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Laddar... Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease (2004)av Wendy Orent
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Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. It's a good read and Orent makes a good case for her theory about the reason for the differences in the three plague epidemics that there is a written record for. She also gives proper references which is always good in a science book. I feel she writes better about the historical plagues better than she writes about the science. I also feel she's far too willing to take statements by her sources at face value. All that being said, I recommend the book to anyone interested in Yersina pestis, historical plagues and epidemiology. If you have a background in health care or curiosity about historical pathologies this book might be of interest. This book is authored by a science journalist who traces the various plague outbreaks and examines the means by which they were tamed (i.e. quarantine and isolation of those with the contagion). The chapters loosely follow a detective plot where clues are given but definitive conclusions about the plague's virulence and transmissiblity were hard to come by. Nowadays, this topic is headed under epidemiology and public health organizations. This book reveals how there was an outbreak of the pneumonic plague in Los Angeles in 1924 by infected rats, killing 31 people. Well written, but at times overly convoluted to the detriment of comprehension. inga recensioner | lägg till en recension
Plague is a terrifying mystery. In the Middle Ages, it wiped out 40 million people -- 40 percent of the total population in Europe. Seven hundred years earlier, the Justinian Plague destroyed the Byzantine Empire and ushered in the Middle Ages. The plague of London in the seventeenth century killed more than 1,000 people a day. In the early twentieth century, plague again swept Asia, taking the lives of 12 million in India alone. Even more frightening is what it could do to us in the near future. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian scientists created genetically altered, antibiotic-resistant and vaccine-resistant strains of plague that can bypass the human immune system and spread directly from person to person. These weaponized strains still exist, and they could be replicated in almost any laboratory. Wendy Orent's Plague pieces together a fascinating and terrifying historical whodunit. Drawing on the latest research in labs around the world, along with extensive interviews with American and Soviet plague experts, Orent offers nothing less than a biography of a disease. Plague helped bring down the Roman Empire and close the Middle Ages; it has had a dramatic impact on our history, yet we still do not fully understand its own evolution. Orent's retelling of the four great pandemics makes for gripping reading and solves many puzzles. Why did some pandemics jump from person to person, while others relied on insects as carriers? Why are some strains more virulent than others? Orent reveals the key differences among rat-based, prairie dog-based, and marmot-based plague. The marmots of Central Asia, in particular, have long been hosts to the most virulent and frightening form of the disease, a form that can travel around the world in the blink of an eye. From its ability to hide out in the wild, only to spring back into humanity with a terrifying vengeance, to its elusive capacity to develop suddenly greater virulence and transmissibility, plague is a protean nightmare. To make matters worse, Orent's disturbing revelations about the former Soviet bioweapon programs suggest that the nightmare may not be over. Plague is chilling reading at the dawn of a new age of bioterrorism. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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Google Books — Laddar... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)614.5732Technology Medicine and health Public Health Contagious and infectious diseases: specialKlassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:
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Though humans have lived with Plague for centuries, we know surprisingly little about it. Only in the late nineteenth century that anyone saw the bacteria (Alexandre Yersin, hence the name of Yersinia pestis). It was only in the early twentieth century that fleas-as-carriers became a widely accepted theory. Even now, no one knows why some instances of plague are so much more virulant than others, or why some become pneumonic instead of bubonic. Some scientists still refuse to believe that Yersinia pestis was the cause of the Black Death. We have antibiotics to treat plague, but there are still no vaccines. ( )