What Disease was Plague?

What Disease was Plague? PDF Author: Ole Jørgen Benedictow
Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9789004180024
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 746

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Book Description
In this monograph, the alternative theories to the established bubonic-plague theory as to the microbiological identity of historical plague epidemics are intensively discussed in the light of the historical sources and the medical primary research and standard works.

What Disease was Plague?

What Disease was Plague? PDF Author: Ole Jørgen Benedictow
Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9789004180024
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 746

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Book Description
In this monograph, the alternative theories to the established bubonic-plague theory as to the microbiological identity of historical plague epidemics are intensively discussed in the light of the historical sources and the medical primary research and standard works.

Plague

Plague PDF Author: Wendy Orent
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451699212
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
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.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Encyclopaedia Britannica PDF Author: Hugh Chisholm
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Languages : en
Pages : 1090

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Book Description
This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World

Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World PDF Author: Monica Helen Green
Publisher: ARC Humanities Press
ISBN: 9781942401001
Category : Black Death
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The plague organism (Yersinia pestis) killed an estimated 40% to 60% of all people when it spread rapidly through the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe in the fourteenth century: an event known as the Black Death. Previous research has shown, especially for Western Europe, how population losses then led to structural economic, political, and social changes. But why and how did the pandemic happen in the first place? When and where did it begin? How was it sustained? What was its full geographic extent? And when did it really end?

Plagues in World History

Plagues in World History PDF Author: John Aberth
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442207965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Plagues in World History provides a concise, comparative world history of catastrophic infectious diseases, including plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, and AIDS. Geographically, these diseases have spread across the entire globe; temporally, they stretch from the sixth century to the present. John Aberth considers not only the varied impact that disease has had upon human history but also the many ways in which people have been able to influence diseases simply through their cultural attitudes toward them. The author argues that the ability of humans to alter disease, even without the modern wonders of antibiotic drugs and other medical treatments, is an even more crucial lesson to learn now that AIDS, swine flu, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and other seemingly incurable illnesses have raged worldwide. Aberth's comparative analysis of how different societies have responded in the past to disease illuminates what cultural approaches have been and may continue to be most effective in combating the plagues of today.

Viral Infections of Humans

Viral Infections of Humans PDF Author: Alfred S. Evans
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1468447270
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
also occurs. New outbreaks of yellow fever have occurred in Colombia and Trinidad and new outbreaks of rift valley fever have occurred in Egypt. Chapter 6, Arenaviruses: The biochemical and physical properties have now been clar ified, and they show a remarkable uniformity in the various viruses constituting the group. The possibility that prenatal infection with LCM may result in hydrocephalus and chorioretinitis has been raised. Serologic surveys have suggested the existence of Lassa virus infection in Guinea, Central African Empire, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon, and Benin, in addition to earlier identification in Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Chapter 7, Coronaviruses: New studies have confirmed the important role of these viruses in common respiratory illnesses of children and adults. The viruses are now known to contain a single positive strand of RNA. About 50% of corona virus infections result in clinical illness. About 5% of common colds are caused by strain DC 43 in winter. Chapter 8, Cytomegalovirus: Sections on pathogenesis of CMV in relation to organ transplantation and mononucleosis, as well as sections on the risk and features of con genital infection and disease, have been expanded. There are encouraging preliminary results with a live CMV vaccine, but the questions of viral persistence and oncogenicity require further evaluation.

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World PDF Author: Nükhet Varlik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107013380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies, and travelers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.

Plagues Upon the Earth

Plagues Upon the Earth PDF Author: Kyle Harper
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069119212X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
"Panoramic in scope, Plagues upon the Earth traces the role of disease in the transition to farming, the spread of cities, the advance of transportation, and the stupendous increase in human population. Harper offers a new interpretation of humanitys path to control over infectious diseaseone where rising evolutionary threats constantly push back against human progress, and where the devastating effects of modernization contribute to the great divergence between societies. The book reminds us that human health is globally interdependentand inseparable from the well-being of the planet itself."--

Bubonic Plague

Bubonic Plague PDF Author: Barbara Krasner
Publisher:
ISBN: 1543570399
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 33

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Book Description
The bubonic plague is a disease spread by fleas that live on rats. Outbreaks of the disease killed millions of people. Read this book to learn more about the history of this infectious disease.

The Plague Cycle

The Plague Cycle PDF Author: Charles Kenny
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982165359
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A vivid, sweeping, and “fact-filled” (Booklist, starred review) history of mankind’s battles with infectious disease that “contextualizes the COVID-19 pandemic” (Publishers Weekly)—for readers of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and John Barry’s The Great Influenza. For four thousand years, the size and vitality of cities, economies, and empires were heavily determined by infection. Striking humanity in waves, the cycle of plagues set the tempo of civilizational growth and decline, since common response to the threat was exclusion—quarantining the sick or keeping them out. But the unprecedented hygiene and medical revolutions of the past two centuries have allowed humanity to free itself from the hold of epidemic cycles—resulting in an urbanized, globalized, and unimaginably wealthy world. However, our development has lately become precarious. Climate and population fluctuations and factors such as global trade have left us more vulnerable than ever to newly emerging plagues. Greater global cooperation toward sustainable health is urgently required—such as the international efforts to manufacture and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine—with millions of lives and trillions of dollars at stake. “A timely, lucid look at the role of pandemics in history” (Kirkus Reviews), The Plague Cycle reveals the relationship between civilization, globalization, prosperity, and infectious disease over the past five millennia. It harnesses history, economics, and public health, and charts humanity’s remarkable progress, providing a fascinating and astute look at the cyclical nature of infectious disease.