Who Gave Pinta to the Santa Maria?: Torrid Diseases in a Temperate World PDF Download
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Author: Robert S. Desowitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393254046
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
We live in a medical fool's paradise, comforted, believing our sanitized Western world is safe from the microbes and parasites of the tropics. Not so, nor was it ever so. Past--and present--tell us that tropical diseases are as American as the heart attack; yellow fever lived happily for centuries in Philadelphia. Malaria liked it fine in Washington, not to mention in the Carolinas where it took right over. The Ebola virus stopped off in Baltimore, and the Mexican pig tapeworm has settled comfortably among orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. This book starts with the little creatures the first American immigrants brought with them on the long walk from Siberia 50,000 years ago. It moves on to all that unwanted baggage that sailed over with the Spanish, French, and the English and killed native Americans in huge numbers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (The native Americans, it appears, got some revenge by passing syphilis--including Pinta, a feisty strain of syphilis--back to Europe with Columbus's returning sailors.) Nor have the effects of these diseases on people and economics been fully appreciated. Did slavery last so long because Africans were semi-immune to malaria and yellow fever, while Southern whites of all ranks fell in thousands to those diseases? In the final chapters, Robert S. Desowitz takes us through the Good Works of the twentieth century, Kid Rockefeller and the Battling Hookworm, and the rearrival of malaria; and he offers a glimpse into the future with a host of "Doomsday bugs" and jet-setting viruses that make life, quite literally, a jungle out there.
Author: Robert S. Desowitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393254046
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Get Book Here
Book Description
We live in a medical fool's paradise, comforted, believing our sanitized Western world is safe from the microbes and parasites of the tropics. Not so, nor was it ever so. Past--and present--tell us that tropical diseases are as American as the heart attack; yellow fever lived happily for centuries in Philadelphia. Malaria liked it fine in Washington, not to mention in the Carolinas where it took right over. The Ebola virus stopped off in Baltimore, and the Mexican pig tapeworm has settled comfortably among orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. This book starts with the little creatures the first American immigrants brought with them on the long walk from Siberia 50,000 years ago. It moves on to all that unwanted baggage that sailed over with the Spanish, French, and the English and killed native Americans in huge numbers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (The native Americans, it appears, got some revenge by passing syphilis--including Pinta, a feisty strain of syphilis--back to Europe with Columbus's returning sailors.) Nor have the effects of these diseases on people and economics been fully appreciated. Did slavery last so long because Africans were semi-immune to malaria and yellow fever, while Southern whites of all ranks fell in thousands to those diseases? In the final chapters, Robert S. Desowitz takes us through the Good Works of the twentieth century, Kid Rockefeller and the Battling Hookworm, and the rearrival of malaria; and he offers a glimpse into the future with a host of "Doomsday bugs" and jet-setting viruses that make life, quite literally, a jungle out there.
Author: Xavier Pastor
Publisher: Conway Maritime Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
1992 marked the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. The details of Columbus's ships - the Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta - remain lost to historians, for the ships were built before the first manuals of shipbuilding were written, and no documentation or illustration has survived.
Author: Edward Wilson-Lee
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1982111402
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
This impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming modern. At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Colón sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues; really, the first ever database for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed: ballads, erotica, news pamphlets, almanacs, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522, set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection. “Magnificent…a thrill on almost every page” (The New York Times Book Review), The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is a window into sixteenth-century Europe’s information revolution, and a reflection of the passion and intrigues that lie beneath our own insatiable desires to bring order to the world today.
Author: K. Lee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403943826
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
There is widespread recognition that globalization is changing the world around us, but so far there has been no systematic analysis of how it is impacting on human health. Such impacts are diverse, encompassing global economic, political, sociocultural, technological and environmental changes. Globalization and Health presents a clear conceptual framework for understanding these varied impacts and draws on a broad range of literature to illustrate them. Kelley Lee emphasises that more attention is needed to ensure that current forms of globalization become more equitable, sustainable and guided by appropriate forms of governance.
Author: Janice Moore
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195146530
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Moore places parasite-induced behavioural alterations in an evolutionary and ecological context by examining the adaptive nature of those changes and possible constraints on them.
Author: Terry Sturm
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 1775580164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 479
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Book Description
A critical biography of the popular 1920s novelist G. B. Lancaster (the pen name of Edith Lyttleton), this book tells the moving story of her life and work. Sturm paints a fascinating picture of the harsh experience of a woman writer in the first half of the 20th century whose economic circumstances shaped much of her output but who struggled nonetheless to move beyond the limits of potboilers toward more serious and original work.
Author: Baruch S. Blumberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691187231
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
About 375 million people are infected with the hepatitis B virus. It has killed more people than AIDS and also causes millions of cases of liver cancer. The discovery of this deadly virus and the vaccine against it--a vaccine that is sharply decreasing the infection rate worldwide and is probably the first effective cancer vaccine--was one of the great triumphs of twentieth-century medicine. And it almost didn't happen. With wit and insight, this scientific memoir and story of discovery describes how Baruch Blumberg and a team of researchers found a virus they were not looking for and created a vaccine for a disease they previously knew little about--work that took the author around the world and won him the Nobel Prize. Blumberg and his collaborators were investigating relationships between gene distribution and disease susceptibility, research that was yielding interesting data but no real breakthroughs. Many viewed their work as more field trip than science. But, through decades of hard work and investigative twists and turns, their pursuit led to the hepatitis B antigen, the elusive virus itself, and, ultimately, the vaccine. As he takes the reader through the detective work that culminated in his incredible discovery, the author recounts with immediacy exciting moments in the lab and in the field--from a hair-raising flight to Africa to an unpleasant encounter with Alaskan sled dogs. The hepatitis B story is more than a fascinating chronicle of a major discovery. What Blumberg followed to the virus was a trail of remarkable "accidents" that happen when scientists seek answers to interesting questions. Those events, combined with the investigator's determined persistence, resulted in studies that generated a pharmaceutical industry, have far-flung public-health applications, and saved millions of lives.
Author: César E. Giraldo Herrera
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319713183
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Shamanism is commonly understood through reference to spirits and souls. However, these terms were introduced by Christian missionaries as part of the colonial effort of conversion. So, rather than trying to comprehend shamanism through medieval European concepts, this book examines it through ideas that started developing in the West after encountering Amerindian shamans. Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings develops three major arguments: First, since their earliest accounts Amerindian shamanic notions have had more in common with current microbial ecology than with Christian religious beliefs. Second, the human senses allow the unaided perception of the microbial world; for example, entoptic vision allows one to see microscopic objects flowing through the retina and shamans employ techniques that enhance precisely these kinds of perception. Lastly, the theory that some diseases are produced by living agents acquired through contagion was proposed right after Contact in relation to syphilis, an important subject of pre-Contact Amerindian medicine and mythology, which was treasured and translated by European physicians. Despite these early translations, the West took four centuries to rediscover germs and bring microbiology into mainstream science. Giraldo Herrera reclaims this knowledge and lays the fundaments for an ethnomicrobiology. It will appeal to anyone curious about shamanism and willing to take it seriously and to those enquiring about the microbiome, our relations with microbes and the long history behind them.
Author: Mario J. Azevedo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319324616
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
This book examines the historical and current state of health and the health of the African people, including the Arab North, impacted by such factors as geography and natural elements, cultural and colonial traditions, and competing biomedical and traditional systems. It also looks at technological advances, poverty and health disparities, utilization of resources, and international presence, as reflected by the work of the World Health Organization, and structural adjustments imposed by the IMF and the World Bank.
Author: Elizabeth A. Casman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1136523057
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
As malaria and other tropical diseases continue their resurgence, questions about the potential impacts of environmental and demographic factors are becoming more critical. Recent attempts to understand the increase in malaria incidence often acknowledge the importance of social, economic and other contextual variables, but fail to explicitly incorporate them into models or consider how they evolve in relation to one another. This problem is of crucial interest to the climate policy community, which has been buffeted by claims and counter-claims concerning the impact of climate change on malaria. This important volume examines the contextual determinants of malaria and attempts to develop methods for incorporating them into projections of future incidence. Internationally renowned health specialists, economists, and other social scientists provide regional and global perspectives on risk modeling, the history of eradication efforts, current determinants (including environmental, social, and economic factors), and prospects for new vaccines and drugs. The Contextual Determinants of Malaria argues that an association of climate change with increased malaria incidence will have at least as much to do with human aging, poverty, urbanization, and population movement as with a rise in global temperatures. By placing climate in this perspective, The Contextual Determinants of Malaria focuses attention on the public health needs most critical in both the immediate and long-term future. It encourages multidisciplinary analysis of malaria control, and improves our understanding of the interactions of the diverse range of factors involved in the incidence and spread of the disease.
