Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Contagious Diseases

Apollo's Arrow offers a riveting account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as it swept through American society in 2020, and of how the recovery will unfold in the coming years. Drawing on momentous (yet dimly remembered) historical epidemics, contemporary analyses, and cutting-edge research from a range of scientific disciplines, best-selling author, physician, sociologist, and public health expert Nicholas A. Christakis explores what it means to live in a time of plague.

The bumper-sticker directive to ‘follow the science’ was actually an evasion of responsibility. It let people off the hook for their bad decisions in a crisis. Was New York Governor Cuomo’s executive order sending COVID-hospitalized patients back to nursing homes to infect other vulnerable nursing home patients ‘following the science’? Relative to the total nursing home population, Governor Cuomo contributed to a larger percentage of nursing-home deaths - especially when compared to the states without such a policy.

In this game-changing book, Keith Frayn, an international expert in human metabolism and nutrition, dispels common misconceptions about human metabolism, explaining in everyday language the important metabolic processes that underlie all aspects of our daily lives. Frayn describes the communication systems that enable our different organs and tissues to cooperate, for instance in providing fuel to our muscles when we exercise, and in preserving our tissues during fasting.

In the 200 years since we discovered that microbes cause infectious diseases, we've battled to keep them at bay. But a recent explosion of scientific knowledge has led to undeniable evidence that early exposure to these organisms is beneficial to our children's well-being. Our current emphasis on hyper-cleanliness is taking a toll on our children's lifelong health. This engaging and important book explains how the millions of microbes that live in our bodies influence childhood development.

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, Scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu and the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles, to the 1930 'parrot fever' pandemic and the more recent SARS, Ebola and Zika, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms.

JULY 2014. Two American medical volunteers who joined the fight against the deadliest Ebola outbreak in world history have gotten infected. The virus kills in just over a week and they’re trapped in a hot zone with the clock ticking. If there’s going to be a rescue it has to happen now. The very notion of getting the patients out is a radical and dangerous idea. Bringing them home might cause an outbreak of Ebola here in the US. No one’s certain if it can or should be done or if they’ll even survive the flight.

For the first time in history, the world shut itself down - by choice - all for fear of a virus, COVID-19, that wasn’t well understood. The government, with the support of most Americans, ordered the closure of tens of thousands of small businesses - many never to return. Almost every school and college in the country sent its students home to finish the school year in front of a computer. Churches cancelled worship services. “Social distancing” went from a non-word to a moral obligation overnight.

Mankind’s annals don’t get darker. Delve into the deadliest pandemic ever known. No one knew where it came from, and at a certain point, it didn’t matter because it seemed to be everywhere...stalking the land with silent menace. It clung to people and animals like a second skin, traveling to distant places on the backs of traders and travelers who didn’t even know they were dead. It could kill swiftly and brutally, or slowly and painfully, and no one knew if they had it until it was far too late.

Professor Devi Sridhar has risen to prominence for her vital roles in communicating science to the public and speaking truth to power. In Preventable, she highlights lessons learned from outbreaks past and present in a narrative that traces the COVID-19 pandemic—including her personal experience as a scientist—and sets out a vision for how we can better protect ourselves from the inevitable health crises to come.

Imagine being physically denied access to your office, business, or livelihood. Imagine being refused entry to a grocery store or being told who you can or cannot sit with at a restaurant. Imagine being barred from a hospital room when you or your family member needs critical care. Unthinkable? Today, these scenarios and worse are happening in “democracies” all over the world, and could be our collective future—orchestrated by AI, Big Tech, and state-sponsored apps—all in the name of “protecting” public health with vaccine passports.

In medical charts, the term "N.A.D." (No Apparent Distress) is used for patients who appear stable. The phrase also aptly describes America's medical system when it comes to treating the underprivileged. Medical students learn on the bodies of the poor - and the poor suffer from their mistakes. Rachel Pearson confronted these harsh realities when she started medical school in Galveston, Texas.

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the shocking mortality figures obscured the fact that death is not the only adverse outcome associated with the virus. Today, as many as 30 to 50 percent of COVID-19 survivors still experience symptoms long after their acute illness has passed, with problems especially prominent in the areas of cognitive and mental health. In Clearing the Fog, neuropsychologist Dr. James C. Jackson offers people suffering from Long COVIDand their families a roadmap to help them manage their 'new normal'.

To place the story of tuberculosis in Arkansas in historical perspective, the authors trace the origins of the disease. Arkansas suffered some of the worst ravages of the disease, and the authors argue that many of the improvements in the state's medical infrastructure grew out of the desperate need to control it.

In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country - and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism," it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.

History books abound with accounts of large scale destruction wrought by infectious disease. As recently as 1918, a pandemic of influenza claimed over 50 million lives worldwide. The advent of drugs and vaccines led to an era of hope when we thought our battles with infectious disease were won, but our optimism has been eroded by the recognition that many pathogens have the capacity to transform themselves and escape our efforts to eradicate them. Are we now facing an inevitable repeat of a calamity such as the 1918 influenza pandemic or the Black Death?

In The End of Epidemics, leading public health authority Dr Jonathan D. Quick tells the stories of the heroes, past and present, who’ve succeeded in their fights to stop the spread of illness and death. He explains the science and the politics of combating epidemics. And he provides a detailed seven-part plan showing exactly how world leaders, health professionals, the business community, media and ordinary citizens can work together to prevent epidemics, saving millions of lives.

CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta offers an accessible, data-packed answer to our biggest questions about COVID-19. As the doctor who's been holding America's hand through the crisis with compassion, clarity and well-earned wisdom, he gives you the unvarnished story behind the pandemic, including insights about the novel virus' behavior, and offers practical tools to ready ourselves for what lies ahead.

In Infectious Madness, Washington presents the new germ theory, which posits not only that many instances of Alzheimer's, OCD, and schizophrenia are caused by viruses, prions, and bacteria but also that with antibiotics, vaccinations, and other strategies, these cases can be easily prevented or treated.

The hunt for the origin of the AIDS virus began over 20 years ago. It was a journey that went around the world and involved painstaking research to unravel how, when, and where the virus first infected humans. Dorothy H. Crawford traces the story back to the remote rain forests of Africa - home to the primates that carry the ancestral virus - and reveals how HIV-1 first jumped from chimpanzees to humans in rural southeast Cameroon. Examining how this happened, and how it then travelled back to Colonial west central Africa where it eventually exploded as a pandemic, she asks why and how it was able to spread so widely.