Showing titles in Contagious Diseases

'Rachel takes the worst life can throw at us and shows us the beauty in it' Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt Included in Best Books to read in 2021 pieces in the Sunday Times, Guardian, Financial Times, New Stateman, Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Evening Standard, The Tablet, Sunday...

Over the past 50 years, rates of autoimmunity and chronic disease have exploded. In this provocative book, Dr. Thomas Cowan argues for a direct causal relationship to a corresponding increase in the number of vaccines American children typically receive. The goal of these vaccines is precisely what we’re now seeing in such abundance among our chronically ill children: the provocation of immune response. Cowan looks at emerging evidence that certain childhood illnesses are actually protective of disease later in life.

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. For this revised edition, Oldstone includes discussions of new viruses like SARS, bird flu, virally caused cancers, chronic wasting disease, and West Nile. Viruses, Plagues, and History paints a sweeping portrait of humanity's long-standing conflict with our unseen viral enemies.

From the masters of storytelling-meets-science and co-authors of Quackery, Patient Zero tells the long and fascinating history of disease outbreaks—how they start, how they spread, the science that lets us understand them, and how we race to destroy them before they destroy us. Written in the...

*The inside story of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, from two of the leading scientists who created it. Fully updated for paperback publication with a preface and a new chapter .* This is the story of a race - not against other vaccines or other scientists, but against a deadly and devastating...

From tuberculosis to bird flu and HIV to coronavirus, these infectious diseases share a common origin story: human interaction with animals. Otherwise known as zoonotic diseases for their passage from animals to humans, these pathogens—both pre-existing ones and those newly identified—emerge...

As globalisation spreads and as we destroy the ancient ecosystems, we encounter strange and dangerous infections that originate in animals but that can be transmitted to humans. Diseases that were contained are being set free, and the results are potentially catastrophic. In a journey that takes him from Southern China to the Congo, from Bangladesh to Australia, David Quammen tracks these infections to their source and asks what we can do to prevent some new pandemic spreading across the face of the earth.

Understanding how Covid-19 started is more important than we know for the future of humankind. Determining whether the virus came from nature or from a lab will help us to safeguard against the next pandemic. This disease will forever punctuate modern history. It has led to the deaths of...

Plagues upon the Earth is a monumental history of humans and their germs. Weaving together a grand narrative of global history with insights from cutting-edge genetics, Kyle Harper explains why humanity’s uniquely dangerous disease pool is rooted deep in our evolutionary past, and why its growth is accelerated by technological progress. He shows that the story of disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and reveals the enduring effects of historical plagues all around us, in patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality.

Fair Doses is a story of vaccines: how they came about, why they are important, and how they have been made globally available—although our quest for vaccine equity is still ongoing. In this fascinating deep dive into vaccines, Dr. Seth Berkley offers an inside view of the challenges of developing and disseminating vaccines for a broad swath of illnesses, from Ebola to AIDS to malaria and beyond.

With over 30 years of experience as a nurse, Anthea thought she had seen it all. But with Covid came the greatest trial, personally and professionally, of her life. Thrust into hourly challenges–many a matter of life and death–while on the Critical Care units of St George’s in south London, Anthea processed her shocking experiences through writing. It started with an email to request biscuits. But her appeal to help boost the morale of her fellow nurses soon turned into a series of astonishingly moving stories detailing the realities of being a front line worker.

“Powerful, rich with details, moving, humane, and full of important lessons for an age when weapons of mass destruction are loose among us.” — Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human...

Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes listeners from Rome's pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted.

At every moment, within your body and all around you, trillions of microscopic combatants are fighting an invisible war. Countless times per second, 'good' viruses known as phages are infecting and destroying bacteria. These phages are the most abundant life form on the planet and have an incredible power to heal rather than harm. So why have most of us never even heard of them? The Good Virus reveals how personalities, power and politics have repeatedly crashed together to hinder our understanding of these weird and wonderful life forms.

From the award-winning author of American Sirens and A Thousand Naked Strangers comes a real-life thriller about the most daring rescue in air-medical history. JULY 2014. Two American medical volunteers who joined the fight against the deadliest Ebola outbreak in world history have gotten...

In Why Are Health Disparities Everyone's Problem? Dr. Lisa Cooper shows how we can work together to eliminate the injustices that plague our health care system and society. The book follows Cooper's journey from her childhood in Liberia, West Africa, to her thirty-year career working first as a clinician and then as a health equity researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Drawing on her experiences, it explores how differences in communication and the quality of relationships affect health outcomes.

In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, known now as the Antonine plague, may have been history’s first pandemic. Soon after its arrival, the Empire began its downward trajectory toward decline and fall.

Unlike natural disasters, whose destruction is concentrated in a limited area over a period of days, and illnesses, which have devastating effects but are limited to individuals and their families, infectious disease has the terrifying power to disrupt everyday life on a global scale, overwhelming public and private resources and bringing trade and transportation to a grinding halt.

The Covid pandemic quickly led to the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history. By early April 2020, half the world's population were living under quarantine. The most devastating pandemic in a century and the policies adopted in response to it upended life as we knew it. In this book, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee examine our pandemic response and pose some provocative questions: Why did we ignore pre-Covid plans for managing a pandemic? Did we adequately consider the costs and benefits of different policy options?

Humanity is under assault from pandemics but not for the reasons that the mainstream sources portray. This book examines the claims regarding alleged “contagious” disease outbreaks such as COVID-19 to shed more light on what they are, or perhaps more importantly, what they are not. The belief that germs from the natural environment (or a laboratory) are attacking us has led most of the population to go along with lockdowns, civil rights restrictions, unprecedented peacetime censorship and more vaccines.