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26 books match the query 'Infectious Diseases'

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A Planet of Viruses

Carl Zimmer

University of Chicago Press, 2015

For years, scientists have been warning us that a pandemic was all but inevitable. Now it's here, and the rest of us have a lot to learn.

Fortunately, science writer Carl Zimmer is here to guide us. In this compact volume, he tells the story of how the smallest living things known to science can bring an entire planet of people to a halt--and what we can learn from how we've defeated them in the past.

Planet of Viruses covers such threats as Ebola, MERS, and chikungunya virus; tells about recent scientific discoveries, such as a hundred-million-year-old virus that infected the common ancestor of armadillos, elephants, and humans; and shares new findings that show why climate change may lead to even deadlier outbreaks. Zimmer’s lucid explanations and fascinating stories demonstrate how deeply humans and viruses are intertwined. Viruses helped give rise to the first life-forms, are responsible for many of our most devastating diseases, and will continue to control our fate for centuries. Thoroughly readable, and, for all its honesty about the threats, as reassuring as it is frightening, A Planet of Viruses is a fascinating tour of a world we all need to better understand.

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A Planet of Viruses

Third Edition

Carl Zimmer

University of Chicago Press, 2021

In 2020, an invisible germ—a virus—wholly upended our lives. We’re most familiar with the viruses that give us colds or Covid-19. But viruses also cause a vast range of other diseases, including one disorder that makes people sprout branch-like growths as if they were trees. Viruses have been a part of our lives for so long that we are actually part virus: the human genome contains more DNA from viruses than our own genes. Meanwhile, scientists are discovering viruses everywhere they look: in the soil, in the ocean, even in deep caves miles underground.

Fully revised and updated, with new illustrations and a new chapter about coronaviruses and the spread of Covid-19, this third edition of Carl Zimmer’s A Planet of Viruses pulls back the veil on this hidden world. It presents the latest research on how viruses hold sway over our lives and our biosphere, how viruses helped give rise to the first life-forms, how viruses are producing new diseases, how we can harness viruses for our own ends, and how viruses will continue to control our fate as long as life endures.

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Beasts of the Earth

Animals, Humans, and Disease

Torrey, E. Fuller

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Humans have lived in close proximity to other animals for thousands of years. Recent scientific studies have even shown that the presence of animals has a positive effect on our physical and mental health. People with pets typically have lower blood pressure, show fewer symptoms of depression, and tend to get more exercise.

But there is a darker side to the relationship between animals and humans. Animals are carriers of harmful infectious agents and the source of a myriad of human diseases. In recent years, the emergence of high-profile illnesses such as AIDS, SARS, West Nile virus, and bird flu has drawn much public attention, but as E. Fuller Torrey and Robert H. Yolken reveal, the transfer of deadly microbes from animals to humans is neither a new nor an easily avoided problem.

Beginning with the domestication of farm animals nearly 10,000 years ago, Beasts of the Earth traces the ways that human-animal contact has evolved over time. Today, shared living quarters, overlapping ecosystems, and experimental surgical practices where organs or tissues are transplanted from non-humans into humans continue to open new avenues for the transmission of infectious agents. Other changes in human behavior like increased air travel, automated food processing, and threats of bioterrorism are increasing the contagion factor by transporting microbes further distances and to larger populations in virtually no time at all.

While the authors urge that a better understanding of past diseases may help us lessen the severity of some illnesses, they also warn that, given our increasingly crowded planet, it is not a question of if but when and how often animal-transmitted diseases will pose serious challenges to human health in the future.

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Diseases of Poverty

Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, and Modern Plagues

Lisa V. Adams and John R. Butterly

Dartmouth College Press, 2015

Only a few decades ago, we were ready to declare victory over infectious diseases. Today, infectious diseases are responsible for significant morbidity and mortality throughout the world. This book examines the epidemiology and social impact of past and present infectious disease epidemics in the developing and developed world. In the introduction, the authors define global health as a discipline, justify its critical importance in the modern era, and introduce the Millennium Development Goals, which have become critical targets for most of the developing world. The first half of the volume provides an epidemiological overview, exploring early and contemporary perspectives on disease and disease control. An analysis of nutrition, water, and sanitation anchors the discussion of basic human needs. Specific diseases representing both “loud” and “silent” emergencies are investigated within broader structures of ecological and biological health such as economics, education, state infrastructure, culture, and personal liberty. The authors also examine antibiotic resistance, AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and pandemic influenza, and offer an epilogue on diseases of affluence, which now threaten citizens of countries both rich and poor. A readable guide to specific diseases, richly contextualized in environment and geography, this book will be used by health professionals in all disciplines interested in global health and its history and as a textbook in university courses on global health.

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Framing Disease

Studies in Cultural History

Rosenberg, Charles E

Rutgers University Press, 1992

"In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it, " writes Charles E. Rosenberg in his introduction to this stimulating set of essays. Disease is both a biological event and a social phenomenon. Patient, doctor, family, and social institutions—including employers, government, and insurance companies—all find ways to frame the biological event in terms that make sense to them and serve their own ends.

Many diseases discussed here—endstage renal disease, rheumatic fever, parasitic infectious diseases, coronary thrombosis—came to be defined, redefined, and renamed over the course of several centuries. As these essays show, the concept of disease has also been used to frame culturally resonant behaviors: suicide, homosexuality, anorexia nervosa, chronic fatigue syndrome. Disease is also framed by public policy, as the cases of industrial disability and of forensic psychiatry demonstrate. Medical institutions, as managers of people with disease, come to have vested interests in diagnoses, as the histories of facilities to treat tuberculosis or epilepsy reveal. Ultimately, the existence and conquest of disease serves to frame a society's sense of its own "healthiness" and to give direction to social reforms.

The contributors include Steven J. Peitzman, Peter C. English, John Farley, Christopher Lawrence, Michael MacDonald, Bert Hansen, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Robert A. Aronowitz, Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner, Janet A. Tighe, Barbara Bates, Ellen Dwyer, John M. Eyler, and Elizabeth Fee. For any student of disease and society, this book is essential, compelling reading.

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Geographic Medicine for the Practitioner

Algorithms in the Diagnosis and Management of Exotic Diseases

Kenneth D. Warren and Adel A. F. Mahmoud

University of Chicago Press, 1978

"The many diseases that are endemic in most of the developing nations of the world (and that may also affect travelers to these regions) are, at world levels, the most important sources of morbidity that affect the entire human race. The change in morbidity patterns in the more developed nations should not be permitted to blind the more affluent countries to the implications of this simple statement. Thus, direct and useful guides are needed to assure efficient and economical diagnosis and treatment of those infections that are endemic to the less affluent two-thirds of the earth.

"The algorithms in this book have been developed by Drs. Warren and Mahmoud, as the result of a systematic effort to produce such guides. The book is presented as another in the series "Studies in Infectious Disease Research" and is a most welcome addition, certain to supply a major and hitherto inadequately fulfilled need."—from the Foreword, by Edward H. Kass, M. D., Ph.D

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Hidden Arguments

Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy

Sylvia Noble Tesh

Rutgers University Press, 1988

In this provocative book, Sylvia Tesh shows how "politics masquerades as science" in the debates over the causes and prevention of disease. Tesh argues that ideas about the causes of disease which dominate policy at any given time or place are rarely determined by scientific criteria alone. The more critical factors are beliefs about how much government can control industry, who should take risks when scientists are uncertain, and whether the individual or society has the ultimate responsibility for health. Tesh argues that instead of lamenting the presence of this extra-scientific reasoning, it should be brought out of hiding and welcomed. She illustrates her position by analyzing five different theories of disease causality that have vied for dominance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and discusses in detail the political implications of each theory. Tesh also devotes specific chapters to the multicausal theory of disease, to health education policy in Cuba, to the 1981 air traffic controller's strike, to the debate over Agent Orange, and to an analysis of science as a belief system.

Along the way she makes these principal points: She criticizes as politically conservative the idea that diseases result from a multifactorial web of causes. Placing responsibility for disease prevention on "society" is ideological, she argues. In connection with the air traffic controllers she questions whether it is in a union's best interests to claim that workers' jobs are stressful. She shows why there are no entirely neutral answers to questions about the toxicity of environmental pollutants. In a final chapter, Tesh urges scientists to incorporate egalitarian values into their search for the truth, rather than pretending science can be divorced from that political ideology.

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Infectious Disease Emergencies

Preparedness and Response

Edited by Dale Fisher

National University of Singapore Press, 2025

An accessible and diverse resource for infectious disease outbreak response.

For too long, the theory and practice of infectious disease outbreak response have been the domain of a small number of experienced responders. The COVID-19 pandemic brought global attention to the requirements of effective outbreak response, and the need for preparation across the key pillars. Decisionmakers, early career practitioners, and those in the field now have access to a comprehensive text that brings together evidence-based and practical insights from the best in the business.

Dale Fisher, Professor of Medicine at the National University of Singapore, was chair of WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network before and during most of the pandemic. In this massive collaborative effort, he marshals nearly one hundred top public health leaders and experts from the front lines to present thirty-seven chapters on pandemic preparedness and response, drawing heavily on experiences from COVID-19, but also from Ebola, MERS, SARS-1, influenza, and other outbreaks of modern times. The contributors include experts from health ministries and Centres for Disease Control and national public health institutions around the world; from international organizations like the WHO, MSF, IFRC, and UNICEF; and research institutions and various NGOs from dozens of countries, adding to the diversity and richness of the descriptions.

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Infectious Disease

A Scientific American Reader

Edited by Scientific American

University of Chicago Press, 2008

The international public health scare that resulted last year when a man infected with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis flew overseas from the United States and back illustrates both the fear and the potential impact of highly infectious diseases in a global age. At a time when scientists warn of the potential for an influenza epidemic to rival the deadly outbreak of 1919 and newspapers feature alarming headlines about incidences of mad cow disease, infectious disease will be a critical area of concern and scientific study in the twenty-first century.

Infectious Disease collects thirty of the most exciting, innovative, and significant articles on communicable illness published inthe pages of ScientificAmerican magazine since 1993. With sections devoted to viral infections, infectious disease, the immune system, and global management and treatment issues, Infectious Disease provides general readers and students with an excellent overview of recent research in the field. Roger I. Glass discusses a potential vaccine for the rotavirus—a leading cause of severe childhood diarrhea world wide and frequent killer of young children in developing nations. Jeffery K. Taubenberger and colleagues investigate the virulent strain of influenza that killed up to 40 million people in 1919 to suggest treatments and recommend preventative measures. And Paul R. Epstein looks into whether global warming could be harmful to our health, untangling research that suggests that many diseases will flourish as Earth’s atmosphere heats up.

The prominence of disease in the ecology and evolution of human society has spurred investment in research and technology development, and, as a consequence, the topic is much discussed in the general and scientific media. Infectious Disease is the essential sourcebook for anyone looking for the solid science and compelling narrative behind the stories that make headlines.

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Making Uncertainty

Tuberculosis, Substance Use, and Pathways to Health in South Africa

Anna Versfeld

Rutgers University Press, 2023

In Cape Town, South Africa, many people with tuberculosis also use substances. This sets up a seemingly impossible problem: People who use substances are at increased risk of tuberculosis disease; and substance use seems to result in erratic behavior that makes successful treatment of people affected by tuberculosis extremely difficult. People affected don’t get healthy, healthcare providers are frustrated, and families seek to balance love and care for those who are ill with self-protection. How are we to understand this? Where does the responsibility for poor health and healing lie? What are the possibilities for an effective healthcare response? Through a close look at lives and care, Making Uncertainty: Tuberculosis, Substance Use, and Pathways to Health shows how patterns of substance use, tuberculosis disease, and their interaction are shaped by history, social context, and political economy. This, in turn, generates new perspectives on what makes poor health, and what good care might look like.

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Maraña

War and Disease in the Jungles of Colombia

Lina Pinto-García

University of Chicago Press, 2025

Delves into the relationship between war and disease, focusing on Colombian armed conflict and the skin disease known as cutaneous leishmaniasis.

Cutaneous leishmaniasis, transmitted by female sandflies, produces skin lesions of varying size and shape. In Colombia, the insect vector of the disease is native to the same forested environments that have served as the main stage for one of the longest and most violent wars in Latin American history. As a result, the populations most affected by leishmaniasis in Colombia are members of the state army and nonstate armed groups.

Lina Pinto-García explores how leishmaniasis and the armed conflict are inextricably connected and mutually reinforcing. Maraña means “tangle” in Spanish but is also commonly used in Colombia to name the entangled greenery, braided lianas, and dense foliage that characterize the tropical forests where leishmaniasis transmission typically occurs. Pinto-García argues that leishmaniasis and the war are not merely linked but enmarañadas to each other through narratives, technologies, and practices produced by the state, medicine, biomedical research, and the armed conflict itself. All told, Maraña is a passionate study of how war has shaped the production of scientific knowledge about leishmaniasis and access to its treatments in Colombia.

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Mosquito Warrior

Yellow Fever, Public Health, and the Forgotten Career of General William C. Gorgas

Carol R. Byerly

University of Alabama Press, 2024

A compelling biography of General William C. Gorgas, the US Army doctor's campaign against mosquito-borne disease reshaped public health, military medicine, and U. S. power on the world stage.

Mosquito Warrior tells the engrossing story of General William C. Gorgas (1854–1920), the once-renowned pioneer in tropical disease research and public health. His fascinating life illuminates vast transformations in the United States, including the end of the Civil War and the industrialization of the US military and economy, the emergence of germ theory and the modernization of the public health system, and the rise of the United States as a world power.

A scion of Confederate elites, Gorgas came of age amidst war and disease and the politics of racial segregation. He followed his father into military service as an army medical officer, treating troops on America’s western frontier posts. During the US occupation of Cuba, Gorgas applied Walter Reed’s research on the theory of mosquito-borne disease transmission, ending centuries of yellow fever in Havana through the eradication of the deadly Aedes aegypti mosquito. Applying similar strategies on the isthmus of Panama against yellow fever and malaria, Gorgas enabled the completion of the Panama Canal, then the largest engineering project in the world. Hailed a hero, he pursued his fight against mosquito-borne disease throughout the tropics, expanding American interests as he went. Appointed as US Army surgeon general on the eve of World War I, Gorgas resumed work modernizing the army health care system, strengthening US medical and military authority on the world stage.

Celebrated in life, Gorgas’s reputation fell victim to competing political interests and jealousies after his death, a cautionary tale about historical memory and the politics of science and personality. Carol R. Byerly’s balanced and contemporary examination of Gorgas illuminates his complex legacy in medicine and public health, military history, and American ambitions at the dawn of US global ascendency.

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Persisting Pandemics

Syphilis, AIDS, and COVID

Powel H. Kazanjian

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Persisting Pandemics explores the history of syphilis and AIDS to provide insights into the limits of biomedicine and our experience with epidemics today. Novel therapies developed for syphilis and AIDS became renowned in the medical field and the broader public sphere as exemplars of biomedical innovations. Public health campaigns based on these spectacular biomedical advances, however, have repeatedly fallen short of their goals to eliminate syphilis and AIDS in the population. The diseases epitomize the power of innovative biomedical therapies for the individual while unveiling limitations of scientific medicine in the domain of public health. The need for a public health approach to address mistrust in science, government indifference, and racial inequalities is relevant for strategies to eliminate COVID-19 today. Persisting Pandemics argues that campaigns to eliminate these diseases have not succeeded because they have not adequately addressed how diseases like AIDS, syphilis, and COVID spread unevenly in populations according to race, ethnicity, and geographic location. Despite the expectation of public health officials that medical advances would render epidemics obsolete, new diseases continue to emerge and spread regardless of efforts to eliminate them. Medical doctor and historian Powel H. Kazanjian concludes that narratives of syphilis, AIDS and COVID, unlike smallpox, do not contain a discrete ending—at least not within the timelines specified by their elimination campaigns. Instead they will be a continued part of our existence.

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Perturbing the Organism

The Biology of Stressful Experience

Herbert Weiner

University of Chicago Press, 1992

The concept of stress pervades modern society, with relief from it promised on everything from vitamin to vacation packages. Yet there exists no generally accepted classification of stressful experience, nor is the concept itself universally considered a valid subject for research.

This authoritative work is the first to analyze critically the entire range of research and theory on stress in animals and humans, from the earliest studies in the 1930s up to the present day. Herbert Weiner not only documents the many empirical and conceptual advances of recent years, but also supplies a new working definition and classification of stressful experience. He describes the integrated, organismic responses to stressful environmental changes, tasks, and challenges in terms of functional adaptation: the failure of these responses results in injury, ill-health, disease, and death. To examine the coordination between behavior and bodily functions, Weiner reviews current knowledge on how stressful experiences also alter biobehavioral rhythms.

Providing a useful, integrative concept of stress rooted in an understanding of the organism as an interactive communication system composed of many subsystems, Perturbing the Organism will interest a wide range of clinicians and researchers throughout the medical and behavioral sciences.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Mental Health and Development

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Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic

Transcultural Communication about SARS

Huiling Ding

Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

2016 CCCC Best Book Award in Technical and Scientific Communication

In the past ten years, we have seen great changes in the ways government organizations and media respond to and report on emerging global epidemics. The first outbreak to garner such attention was SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). In Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic, Huiling Ding uses SARS to explore how various cultures and communities made sense of the epidemic and communicated about it. She also investigates the way knowledge production and legitimation operate in global epidemics, the roles that professionals and professional communicators, as well as individual citizens, play in the communication process, points of contention within these processes, and possible entry points for ethical and civic intervention.

Focusing on the rhetorical interactions among the World Health Organization, the United States, China, and Canada, Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic investigates official communication and community grassroots risk tactics employed during the SARS outbreak. It consists of four historical cases, which examine the transcultural risk communication about SARS in different geopolitical regions at different stages. The first two cases deal with risk communication practices at the early stage of the SARS epidemic when it originated in southern China. The last two cases move to transcultural rhetorical networks surrounding SARS.

With such threats as SARS, avian flu, and swine flu capturing the public imagination and prompting transnational public health preparedness efforts, the need for a rhetoric of global epidemics has never been greater. Government leaders, public health officials, health care professionals, journalists, and activists can learn how to more effectively craft and manage transcultural risk communication from Ding’s examination of the complex and varied modes of communication around SARS. In addition to offering a detailed case study, Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic provides a critical methodology that professional communicators can use in their investigations of epidemics and details approaches to facilitating more open, participatory risk communication at all levels.

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Selling Science

Polio and the Promise of Gamma Globulin

Mawdsley, Stephen E

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Today, when many parents seem reluctant to have their children vaccinated, even with long proven medications, the Salk vaccine trial, which enrolled millions of healthy children to test an unproven medical intervention, seems nothing short of astonishing. In Selling Science, medical historian Stephen E. Mawdsley recounts the untold story of the first large clinical trial to control polio using healthy children—55,000 healthy children—revealing how this long-forgotten incident cleared the path for Salk’s later trial.

Mawdsley describes how, in the early 1950s, Dr. William Hammon and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis launched a pioneering medical experiment on a previously untried scale. Conducted on over 55,000 healthy children in Texas, Utah, Iowa, and Nebraska, this landmark study assessed the safety and effectiveness of a blood component, gamma globulin, to prevent paralytic polio. The value of the proposed experiment was questioned by many prominent health professionals as it harbored potential health risks, but as Mawdsley points out, compromise and coercion moved it forward. And though the trial returned dubious results, it was presented to the public as a triumph and used to justify a federally sanctioned mass immunization study on thousands of families between 1953 and 1954. Indeed, the concept, conduct, and outcome of the GG study were sold to health professionals, medical researchers, and the public at each stage. At a time when most Americans trusted scientists, their mutual encounter under the auspices of conquering disease was shaped by politics, marketing, and at times, deception.

Drawing on oral history interviews, medical journals, newspapers, meeting minutes, and private institutional records, Selling Science sheds light on the ethics of scientific conduct, and on the power of marketing to shape public opinion about medical experimentation.

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Silent Violence

Global Health, Malaria, and Child Survival in Tanzania

Vinay R. Kamat

University of Arizona Press, 2013

Silent Violence engages the harsh reality of malaria and its effects on marginalized communities in Tanzania. Vinay R. Kamat presents an ethnographic analysis of the shifting global discourses and practices surrounding malaria control and their impact on the people of Tanzania, especially mothers of children sickened by malaria.

Malaria control, according to Kamat, has become increasingly medicalized, a trend that overemphasizes biomedical and pharmaceutical interventions while neglecting the social, political, and economic conditions he maintains are central to Africa’s malaria problem. Kamat offers recent findings on global health governance, neoliberal economic and health policies, and their impact on local communities.

Seeking to link wider social, economic, and political forces to local experiences of sickness and suffering, Kamat analyzes the lived experiences and practices of people most seriously affected by malaria—infants and children. The persistence of childhood malaria is a form of structural violence, he contends, and the resultant social suffering in poor communities is closely tied to social inequalities.

Silent Violence illustrates the evolving nature of local responses to the global discourse on malaria control. It advocates for the close study of disease treatment in poor communities as an integral component of global health funding. This ethnography combines a decade of fieldwork with critical review and a rare anthropological perspective on the limitations of the bureaucratic, technological, institutional, medical, and political practices that currently determine malaria interventions in Africa.

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Suspicion

Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados

Nicole Charles

Duke University Press, 2021

In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion, Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

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The Bacteriology of Tuberculosis

Egons Darzins

University of Minnesota Press, 1958

The Bacteriology of Tuberculosis was first published in 1958.Although tuberculosis is one disease against which, it may be said with little argument, medical science has scored tremendous victories, the goal of complete conquest still lies ahead. To fix accurate sights for that goal, a thorough understanding of the present status of knowledge about the disease is needed. This volume is published in response to that need.Through an exhaustive study of the literature on tuberculosis bacteriology from the late nineteenth century to the present, Dr. Darzins presents a comprehensive account of the knowledge and practices which have developed in this field. An important aspect is the discussion of the relatively new problems raised in bacteriological science by recent advances in the use of chemotherapeutics, antibiotics, and surgery for the treatment of tuberculosis.The first section is devoted to the morphology and cytology of the tubercle bacillus. Here Dr. Darzins outlines the physical, biological, and chemical methods of identifying cell structures. In the next section he considers the sources of energy and growth of the bacillus. He proceeds in the following section to a discussion of the methods of isolating and identifying the bacillus. The fourth part deals with a major problem of tuberculosis bacteriology, that of distinguishing the types of bacilli and determining their pathogenicity. In the final section he considers the problems of experimental work and points out the hazards and the need for precautions in laboratory work.

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The Bartonellas and Peruvian Medicine

The Work of Alberto Leonardo Barton

Alarcón, Graciela S

Rutgers University Press, 2019

The Bartonellas and Peruvian Medicine explores the events surrounding the discovery of the etio-pathogenic agent of the Oroya Fever, also known as Peruvian Verruga or Carrión’s disease (an endemic infectious disease in South America’s Andean regions) by Dr. Alberto Leonardo Barton. Graciela S. Alarcón and Renato D. Alarcón recount Barton’s persistent work against skepticism, obstacles, and limitations imposed by members of Peru’s medical elites of the time, as well as his eventual successful scientific career and the delayed but well-deserved global recognition of his contributions.

The book is the result of intense bibliographic research and of original documents aimed not just at the examination of Barton’s life and work, but also the examination of today’s perspectives and future work in the field of infectious and “neglected” diseases. The authors address current scientific information on the relevant bacteria Bartonella bacilliformis, besides current research and clinical status of the other Bartonellas, making it a useful and practical text for those studying infectious diseases.

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The Elephant in the Room

How to Stop Making Ourselves and Other Animals Sick

Liz Kalaugher

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A healthier future starts with seeing the human causes of wildlife diseases.

When new diseases spread, news reports often focus on wildlife culprits—rodents, monkeys and mpox; bats and COVID-19; waterfowl and avian flu; or mosquitoes and Zika. But, in this urgent and engaging book, we see it often works the other way around—humans have caused diseases in other animals countless times, through travel and transport, the changes we impose on our environment, and global warming. With science journalist Liz Kalaugher as our guide, we meet the wildlife we have harmed and the experts now studying the crosscurrents between humans, other animals, and health.

Herds of buffalo in Kenya, cloned ferrets in Colorado, and frogs shipped worldwide as living pregnancy tests for humans, all help Kalaugher dive into the murky backstories behind wildlife epidemics past and present. We learn that military conflict likely contributed to the spread of rinderpest, or cattle plague, throughout Africa, devastating pastoral communities. That crowded poultry farms may create virulent new forms of bird flu that spill back into the wild. And that West Nile virus—which affects not only birds and humans, but other animals, including horses, skunks, and squirrels—is spreading as global temperatures rise.

Expanding today’s discussions of environmental protection to include illness and its impact, Kalaugher both sounds the alarm and explores ways to stop the emergence and spread of wildlife diseases. These solutions start with a simple lesson: when we protect other animals, we protect ourselves.

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The Greatest Killer

Smallpox in History

Donald R. Hopkins

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Once known as the "great fire" or "spotted death," smallpox has been rivaled only by plague as a source of supreme terror. Although naturally occurring smallpox was eradicated in 1977, recent terrorist attacks in the United States have raised the possibility that someone might craft a deadly biological weapon from stocks of the virus that remain in known or 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 through the ancient and modern worlds, showing how smallpox 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-factors that shaped the course of world events.

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The Stockholm Paradigm

Climate Change and Emerging Disease

Daniel R. Brooks, Eric P. Hoberg, and Walter A. Boeger

University of Chicago Press, 2019

The contemporary crisis of emerging disease has been a century and a half in the making. Human, veterinary, and crop health practitioners convinced themselves that disease could be controlled by medicating the sick, vaccinating those at risk, and eradicating the parts of the biosphere responsible for disease transmission. Evolutionary biologists assured themselves that coevolution between pathogens and hosts provided a firewall against disease emergence in new hosts. Most climate scientists made no connection between climate changes and disease. None of these traditional perspectives anticipated the onslaught of emerging infectious diseases confronting humanity today.

As this book reveals, a new understanding of the evolution of pathogen-host systems, called the Stockholm Paradigm, explains what is happening. The planet is a minefield of pathogens with preexisting capacities to infect susceptible but unexposed hosts, needing only the opportunity for contact. Climate change has always been the major catalyst for such new opportunities, because it disrupts local ecosystem structure and allows pathogens and hosts to move. Once pathogens expand to new hosts, novel variants may emerge, each with new infection capacities. Mathematical models and real-world examples uniformly support these ideas. Emerging disease is thus one of the greatest climate change–related threats confronting humanity.

Even without deadly global catastrophes on the scale of the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, emerging diseases cost humanity more than a trillion dollars per year in treatment and lost productivity. But while time is short, the danger is great, and we are largely unprepared, the Stockholm Paradigm offers hope for managing the crisis. By using the DAMA (document, assess, monitor, act) protocol, we can “anticipate to mitigate” emerging disease, buying time and saving money while we search for more effective ways to cope with this challenge.

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The White Plague

Tuberculosis, Man and Society

Dubos, Jean

Rutgers University Press, 1987

In The White Plague, René and Jean Dubos argue that the great increase of tuberculosis was intimately connected with the rise of an industrial, urbanized society and—a much more controversial idea when this book first appeared forty years ago—that the progress of medical science had very little to do with the marked decline in tuberculosis in the twentieth century.

The White Plague has long been regarded as a classic in the social and environmental history of disease. This reprint of the 1952 edition features new introductory writings by two distinguished practitioners of the sociology and history of medicine. David Mechanic's foreword describes the personal and intellectual experience that shaped René Dubos's view of tuberculosis. Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz's historical introduction reexamines The White Plague in light of recent work on the social history of tuberculosis. Her thought-provoking essay pays particular attention to the broader cultural and medical assumptions about sickness and sick people that inform a society’s approach to the conquest of disease.

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