PANDEMICS

The 2014 Ebola epidemic demonstrated the power of pandemics and their ability not only to destroy lives locally but also to capture the imagination and terrify the world In 2019 and the years that followed the coronavirus pandemic infected every continent and took the lives of millions In this updated edition 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 Extremely interesting from a medical standpoint the study of pandemics also provides unexpected broader insights into culture and politics 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 twentieth centuries Today