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The Pandemic Century

One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris

(Autor)

Buch | Hardcover
464 Seiten
2019
WW Norton & Co (Verlag)
978-0-393-25475-4 (ISBN)
31,40 inkl. MwSt
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year

A medical historian narrates the last century of scientific struggle against an enduring enemy: deadly contagious disease.
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.

Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian, journalist, and author of five books including The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris and The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria. He is currently a lecturer at City University of London.

Erscheinungsdatum
Zusatzinfo 8 pages of black and white photographs
Verlagsort New York
Sprache englisch
Maße 163 x 244 mm
Gewicht 800 g
Themenwelt Geschichte Allgemeine Geschichte Neuzeit (bis 1918)
Medizin / Pharmazie Medizinische Fachgebiete
Studium Querschnittsbereiche Epidemiologie / Med. Biometrie
Studium Querschnittsbereiche Infektiologie / Immunologie
Naturwissenschaften
ISBN-10 0-393-25475-5 / 0393254755
ISBN-13 978-0-393-25475-4 / 9780393254754
Zustand Neuware
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