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The Pandemic Century - One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris (Hardcover)
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The Pandemic Century - One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris (Hardcover)
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Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have
dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease.
Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial
disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and
dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu to the 1924 outbreak
of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 "parrot fever"
pandemic, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics,
the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of
unanticipated pandemic alarms. In The Pandemic Century, a lively
account of scares both infamous and less known, Mark Honigsbaum
combines reportage with the history of science and medical
sociology to artfully reconstruct epidemiological mysteries and the
ecology of infectious diseases. We meet dedicated disease
detectives, obstructive or incompetent public health officials, and
brilliant scientists often blinded by their own knowledge of
bacteria and viruses. We also see how fear of disease often
exacerbates racial, religious, and ethnic tensions-even though, as
the epidemiologists Malik Peiris and Yi Guan write, "'nature'
remains the greatest bioterrorist threat of all." Like man-eating
sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting
to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its
place. These pandemics remind us of the limits of scientific
knowledge, as well as the role that human behavior and technologies
play in the emergence and spread of microbial diseases.
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