Over the last decades, we have seen more than three dozen new infectious diseases appear, some of which could kill millions of people with one or two unlucky gene mutations or one or two unfavourable environmental changes. The risks of pandemics only increase as the human population grows; therefore to direct our future we should examine our past. Howard Phillips provides the first look into the history of epidemics in South Africa, probing lethal episodes which significantly shaped this society over three centuries.

Focusing on devastating diseases such as smallpox, bubonic plague, Spanish influenza, polio and HIV/Aids, Plague, Pox and Pandemics probes their origin, their catastrophic course and their consequences in both the short and long term. Their impact ranges from the demographic to the political, the social, the economic, the spiritual, the psychological and the cultural. As each of these epidemics occurred at crucial moments in the country's history - early in European colonisation, in the midst of the mineral revolution, during the South African War and World War I, as industrialisation was getting under way, and within the eras of apartheid and post-apartheid - the book also examines how these processes affected and were affected by the five epidemics, thereby adding important dimensions to an understanding of each.

To those who read this book, South African history will not look the same again.

For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios.

Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected.

A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work.

Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.

Tamoxifen Tales: Suggestions for Scientific Survival presents a case study describing the academic journey of teams behind major advances in medical sciences, highlighting lessons learned that are applicable to the next generation of scientists. This book provides a manual on the successful mentoring of young scientists, including stories describing how training experience shaped careers to become leaders in academia and the pharmaceutical industry. The book documents Professor V. Craig Jordan's 50-year career in medical sciences that led to the discovery and development of Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators (SERMs), which became the standard of women's healthcare around the world. Additionally, it illustrates the versatility of a scientist with a commitment to serving societies. This important resource will be a useful and interesting book for established medical scientists, research mentors and advanced students wanting to chart a successful and impactful research career.

Targeting Chronic Inflammatory Lung Diseases Using Advanced Drug Delivery Systems explores the development of novel therapeutics and diagnostics to improve pulmonary disease management, looking down to the nanoscale level for an efficient system of targeting and managing respiratory disease. The book examines numerous nanoparticle-based drug systems such as nanocrystals, dendrimers, polymeric micelles, protein-based, carbon nanotube, and liposomes that can offer advantages over traditional drug delivery systems. Starting with a brief introduction on different types of nanoparticles in respiratory disease conditions, the book then focuses on current trends in disease pathology that use different in vitro and in vivo models. The comprehensive resource is designed for those new to the field and to specialized scientists and researchers involved in pulmonary research and drug development.

This book reviews the three most popular methods (and their extensions) in applied economics and other social sciences: matching, regression discontinuity, and difference in differences. The book introduces the underlying econometric/statistical ideas, shows what is identified and how the identified parameters are estimated, and then illustrates how they are applied with real empirical examples. The book emphasizes how to implement the three methods with data: many data and programs are provided in the online appendix. All readers--theoretical econometricians/statisticians, applied economists/social-scientists and researchers/students--will find something useful in the book from different perspectives.

Learn biostatistics the easy way. This outstanding resource presents the key concepts you need to understand biostatistics and how to apply them in clinical medicine. Easy-to-understand examples and analogies explain complex concepts, and practical applications provide you with real tools for use in daily practice. The book's organization is intuitive, so that concepts build upon one another, maximizing understanding. This book will give you the confidence to appraise the existing literature - and the vocabulary you need to discuss it. Uses an easy-to-understand presentation and writing style to make the material easily accessible. Places its emphasis on concepts, not formulas, for more clinical-based guidance. Focuses on practical applications of biostatistics to medical practice to give you a better understanding of how and why research is conducted. Presents concise but comprehensive coverage to create easily accessible yet complete information. Provides examples, analogies, and memorization tips to make the material easier to absorb.

This book brings together current thought on several aspects of the use of pesticides in and around homes, schools and workplaces. The book addresses several parts of the process, from the discovery and development of new active ingredients, their formulation, use, longevity, environmental fate and human exposure.

Americans' health improved dramatically over the twentieth century. Public health programs for disease and injury prevention were responsible for much of this advance. Over the century, America's public health system grew dramatically, employing science and political authority in response to an increasing array of health problems. As the disease burden of the old scourges of infection, perinatal mortality, and dietary deficiencies began to lift, public health's mandate expanded to take on new health threats, such as those resulting from a changing workplace, the rise of the automobile, and chronic and complex conditions caused by smoking, diet and other lifestyle and environmental factors. Public health measures almost always occur on contested ground; accordingly, controversies and recriminations over past failures often persist. In contrast, public health's many successes, even the imperfect ones, become part of the fabric of everyday life, a fact already apparent early in the last century, when C.E.A. Winslow reminded his peers that the lives saved and healthy years extended were the "silent victories" of public health. In its exploration of ten major public health issues addressed in the 20th century, Silent Victories takes a unique approach: for each issue, leading scientists in the field trace the discoveries, practices and programs that reduced morbidity and mortality from disease and injury, and an accompanying chapter by a historian or social scientist highlights key moments or conflicts that shaped public health action on that issue. The book concludes with a look toward the challenges public health must face in the future. Silent Victories reveals the lessons of history in aformat designed to appeal to students, health professionals and the public seeking to understand how public health advanced the country's health in the 20th century, and the challenges to protecting health in the future.

In the late 1960s, the World Health Organization initiated a series of international studies of the incidence, characteristics, course, and consequences of schizophrenia. Those studies - the largest ever in the history of psychiatry - provided important data about the disorder in groups of patients living in different countries and cultures, and first focused attention on the differences in short-term prognosis for schizophrenia between the third world and industrialized countries. In the 1990s, the International Study of Schizophrenia (ISoS) set out to relocate those subjects and to determine their clinical and social status some 15 to 25 years later.
Recovery from Schizophrenia is a comprehensive account of what ISoS found, reporting follow-up results for over 1000 subjects examined in the earlier WHO studies (and in several local studies as well). The body of this volume consists of detailed descriptions of the long-term course and outcome of schizophrenia, together with portraits of the field research sites in 14 countries. Introductory and synoptic chapters lay out the origin and design of the WHO studies culminating in ISoS, and synthesize the study's main findings. ISoS shows that, with appropriate treatment, schizophrenia has a favorable outcome for a substantial portion of those afflicted. The surprising finding of the short-term follow-up studies - that outcome was better in the developing than in the developed countries - is confirmed here for long-term course. Yet while prognosis continues to favor subjects in developing countries, the varied outcomes for those in developed nations still offers ample reason for hope.
This book is the first of its kind. The massivemultinational investigations upon which it is based are unique in psychiatry and cross-cultural epidemiology. Recovery from Schizophrenia will be a valuable resource for researchers, epidemiologists, policymakers, and mental health professionals worldwide, providing evidence that supports investment in the care of persons with schizophrenia.

This book presents a logical system of critical appraisal, to allow readers to evaluate studies and to carry out their own studies more effectively. This system emphasizes the central importance of cause and effect relationships. Its great strength is that it is applicable to a wide range of issues, and both to intervention trials and observational studies. This system unifies the often different approaches used in epidemiology, health services research, clinical trials, and evidence-based medicine, starting from a logical consideration of cause and effect. The author's approach to the issues of study design, selection of subjects, bias, confounding, and the place of statistical methods has been praised for its clarity and interest. Systematic reviews, meta-analysis, and the applications of this logic to evidence-based medicine, knowledge-based health care, and health practice and policy are discussed. Current and often controversial examples are used, including screening for prostate cancer, publication bias in psychiatry, public health issues in developing countries, and conflicts between observational studies and randomized trials. Statistical issues are explained clearly without complex mathematics, and the most useful methods are summarized in the appendix. The final chapters give six applications of the critical appraisal of major studies: randomized trials of medical treatment and prevention, a prospective and a retrospective cohort study, a small matched case-control study, and a large case-control study. In these chapters, sections of the original papers are reproduced and the original studies placed in context by a summary of current developments.

This book is an account of a study which provided unique information on trends in growth and respiratory health in British children over 25 years, with methodological discussion and other major findings including risk factors for impaired growth, obesity, respiratory disease and the distribution of coronary heart disease factors. The book provides information on trends in growth, height weight for height and subcutaneous arm tissue, and in respiratory health, asthma attacks and related symptoms, in children aged 5 to 11 years, from 1972 to 1994. It provides information on risk factors for impaired growth, obesity and respiratory disease, and on the distribution of risk factors for coronary heart disease in children. The contribution of the National Health and Growth Study extended to topics such as the effects of changes in welfare policy, under-diagnosis and under-treatment of asthma, nocturnal enuresis, disturbed sleep, the impact of passive smoking on the health of children, and the relation of lung function to the child's intra-uterine environment and to passive smoking. The methodological issues in relation to the conduct of the study and analysis of the data are discussed in non-technical language. Each contribution of the study is discussed in relation to current literature, which is fully referenced throughout.

Personalized medicine is a medical paradigm that emphasizes systematic use of individual patient information to optimize that patient's health care, particularly in managing chronic conditions and treating cancer. In the statistical literature, sequential decision making is known as an adaptive treatment strategy (ATS) or a dynamic treatment regime (DTR). The field of DTRs emerges at the interface of statistics, machine learning, and biomedical science to provide a data-driven framework for precision medicine. The authors provide a learning-by-seeing approach to the development of ATSs, aimed at a broad audience of health researchers. All estimation procedures used are described in sufficient heuristic and technical detail so that less quantitative readers can understand the broad principles underlying the approaches. At the same time, more quantitative readers can implement these practices. This book:* Provides the most up-to-date summary of the current state of the statistical research in personalized medicine.* Contains chapters by leaders in the area from both the statistics and computer sciences fields.* Contains a range of practical advice, introductory and expository materials, and case studies.

In the past two decades, several pandemics have ravaged the globe, giving us several lessons on infectious disease epidemiology, the importance of initial detection and characterization of outbreak viruses, the importance of viral epidemic prevention steps, and the importance of modern vaccines. Pandemic Outbreaks in the Twenty-First Century: Epidemiology, Pathogenesis, Prevention, and Treatment summarizes the improvements in the 21st century to overcome / prevent / treat global pandemic with future prospective. Divided into 9 chapters, the book begins with an in-depth introduction to the lessons learned from the first pandemic of the 21st century. It describes the history, present and future in terms of detection, prevention and treatment. Followed by chapters on the outbreak, treatment strategies and clinical management of several infectious diseases like MERS, SARD and COVID 19, Pandemic Outbreaks in the Twenty-First Century: Epidemiology, Pathogenesis, Prevention, and Treatment, presents chapters on immunotherapies and vaccine technologies to combat pandemic outbreak and challenges. The book finishes with a chapter on the current knowledge and technology to control pandemic outbreaks. All are presented in a practical short format, making this volume a valuable resource for very broad academic audience.

Infectious diseases have been a threat since the beginning of civilization, leading the world to constantly adapt and advance medical knowledge in order to survive. The way society responds to these diseases has changed significantly throughout the years due to an influx of new technology, information, and research. In order to ensure society is equipped to handle future battles with infectious diseases, it is essential to understand past outbreaks and how they were handled. Historical and Epidemiological Analyses on the Impact of Infectious Disease on Society considers the history of infectious disease from the dawn of man to the present and discusses the scope and impact they have had on society and humanity. This book also examines how nation-state conflicts have interwoven with microscopic conflicts. Covering a range of critical topics such as plague, lethality, and technology, this reference work is ideal for medical professionals, historians, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.

Handbook on the Toxicology of Metals, Fifth Edition, Volume I: General Considerations is the first volume of a two-volume work that gives an overview and covers topics of general importance including reviews of various health effects of trace metals. The book emphasizes toxic effects in humans, along with discussions on the toxic effects of animals and biological systems in vitro when relevant. The book has been systematically updated with the latest studies and advances in technology and contains several new chapters. As a multidisciplinary resource that integrates both human and environmental toxicology, the book is a comprehensive and valuable reference for toxicologists, physicians, pharmacologists, and environmental scientists in the fields of environmental, occupational and public health.

COVID-19 in the Environment: Impact, Concerns, and Management of Coronavirus highlights the research and technology addressing COVID-19 in the environment, including the associated fate, transport, and disposal. It examines the impacts of the virus at local, national, and global levels, including both positive and negative environmental impacts and techniques for assessing and managing them. Utilizing case studies, it also presents examples of various issues around handling these impacts, as well as policies and strategies being developed as a result. Organized into six parts, COVID-19 in the Environment begins by presenting the nature of the virus and its transmission in various environmental media, as well as models for reducing the transmission. Section 2 describes methods for monitoring and detecting the virus, whereas Sections 3, 4, and 5 go on to examine the socio-economic impact, the environmental impact and risk, and the waste management impact, respectively. Finally, Section 6 explores the environmental policies and strategies that have comes as a result of COVID-19, the implications for climate change, and what the long-term effects will be on environmental sustainability.

The COVID-19 Disruption and the Global Health Dilemma provides an historical accounting of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the eyes of the largest pubic health system in the United States, one that served the hardest hit neighborhoods in New York City. The book offers a roadmap to guide healthcare systems and their providers in the event of future pandemics. Readers will learn from healthcare providers at the epicenter of the pandemic in New York City about surge staffing and level loading, along with tips from the ED and ICUs on how to respond to an unprecedented influx of inpatients.

Neuroprotection in Alzheimer's Disease offers a translational point-of-view from both basic and clinical standpoints, putting it on the cusp for further clinical development with its emphasis on nerve cell protection, including the accumulation of knowledge from failed clinical trials and new advances in disease management. This book brings together the latest findings, both basic, and clinical, under the same cover, making it easy for the reader to obtain a complete overview of the state-of-the-field and beyond. Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, accounting for 60 to 80 percent of dementia cases. It is a progressive brain disease that slowly destroys memory, thinking skills, and eventually, even the ability to carry out the simplest tasks. It is characterized by death of synapses coupled to death nerve cells and brain degeneration which is manifested by loss of cognitive abilities. Understanding neuroprotection in Alzheimer's disease will pave the path to better disease management and novel therapeutics.