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Pandemics

A Very Short Introduction

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Pandemics

By: Christian W. McMillen
Narrated by: Joe Barrett
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About this listen

Christian W. McMillen provides a concise yet comprehensive account of pandemics throughout human history, illustrating how pandemic disease has shaped history and, at the same time, social behavior has influenced pandemic disease.

This Very Short Introduction describes history's major pandemics-plague, tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox, cholera, influenza, and HIV/AIDS-highlighting how each disease's biological characteristics affected its pandemic development. McMillen discusses state responses to pandemics, such as quarantine, isolation, travel restrictions, and other forms of social control, and pays special attention to the rise of public health and the explosion of medical research in the wake of pandemics, especially as the germ theory of disease emerged in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries. Today, medicine is able to control all of these diseases, yet some of them are still devastating in much of the developing world. By assessing the relationship between poverty and disease and the geography of epidemics, McMillen offers an outspoken and thought-provoking point of view on the necessity for global governments to learn from past experiences and proactively cooperate to prevent any future epidemic.

©2016 Oxford University Press (P)2021 Tantor
Contagious Diseases History & Commentary Medicine & Health Care Industry Physical Illness & Disease World Medicine
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