CONTAINS IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS! "Portrays epidemiologists as disease detectives who tirelessly hunt for clues and excel at deductive reasoning. Even Sherlock Holmes would be proud of this astute group of professionals."-Booklist This updated edition features a brand new section detailing important facts about the coronavirus and tips for keeping yourself and your family safe. Despite advances in health care, infectious microbes continue to be a formidable adversary to scientists and doctors. Vaccines and antibiotics, the mainstays of modern medicine, have not been able to conquer infectious microbes because of their amazing ability to adapt, evolve, and spread to new places. Terrorism aside, one of the greatest dangers from infectious disease we face today is from a massive outbreak of drug-resistant microbes. Deadly Outbreaks recounts the scientific adventures of a special group of intrepid individuals who investigate these outbreaks around the world and figure out how to stop them. Part homicide detective, part physician, these medical investigators must view the problem from every angle, exhausting every possible source of contamination. Any data gathered in the field must be stripped of human sorrows and carefully analyzed into hard statistics. Author Alexandra Levitt, PhD, is an expert on emerging diseases and other public health threats. Here she shares insider accounts she's collected that go behind the alarming headlines we've seen in the media: mysterious food poisonings, unexplained deaths at a children's hospital, a strange neurologic disease afflicting slaughterhouse workers, flocks of birds dropping dead out of the sky, and drug-resistant malaria running rampant in a refugee camp. Meet the resourceful investigators-doctors, veterinarians, and research scientists-and discover the truth behind these cases and more.

Once known a the "great fire, "the spotted death" or "destroying angel", smallpox has been rivaled only by plague as a source of supreme terror. Spreading easily through the air, especially in crowded urban conditions, smallpox even today is fatal to 25% of its victims; there is no known cure once symptoms appear. Although naturally occurring smallpox was eradicated in 1977, recent terrorist attacks in the United States have raised the appalling possibility that someone might craft a deadly biological weapon from stocks of the virus that remain in known (and perhaps unknown) laboratories. In "The Greatest Killer" Donald R. Hopkins provides a fascinating account of smallpox and its role in human history. Starting with its origins 10,000 years ago in Africa or Asia, Hopkins follows the disease on its rampage through both the ancient and modern worlds, including its spread to Europe and the Americas. He describes how smallpox often wiped out whole villages and decimated the populations of entire regions, and how the disease disrupted agriculture and trade. Smallpox changed the course of history as it removed or temporarily incapacitated heads of state, halted or exacerbated wars, and devastated populations that had never been exposed to the disease. In Hopkins's history, smallpox was one of the most dangerous - and influential -characters that shaped the course of world events.