Plagues, Pandemics and Viruses
Plagues, Pandemics and Viruses

Author: Heather E. Quinlan

Publisher: Visible Ink Press

Published: 2020-11-01

Total Pages: 810

ISBN-13: 1578597366

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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!

Viruses, Plagues, and History
Viruses, Plagues, and History

Author: Michael B. A. Oldstone

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 0190056789

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"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"--

The History of the World in 100 Pandemics, Plagues and Epidemics
The History of the World in 100 Pandemics, Plagues and Epidemics

Author: Paul Chrystal

Publisher: Pen and Sword History

Published: 2021-08-31

Total Pages: 619

ISBN-13: 139900543X

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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.

The Plague Year
The Plague Year

Author: Lawrence Wright

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0593320735

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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.

Little Book of Pandemics
Little Book of Pandemics

Author: Peter Moore

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2008-02-12

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 0061374210

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As the world waits once again to see if the latest virus will decimate the population, The Little Black of Pandemics looks at the greatest natural killers of all time. This concise and intelligent look at the most deadly viral and bacterial diseases includes expert opinion on likely future outbreaks, method of contagion, identification of systems, and likelihood of survival. Includes influenza, smallpox, West Nile virus, AIDS, Ebola, SARS, plague, typhus, cholera, tuberculosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, leprosy, meningitis, vCJD, hepatitis, yellow fever, Lassa fever, and many more.

Plagues, Pandemics and Viruses
Plagues, Pandemics and Viruses

Author: Heather E. Quinlan

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781787859852

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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.

Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues [2 volumes]
Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues [2 volumes]

Author: Joseph P. Byrne

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2008-09-30

Total Pages: 917

ISBN-13: 1573569593

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Editor Joseph P. Byrne, together with an advisory board of specialists and over 100 scholars, research scientists, and medical practitioners from 13 countries, has produced a uniquely interdisciplinary treatment of the ways in which diseases pestilence, and plagues have affected human life. From the Athenian flu pandemic to the Black Death to AIDS, this extensive two-volume set offers a sociocultural, historical, and medical look at infectious diseases and their place in human history from Neolithic times to the present. Nearly 300 entries cover individual diseases (such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola, and SARS); major epidemics (such as the Black Death, 16th-century syphilis, cholera in the nineteenth century, and the Spanish Flu of 1918-19); environmental factors (such as ecology, travel, poverty, wealth, slavery, and war); and historical and cultural effects of disease (such as the relationship of Romanticism to Tuberculosis, the closing of London theaters during plague epidemics, and the effect of venereal disease on social reform). Primary source sidebars, over 70 illustrations, a glossary, and an extensive print and nonprint bibliography round out the work.

Plagues and Pandemics
Plagues and Pandemics

Author: Douglas Boyd

Publisher: Pen and Sword History

Published: 2022-01-28

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1399005197

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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.

Viruses, Plagues, and History
Viruses, Plagues, and History

Author: Michael B. A. Oldstone M.D.

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-11-02

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0199758492

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The story of viruses and humanity is a story of fear and ignorance, of grief and heartbreak, and of great bravery and sacrifice. Michael Oldstone tells all these stories as he illuminates the history of the devastating diseases that have tormented humanity, focusing mostly on the most famous viruses. Oldstone begins with smallpox, polio, and measles. Nearly 300 million people were killed by smallpox in this century alone and the author presents a vivid account of the long campaign to eradicate this lethal killer. Oldstone then describes the fascinating viruses that have captured headlines in more recent years: Ebola, Hantavirus, mad cow disease (a frightening illness made worse by government mishandling and secrecy), and, of course, AIDS. And he tells us of the many scientists watching and waiting even now for the next great plague, monitoring influenza strains to see whether the deadly variant from 1918--a viral strain that killed over 20 million people in 1918-1919--will make a comeback. For this revised edition, Oldstone includes discussions of new viruses like SARS, bird flu, virally caused cancers, chronic wasting disease, and West Nile, and fully updates the original text with new findings on particular viruses. Viruses, Plagues, and History paints a sweeping portrait of humanity's long-standing conflict with our unseen viral enemies. Oldstone's book is a vivid history of a fascinating field, and a highly reliable dispatch from an eminent researcher on the front line of this ongoing campaign.

Viral Pathogenesis
Viral Pathogenesis

Author: Michael G. Katze

Publisher: Academic Press

Published: 2015-12-30

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0128011742

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Viral Pathogenesis: From Basics to Systems Biology, Third Edition, has been thoroughly updated to cover topical advances in the evolving field of viral pathogenesis, while also providing the requisite classic foundational information for which it is recognized. The book provides key coverage of the newfound ability to profile molecular events on a system-wide scale, which has led to a deeper understanding of virus-host interactions, host signaling and molecular-interaction networks, and the role of host genetics in determining disease outcome. In addition, the content has been augmented with short chapters on seminal breakthroughs and profiles of their progenitors, as well as short commentaries on important or controversial issues in the field. Thus, the reader will be given a view of virology research with perspectives on issues such as biomedical ethics, public health policy, and human health. In summary, the third edition will give the student a sense of the exciting new perspectives on viral pathogenesis that have been provided by recent developments in genomics, computation, modeling, and systems biology. - Covers all aspects of viral infection, including viral entry, replication, and release, as well as innate and adaptive immunity and viral pathogenesis - Provides a fresh perspective on the approaches used to understand how viruses cause disease - Features molecular profiling techniques, whole genome sequencing, and innovative computational methods - Highlights the use of contemporary approaches and the insights they provide to the field