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This short read provides a very basic introduction to the topic of infectious diseases. If you have no prior knowledge of the topic, then it would be a good place to start. If, however, you have an established interest or any prior knowledge of the subject, then it is going to be far too basic. This is an interesting little book which attempts to cut through all the scare mongering that fills the media every time a new virus, or variant of an existing virus is discovered.

It puts thing in perspective and explains, among other things how the last thing a virus or bacterium wants to do is kill its host because that means it cannot be passed on to others. What I thought was most interesting was how genetic mutations which can produce disabilities in human beings may also confer immunity ag This is an interesting little book which attempts to cut through all the scare mongering that fills the media every time a new virus, or variant of an existing virus is discovered.

What I thought was most interesting was how genetic mutations which can produce disabilities in human beings may also confer immunity against other diseases. Sickle cell anaemia for example goes hand in hand with the ability to survive malaria. We may actually be managing to create the conditions in which another pandemic could arise instead of preventing one occurring.

Aug 05, Denise Weldon-siviy rated it really liked it. Fascinating This is a fascinating examination of the history of pandemics along with predictions for the future. It is well-written and grounded in strong science , yet written clearly enough to be understood by people outside of the medical field. My only complaints with this work , and they are minor, are that there were a handful of typos, and the sizing on the graphs was simply too small to read.

I tried setting the typeface larger by hitting the " I can't find my bifocals button" that Kind Fascinating This is a fascinating examination of the history of pandemics along with predictions for the future. I tried setting the typeface larger by hitting the " I can't find my bifocals button" that Kindle so conveniently provides.

However, the graphs never got any larger.

Table of Contents?
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Pandemics: Our Fears and the Facts (Kindle Single).

Amazon single by Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford specializing in infectious diseases. Argues that we are not "due" another pandemic as some alarmists might have us believe. Then goes on to give an overview of the epidemiology of pandemics. I enjoyed that this book gave a concise, scientific and balanced-thinking approach to our current paranoia around germs and disease.

It was refreshing to be reminded how resilient our bodies are and the importance of medicine and science. A nice single to read. Oct 12, Wilfredo rated it really liked it. Interesting read It's an easy read that offers a cautious approach to pandemics. It's not stuffed with technical data, but it gives you enough facts to dispel popular myths. Ann rated it liked it Oct 20, Timothy McGrath rated it really liked it Jun 01, Melissa Schultz rated it liked it Nov 29, Jordan Weiss rated it it was amazing Sep 11, Rose rated it really liked it Jul 19, Avi Roy rated it liked it Nov 02, Brenda Clark Thomas rated it it was amazing Jun 01, Brian Jarrett rated it it was amazing Sep 06, Caitlin rated it really liked it Nov 12, Erica rated it really liked it Dec 28, Hannah rated it liked it Nov 07, Gary Rivas rated it really liked it Jul 06, Aaron Garrett rated it liked it Oct 26, Joan rated it it was ok Mar 03, Robert rated it liked it Jan 02, Gabriel Dedeic rated it really liked it Jun 14, Jill rated it liked it Jan 10, Arnab Banerji rated it liked it Jul 30, Rachel rated it really liked it May 30, Rob rated it liked it Aug 17, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

Sunetra Gupta is an acclaimed novelist, essayist and scientist. In she was named as the winner of the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her scientific achievements. Sunetra, who lives in Oxford with her husband and two daughters, is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at O Sunetra Gupta is an acclaimed novelist, essayist and scientist. Sunetra, who lives in Oxford with her husband and two daughters, is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University's Department of Zoology, having graduated in from Princeton University and received her PhD from the University of London in From this heartland of the world war and world trade, it was then spread to several parts of the northern hemisphere by similar means between May and July The man in the street In Mumbai, for instance, "Nearly every house Going by what happened in the next four months, it would seem that sometime in August , the A virus serotype already circulating so extensively, mutated yet again, this time into an H1N1 subtype which added to its existing high infectivity the ability easily to penetrate deep into the lungs which it then attacked with speed and ferocity.

In either case the symptoms were dire — laboured breathing, crackling sounds from the lungs, a racking cough and a pungent odour — and the effects often lethal.

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In turn, when these shipboard vectors reached their next destination, the infectious among them spread it to locals. By this process of primary and secondary diffusion the second wave of the pandemic quickly reached ports in West and South Africa , and from these their respective hinterlands via rail and road. It was, in sum, a pandemic driven by the steam-engine, whether at sea or on land. The pattern of diffusion in Europe from Brest and the Americas from Boston was not dissimilar, with infected soldiers and sailors once again being the principal carriers.

Soldiers and sailors, whether on-duty or on leave, AWOL or taken prisoner, demobilized or repatriated, were supplemented as efficient flu vectors by migrant labourers, refugees , pilgrims, school pupils and large gatherings of people at places of work, worship and procession. In other words, everyday activities became fraught with the danger of infection.

As one flu survivor recalled, a sneeze or a cough became a terrifying sound to all in its immediate vicinity. Even so, it claimed some 2 to 3 million lives worldwide in those six months. Even if the figures are only estimates, in terms of lives claimed, World War I ca. Among these fifty-six, the flu death-toll varied greatly, from Europe and North America least so. Yet, even within a single country, considerable differences in mortality occurred.

For example, in the adjoining rural districts of Mount Frere and Mount Ayliff in South Africa, the mortality rates were 7. Several factors help to explain these marked differences in mortality. In the case of the two Samoas, a very strict quarantine had been imposed on American Samoa by its governor, which effectively excluded the virus from the island, unlike on Western Samoa where an open-port status was maintained by its New Zealand administration. What most distinguished Philadelphia from Baltimore in was that, in the former, patriotic Liberty Loan Drive parades continued all through the duration of the epidemic there, drawing thousands together in its streets.

Finally, the telling difference between the Mount Frere and the Mount Ayliff districts is that the latter had been exposed to the first wave of the pandemic, but not the former. Thus, when the lethal second-wave arrived soon afterwards, many had a degree of immunity to it. Such preventive prior exposure was not vouchsafed to their neighbours in Mount Frere when the second wave hit them.

Differing circumstances such as in the three cases outlined above go a long way towards accounting for otherwise puzzling contrasts in pandemic mortality, between countries like Australia and New Zealand here the first imposed a strict quarantine but not the second , between mining towns like Johannesburg and Kimberley here the former was exposed to the first wave but not the latter, before both were hit by the second wave and even between two suburbs of the same city, like Kensington and Southwark in London where their strikingly different class composition translated into living and working environments less or more congenial to the transmission of the influenza virus and to the availability or non-availability of nurses to tend flu victims.

Indeed, given the importance of proximity to an infected person in facilitating the spread of the virus, the degree of overcrowding and contact with others should be an integral part of every attempted explanation of its diffusion. This may help to explain why people in occupations in which encounters with the public were common, like bus and train conductors, shopkeepers, shop assistants and bank and postal clerks, were especially vulnerable to infection, as some analyses suggest. The latter were disproportionately those aged between eighteen and forty, and more often male than female, save if the women were pregnant.

This, it should be noted, is a pattern entirely at odds with the usual profile of those killed by influenza, i. This is very unwise Indeed, it is likely that the absence of skilled nursing in the home — whether because of class, cultural barriers or sheer unavailability as a result of the wartime demand for nurses — may have been a significant factor in determining case mortality.

If the poor, those unable to get into jam-packed hospitals and those in remote areas died in disproportionate numbers — as some have argued [17] — then this may be the chief reason why. Although it is natural to focus on the staggering number who died in the pandemic — perhaps 10 percent of all who contracted it or percent of the entire world population at the time — it is as important to notice too its further, long-term demographic effects.

In seventeen American states, for example, stillbirths rose by 60 percent in October Certainly the results of these lost and averted births in or were to be seen in countries devastated by the pandemic, where school authorities noticed a decline in the number of new school entrants in One unexpected result was that in the USA, at least, tuberculosis deaths actually fell after because the pool of those with this disease had been reduced by the influenza pandemic, making the latter an unlikely factor in the decline of tuberculosis in that country.

The pandemic also cast a long shadow health-wise. A recent analysis of census data from revealing that the social profile of Americans born between January and September i. In terms of levels of education and income, they were noticeably less successful than their near-contemporaries and far more likely to be disabled or to be recipients of welfare grants. If so, it would extend the direct physical effects of the pandemic by sixty to seventy years.

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Nor is it yet possible to prove that the war was responsible for the re-assortment of the virus into the highly infectious but mild H1N1 virus which drove the first wave of the pandemic or of its subsequent mutation into the lethal virus behind the second wave, although the world context in which these metamorphoses occurred is also suggestive and circumstantial. Arnab Banerji rated it liked it Jul 30, Within laboratories as far apart as London, Paris, Berlin, Boston, Melbourne, Rome, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg and Teheran, a number of medical scientists even attempted to identify the causative pathogen of influenza and how it was transmitted. The inclusion of an article on the latter in a site devoted to the former is thus entirely appropriate, justified and necessary — as would the case be if the situations were reversed. Protracted lassitude and a debilitating lack of vigour were common long after an attack, which made a return to combat readiness a slow affair.

Equally long-lasting, but in emotional and psychological terms, was the grief caused by the sudden mass death which stemmed from the pandemic. Families shattered by the death of a young parent or spouse and orphans created by the hundred million all bore testimony to the trauma flowing from these deaths, in many cases for the rest of their lives. I realized, for the first time and forever, that we were not safe. We were not beyond harm.

My father did what he could. He kept us together as a family, but from that time on there was a sadness which had not existed before, a deep down sadness that never went away. But back in , most flu widows who had lost their breadwinner husbands had little time to dwell on their loss, being forced to find immediate ways to support their children.

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Turning to their families for assistance, moving into cheaper accommodation or entering the job market must have been a commonplace experience globally for women in this situation. I plan to go to the diamond diggings to see if I can make a living. I will give a tithe to the Lord.

Ask the Lord for relief and help. Popular sobriquets given to the disease itself sharply reflect contemporary perceptions of it, that, like all attributions of epidemics in history, it had arisen somewhere else. Not surprisingly, given the extraordinary context of World War I, other popular labels make clear that many people were convinced that it must somehow have been connected with the war.

Indeed, some Christians concluded that the coincidence of the devastating pandemic and the climax of the terrible world war was more than just chance and interpreted this as a sign that deeper things were afoot. It thus is no surprise that in , amidst this physical, emotional and spiritual travail, several charismatic prophets rose up in sub-Saharan Africa , preaching millenarianism, faith healing and the need for instant repentance and renewal.

For the healing profession worldwide and the governments of all hard-hit countries the pandemic was a comprehensive rout, for neither was able to fulfil its primary function, viz. Within laboratories as far apart as London, Paris, Berlin, Boston, Melbourne, Rome, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg and Teheran, a number of medical scientists even attempted to identify the causative pathogen of influenza and how it was transmitted.

Not until was a team at the National Institute of Medical Research in London able to demonstrate conclusively that human influenza was caused by a virus transmitted from person-to-person by coughing or sneezing. Public policy initiatives to try and prevent a repeat of the disaster of focused mainly on attempting to create more effective public health systems, either by setting up central public health departments, as in South Africa, Canada, Australia and Great Britain, or by expanding the ambit and capacity of existing governmental public health structures, as in New Zealand, France, India and Mexico.

Soon this data was being regularly circulated in monthly bulletins sent out by post. In tandem with these international public health initiatives went the speedy local provision of new hospitals, or at least the expansion of existing ones which the pandemic had shown to be inadequate and outmoded. As already indicated, many contemporaries firmly believed that the war and the pandemic were connected in some terrible way, either by design or by accident.

But a century later such facile associations need to be interrogated critically, especially as few historians of World War I have accepted them. Probing whether such a relationship existed requires recognition of its potentially two-way character, viz. At present, no virologist can demonstrate that the ancestor of the causative H1N1 virus was the product of wartime conditions, though recent viral archaeology and reconstruction have suggested that it emerged between and , i. Nor is it yet possible to prove that the war was responsible for the re-assortment of the virus into the highly infectious but mild H1N1 virus which drove the first wave of the pandemic or of its subsequent mutation into the lethal virus behind the second wave, although the world context in which these metamorphoses occurred is also suggestive and circumstantial.

This context was, of course, World War I, with its mass agglomeration of soldiers in jam-packed barracks, troopships, troop trains and trenches across Europe, Africa, Asia, North America and the Middle East, all tailor-made locations for extensive viral re-assortment to take place. What is clear, however, is that once the H1N1 virus had emerged in these two forms in , its global dispersion owed a great deal to the movement of soldiers and sailors to and from battle-zones by land and sea.

In effect, the H1N1 virus was globalized by World War I which systematically turned a local outbreak in one continent into a world pandemic. By the armies and navies of belligerent countries had drained civilian life of a large percentage of doctors and nurses, leaving citizens at home hard-pressed to secure adequate professional treatment.

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On the other hand, the fact that the governments of nations-at-war could deploy uniformed doctors and nurses as they decided meant that, in some countries, such medical personnel could be steered to places in dire need of assistance. In New Zealand the Defence Department even furnished emergency civilian hospitals with army beds and with some of the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses under its charge.

The other element in the Great Flu-Great War relationship is the effect of the former on the latter, particularly on its outcome. As even the incomplete estimates in Table 1 reveal, the two waves of the pandemic laid low thousands upon thousands of soldiers on both sides on the Western Front where the outcome of World War I was ultimately decided during What the table also makes clear is that their prostration was not uniform in either time or scale. Protracted lassitude and a debilitating lack of vigour were common long after an attack, which made a return to combat readiness a slow affair.

Moreover, as Table 1 shows, their foes were not as disabled by the pandemic at the same time, for it usually arrived in the German lines after it had swept through the ranks of their enemies. Three days later, having weathered the compromised German attack as the delay had given them enough time to clear their lines, the French forces began a counter-offensive which gained momentum week-by-week, as more and more American troops joined the fray, gradually forcing the Germans onto the back foot.

The stream of events which took Germany, Europe and the world from Brest-Litovsk to Versailles might therefore be conceived of as having been abundantly fed by a Spanish-named tributary as it rolled across the Western Front. In sum, the Great War and the Great Flu were integral to each other in a host of interacting ways. The inclusion of an article on the latter in a site devoted to the former is thus entirely appropriate, justified and necessary — as would the case be if the situations were reversed. Influenza Pandemic , in: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed.