Showing titles in Contagious Diseases

In The Black Death: New Lessons from Recent Research, celebrated medievalist Dorsey Armstrong shares the fascinating new story of this old pandemic—revealed by dedicated researchers working with 21st-century technologies and a knowledge of language and history that now provide input from all geographic areas of the medieval world. In seven engaging lectures, Professor Armstrong corrects explanations of the pandemic that are now known to be inaccurate and offers a more robust description of plague biology than has ever been known.

The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholars and the general public. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story. In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people—one third of the known population—before it vanished.

Reports suggest that over 100m people around the world are living with Long COVID (more than 1.5m in the UK) yet reliable, clear information and guidance remains scarce. This book is the definitive guide to understanding, managing and treating the condition. Written by the world's leading immunologist Professor Danny Altmann and expert patient Gez Medinger, The Long COVID Handbook translates cutting-edge science, patient-led research and practical guidance with clarity.

Rachel is a palliative care doctor who looked after some of the most gravely unwell patients on the COVID-19 wards of her hospital. Amid the tensions, fatigue and rising death toll, she witnessed the courage of patients and NHS staff alike in conditions of unprecedented adversity. For all the bleakness and fear, she found that moments that could stop you in your tracks abounded. People who rose to their best, upon facing the worst, as a microbe laid waste to the population. Her new book, Breathtaking, is an unflinching insider's account of medicine in the time of coronavirus.

Lyme disease infects a minimum of 300,000 people per year in the United States and millions more throughout the rest of the world. Symptoms run from mild lethargy to severe arthritis to heart disease to incapacitating mental dysfunction. Although tests have improved over the past decade, they are still not completely reliable, and antibiotics are only partially effective. Up to 35 percent of those infected will not respond to antibiotic treatment or will relapse.

With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I. Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain and from South Africa to Odessa. She shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered, and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test.

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.

In January 2020, as people started dying from a new virus in Wuhan, China, few really understood the magnitude of what was happening. Except, that is, a small group of scientific misfits who in their different ways had been obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated - and with why the governments and the institutions that were supposed to look after us, kept making the same mistakes time and again. This group saw what nobody else did. A pandemic was coming. We weren't prepared.

Working in A&E is a challenging job, but nurse Louise Curtis loves it. She was newly qualified as an advanced clinical practitioner, responsible for life or death decisions about the patients she saw, when the unthinkable happened and the country was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. The stress on the NHS was huge and for the first time in her life, the job was going to take a toll on Louise herself.

Many sufferers drag themselves from one doctor or alternative practitioner to the next, getting lost in a maze of lab tests, prescription drugs, and treatments. Thousands of dollars and months (or years) later, they realize they are no better off than where they started. Unlocking Lyme puts an end to this desperate quest. Written by Dr. Bill Rawls, a physician who overcame Lyme disease himself, this book is a comprehensive, practical resource full of solutions that work.

In Vaxxers, we hear directly from Professor Gilbert and her colleague, Dr Catherine Green, as they reveal the inside story of making the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine and the cutting-edge science and sheer hard work behind it. This is their story of fighting a pandemic as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Sarah and Cath share the heart-stopping moments in the eye of the storm, they separate fact from fiction, they explain how they made a safe vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching and they give us hope for the future.

This humbling and revelatory book shows how infectious disease has shaped humanity at every stage, from the first success of Homo sapiens over the equally intelligent Neanderthals to the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. How did an Indonesian volcano help cause the Black Death, setting Europe on the road to capitalism? How could 168 men extract the largest ransom in history from an opposing army of eighty thousand? The latest science reveals that infectious diseases are not just something that happens to us, but a fundamental part of who we are.

On 26 March 2020, a new law appeared. In 11 pages, it locked down tens of millions of people, confined us to our homes, banned socialising, closed shops, gyms, pubs, places of worship. It restricted our freedoms more than any other law in history, justified by the rapid spread of a deadly new virus. You might have expected such a law to be fiercely debated in Parliament. But it wasn't debated at all. A state of emergency was declared, meaning the law came into force the moment it was signed.

Multiple studies have now confirmed a dramatic link between the health of our microbiome—the trillions of bacteria that live in our digestive tract—and our likelihood of getting devastating viral illnesses like COVID-19. Low-fiber diets, limited exposure to nature, and overzealous use of pharmaceuticals have messed up our microbiome, making many of us more susceptible to viruses than we naturally should be.

Mark Gober dives into fundamental beliefs about health and disease. These beliefs are so fundamental, in fact, that most of us probably haven’t thought to question them. For example, do bacteria cause disease, or are they part of the body’s cleanup crew that appears at the scene of an underlying toxicity or injury? Do researchers follow the scientific method when they claim to isolate viruses and show that they cause disease in their hosts? In addition to exploring these essential questions, Gober goes a layer deeper by examining the nature of consciousness.

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated lives and livelihoods around the world - and continues to do so. These personal tragedies will, and must, be told and heard. There is, however, also a truthful and objective scientific narrative to be written about how the virus played out and how the world set about dealing with it. Spike is that story - from the inside. Its author, Jeremy Farrar, is one of the UK's leading scientists and a - member of the SAGE emergency committee.

In Phantom Plague, Vidya Krishnan, traces the history of tuberculosis from the slums of 19th-century New York to modern Mumbai. In a narrative spanning century, Krishnan shows how superstition and folk remedies made way for scientific understanding of TB, such that it was controlled and cured in the West.

COVID-19, monkeypox, bird flu, SARS, HIV, AIDS, Ebola; we are living in the Age of Pandemics – one that we have created. As the climate crisis reaches a fever pitch and ecological destruction continues unabated, we are just beginning to reckon with the effects of environmental collapse on our global health. Fevered Planet exposes how the way we farm, what we eat, the places we travel to and the scientific experiments we conduct create the perfect conditions for deadly new diseases to emerge and spread faster and further than ever.

When Peter Piot was in medical school, a professor warned, "There’s no future in infectious diseases. They’ve all been solved." Fortunately, Piot ignored him, and the result has been an exceptional, adventure-filled career. In the 1970s, as a young man, Piot was sent to Central Africa as part of a team tasked with identifying a grisly new virus. Crossing into the quarantine zone on the most dangerous missions, he studied local customs to determine how this disease - the Ebola virus - was spreading. Later, Piot found himself in the field again when another mysterious epidemic broke out: AIDS.

Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, another chapter was added to this chronicle of events, which William McNeill explores in his introduction to this edition. McNeill’s highly acclaimed work is a brilliant and challenging account of the effects of disease on human history. His sophisticated analysis and detailed grasp of the subject make this book fascinating to listen to.