for a low-income setting in order to propose a "highest-priority" essential package. Second, the chapter on packages of care and delivery platforms for universal health coverage (UHC) includes health sector interventions, primarily clinical and public health services, and uses the same approach to propose a highest priority package of interventions and policies that meet similar criteria, provides cost estimates, and describes a pathway to UHC.
Download or read book Virus X written by Frank Ryan and published by FPR-Books Ltd. This book was released on 1998 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ryan has asked experts from around the world to explain where emerging viruses come from and how they have become so strong, and puts forward a new biological theory for the origins and successes of plague viruses. Originally published in 1996.
Download or read book Plagues and Peoples written by William McNeill and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-10-27 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of disease is the history of humankind: an interpretation of the world as seen through the extraordinary impact—political, demographic, ecological, and psychological—of disease on cultures. "A book of the first importance, a truly revolutionary work." —The New Yorker From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, Plagues and Peoples is "a brilliantly conceptualized and challenging achievement" (Kirkus Reviews). Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, another chapter was added to this chronicle of events, which William McNeill explores in his introduction to this edition. Thought-provoking, well-researched, and compulsively readable, Plagues and Peoples is essential reading—that rare book that is as fascinating as it is scholarly, as intriguing as it is enlightening.
Download or read book Pandemics written by Peter C. Doherty and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pandemics. The word conjures up images of horrific diseases sweeping the globe and killing everyone in their path. But such highly lethal illnesses almost never create pandemics. The reality is deadly serious but far more subtle. In Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Peter Doherty, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on how the immune system recognizes virus-infected cells, offers an essential guide to one of the truly life-or-death issues of our age. In concise, question-and-answer format, he explains the causes of pandemics, how they can be counteracted with vaccines and drugs, and how we can better prepare for them in the future. Doherty notes that the term "pandemic" refers not to a disease's severity but to its ability to spread rapidly over a wide geographical area. Extremely lethal pathogens are usually quickly identified and confined. Nevertheless, the rise of high-speed transportation networks and the globalization of trade and travel have radically accelerated the spread of diseases. A traveler from Africa arrived in New York in 1999 carrying the West Nile virus; one mosquito bite later, it was loose in the ecosystem. Doherty explains how the main threat of a pandemic comes from respiratory viruses, such as influenza and SARS, which disseminate with incredible speed through air travel. The climate disruptions of global warming, rising population density, and growing antibiotic resistance all complicate efforts to control pandemics. But Doherty stresses that pandemics can be fought effectively. Often simple health practices, especially in hospitals, can help enormously. And research into the animal reservoirs of pathogens, from SARS in bats to HIV in chimpanzees, show promise for our prevention efforts. Calm, clear, and authoritative, Peter Doherty's Pandemics is one of the most critically important additions to the What Everyone Needs to Know® series. What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
Download or read book The Coming Plague written by Laurie Garrett and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1994-10-31 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller The definitive account of the infectious diseases threatening humanity by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Laurie Garrett "Prodigiously researched . . . A frightening vision of the future and a deeply unsettling one." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times After decades spent assuming that the conquest of infectious disease was imminent, people on all continents now find themselves besieged by AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, cholera that defies chlorine water treatment, and exotic viruses that can kill in a matter of hours. Relying on extensive interviews with leading experts in virology, molecular biology, disease ecology, and medicine, as well as field research in sub-Saharan Africa, Western Europe, Central America, and the United States, Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague takes readers from the savannas of eastern Bolivia to the rain forests of the northern Democratic Republic of the Congo on a harrowing, fifty year journey through the history of our battles with microbes. This book is a work of investigative reportage like no other and a wake-up call to a world that has become complacent in the face of infectious disease—one that offers a sobering and prescient warning about the dangers of ignoring the coming plague.
Download or read book Epidemics and Society written by Frank M. Snowden and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 603 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging study that illuminates the connection between epidemic diseases and societal change, from the Black Death to Ebola This sweeping exploration of the impact of epidemic diseases looks at how mass infectious outbreaks have shaped society, from the Black Death to today. In a clear and accessible style, Frank M. Snowden reveals the ways that diseases have not only influenced medical science and public health, but also transformed the arts, religion, intellectual history, and warfare. A multidisciplinary and comparative investigation of the medical and social history of the major epidemics, this volume touches on themes such as the evolution of medical therapy, plague literature, poverty, the environment, and mass hysteria. In addition to providing historical perspective on diseases such as smallpox, cholera, and tuberculosis, Snowden examines the fallout from recent epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Ebola and the question of the world’s preparedness for the next generation of diseases.
Download or read book History Smashers Plagues and Pandemics written by Kate Messner and published by Random House Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Myths! Lies! Secrets! Uncover the hidden truth about history's pandemics, from the Black Death to COVID-19. Perfect for fans of I Survived! and Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales. During the Black Death in the 14th century, plague doctors wore creepy beaked masks filled with herbs. RIGHT? WRONG! Those masks were from a plague outbreak centuries later--and most doctors never wore anything like that at all! With a mix of sidebars, illustrations, photos, and graphic panels, acclaimed author Kate Messner delivers the whole truth about diseases like the bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, polio, influenza, and COVID-19. Discover the nonfiction series that smashes everything you thought you knew about history! Don't miss History Smashers: The Mayflower, Women's Right to Vote, Pearl Harbor, Titanic, and American Revolution.
