Epidemic disease & human history @ TCC

While visiting the Natural History Smithsonian Museum in DC recently, I picked up a copy of the book, The American Plague: the untold story of yellow fever, the epidemic that shaped our history for my husband, a professor of American History. He gives it a 'thumbs-up' review, and it is available in the TCC Library. Today while reading Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, I noticed a recent bibliography essay was devoted to disease and history ["The First Horseman and History: Epidemic Disease and Civilization", by Fred van Hartesveldt]. Hmmmmm. Coincidence ?

It's feeling like summer time now and that means (1) more time outside with potentially disease carrying mosquitoes (acutely felt this last weekend working in my yard) and (2) more of us will be traveling on planes, cruise ships etc in crowded conditions most likely exposed to an abundance of communicable diseases - so with all those various elements coming together, this seemed like a good topic to cover now !
The TCC Library has a number of resources covering plagues, epidemics, pandemics, communicable diseases and related fascinating topics. Does every human epidemic trace its origins to diseases that began in animals ? If so, does that give those humans of European descent a genetic resistance biological advantage? Look for: Guns, Germs and Steel.
Our library no longer has a copy of Plagues and Peoples by McNeill, but we can easily borrow a copy from a member library in our system [van Hartesveldt says "McNeil’s dramatic storytelling and ability to focus on the telling detail without losing the big picture made his book more influential than those of other writers...Thirty years later, McNeil remains the starting point for any scholarly or popular study of disease and society."]
other recommended titles you'll find at TCC Library include:
The First Horseman: disease in human history, by Aberth, 2007

The Coming Plague: newly emerging diseases in a world out of balance, by Garrett, 1994


Justinian’s flea : plague, empire, and the birth of Europe, by Rosen,2007.

A journal of the plague year by Daniel Defoe, 1722 "For an emotional sense of the conditions created by the plague in the mid-17th century"
Plague : a story of science, rivalry, and the scourge that won’t go away by Marriott, 2003.
It wasn't until the pandemic of the 1890s, when Alexandre Yersin identified the plague bacillus and Paul-Louis Simond revealed the flea as the vector.

The life and death of smallpox by Glynn & Glynn, 2004 "Smallpox, like plague, is also a major epidemic that has a very long history . . . its impact on human life has certainly been immense. The long struggle to defeat smallpox is the most common focus of studies of the disease’s role in society ... an excellent recent volume that provides a survey of smallpox’s history"


Pandemics and global health by Youngerman, 2008

The white death : a history of tuberculosis by Dormandy, 2000

The great influenza : the epic story of the deadliest plague in history by Barry, 2004

The little book of pandemics : 50 of the world’s most virulent plagues and infectious diseases by Moore, 2007

Twelve diseases that changed our world, by Sherman, 2007

The AIDS pandemic : the collision of epidemiology with political correctness, Chin, 2007

more items can be found under the following headings:

~ aids ~ black death ~ cholera ~ communicable diseases ~ communicable disease control ~ ebola ~ epidemics history ~ influenza ~ malaria ~ pandemic ~ plague ~ polio ~ sars ~ sexually transmitted ~ smallpox ~ syphilis ~ tuberculosis ~ typhus ~ yellow fever ~ world health diseases history

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of course, in any review of communicable diseases, we need to recognize
the CDC ~ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

CDC.gov is CDC's primary online communication channel. Annually, there are close to 500 million page views to the site, averaging 41 million page views per month. CDC.gov provides users with credible, reliable health information on:Data and Statistics; Diseases and Conditions ; Emergencies and Disasters;Environmental Health; and more

Examples of information from CDC include:

• the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases site
• the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases
• specific disease information - CDC West Nile Virus Homepage
• information on Diseases Related to Travel
• and links to other useful sites including Flu.gov

Flu.gov provides comprehensive government-wide information on seasonal, H1N1 (swine), H5N1 (bird) and pandemic influenza for the general public, health and emergency preparedness professionals, policy makers, government and business leaders, school systems, and local communities.

Expand your summer reading list, and stay healthy !