Suchergebnisse

Sometimes Fiction can do more to change public opinion than nonfiction. It took Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, to awaken the public to the dangers of sausage and the meat-packing industry in general. Another example, if I can be so presumptuous, is my 1977 novel Coma, which opened readers' eyes tot eh dubious side of the medical profession after years of misleadingly warm and fuzzy treatment of doctors and hospitals in novels, movies, and TV series. Today, there is a crying need for new such socially conscious novel to shake up the complacent public about the high risk an imminent, serious pandemic. And I don't mean the much-publicized swine flu. While the world media has obsessed, and rightfully so, about this fast-spreading illness, I'm worried about the next crisis, something much deadlier and much more catastrophic, indeed the kind of crisis most people wrongly believe could not happen in this day and age. If I were the author, this urgently needed novel would have to be called Plague. Adapted from the source document.

The first victim of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa was almost certainly a 2-year-old boy in the small village of Meliandou in southeastern Guinea. Since his death in December 2013, the disease -- whose previous outbreaks killed at most hundreds of people, and generally in rural areas -- has infected thousands of people across West Africa, as well as a handful of people around the world, due to porous borders, ill-equipped health systems, and a faulty international response. The virus has drawn comparisons to one of history's greatest biological killers: the plague, which killed tens of millions of people from China to Europe in the 'Black Death' of the 14th century. In 1896, Russian microbiologist Waldemar Haffkine began developing an effective plague vaccine using inactive Y. pestis and, among other ingredients, goat flesh. Between 1989 and 2003 -- the most recent comprehensive World Health Organization HO data set-nearly 40,000 cases of the plague were recorded in 25 countries, with transmission usually occurring within, not across, national borders. Adapted from the source document.

Diagrams are found at the heart of the modern history of epidemiology. Epidemiologists used spatial diagrams to visualize concepts of epidemics as arrangements of biological, environmental, historical, as well as social factors and to analyze epidemics as configurations. Often, they provided a representation of the networks of relationships implied by epidemics, rather than to offer conclusions about origin and causation. This article will look at two spatial diagrams of plague across a period in which an epidemiological way of reasoning stood in stark contrast to arguments provided about plague in the rising field of bacteriology and experimental medicine. This historical genealogy of epidemiologists working with diagrams challenges perceptions of epidemic diagrams as mere arguments of causality to emphasize diagrammatic notions of uncertainty, crisis, and invisibility.

A century ago, the third bubonic plague swept the globe, taking more than 15 million lives. Plague Ports tells the story of ten cities on five continents that were ravaged by the epidemic in its initial years: Hong Kong and Bombay, the Asian emporiums of the British Empire where the epidemic first surfaced; Sydney, Honolulu and San Francisco, three "pearls" of the Pacific; Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in South America; Alexandria and Cape Town in Africa; and Oporto in Europe. Myron Echenberg examines plague's impact in each of these cities, on the politicians, the medical and publi

Evidence suggests that the early economic and political success of the English in Plimoth Colony is due to the introduction of European diseases into coastal Massachusetts during the late sixteenth century. Building upon Alfred Crosby's 1972 publication The Columbian Exchange, modern environmental historians and cultural historians recognize the important interconnection between parasitism, disease, and historic trends. It is now fairly well recognized in both the science and humanities disciplines that any study of the political and economic development of European settlements and colonization of the Americas correlates with studies and research about the introduction of foreign diseases, as well as the introduction of new plant and animal species. The successful political and economic English history of Plimoth Colony is directly related to the decline of the Wampanoag population as a result of plagues and epidemics brought to the New World by European explorers and settlers during early years of exploration of New England. Although the diseases that existed in North, South, and Central America before 1492 were epidemiologically insignificant to the indigenous populations living in the New World, those diseases brought into the Americas by early European explorers spread rapidly throughout the continent. Most diseases in pre-contact North America were endemic, not epidemic. When a disease has been prevalent in an area for an extended period of time and the inhabitants are regularly in contact with the pathogen(s), a disease is considered endemic in that area. If foreign diseases were introduced to an area it would act in an epidemic nature for mortality and sickness during times of high prevalence in a targeted location. Put simply, European diseases reached the Wampanoag living in the region now recognized as Plymouth Massachusetts long before English colonization in Massachusetts during the seventeenth century. Yet, the idea that the Natives of New England were somehow destined to be destroyed by diseases that pre-date English settlers is often misinterpreted and relieves the English themselves of responsibility for the mass death of Native peoples in New England. This thesis argues that the key to the successful English colonization of coastal Massachusetts was not just the onslaught of plagues and epidemics that affected the Wampanoag in coastal Massachusetts from 1616 to the mid-seventeenth century, rather, the success is due to how English explorers and colonists crafted racial and religious perceptions about these disease ridden Wampanoag populations, and how these perceptions empowered the English to perceive themselves as a culturally superior power further enabling them to become the colonizer and the Wampanoag the colonized.

[p. 2] ; column 4 ; 12 ¾ col. in. ; Comments on the number of men being sent to fight the Mormons. The folly of appointing Brigham Young as governor.

[p. 2] ; column 1 ; 4 ¾ col. in. ; The government is sending troops to Salt Lake City to somehow control the detestable practices of Brigham Young and his sect. New "victims" are arriving in Salt Lake City from Europe.