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From cholera to SARS and from the Black Death to today’s COVID-19 pandemic, both fiction and non-fiction books have provided unique insights into events that have significantly altered human history.
Fictional books that have pandemics as backdrops provide a bit of an escape from the current situation while still providing perspective of how people are affected by outbreaks and plagues. Below are some titles the Brantford Public Library has that stand out as excellent pandemic-based reading options.
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Over a hundred thousand people have now died of Covid-19 in the UK alone; people around the world have been separated from their family and friends, and entire economies have come to a standstill. All of which raises an important question: how can the world prevent another pandemic? The obvious place to start is at the beginning – before a pathogen has been seeded around the world and serious damage has been caused. If we can predict where the next pandemic will come from, perhaps we can stop it at its source. It s a simple idea, but is remarkably difficult to put into practice: infectious diseases can emerge from an enormous number of sources. Some are new strains of old pathogens – such as tuberculosis that has developed resistance to drugs, or malaria that is resistant to chloroquine. Others come out of laboratory accidents. More still stem from pathogens that are found in one region and then migrate into new places. The West Nile virus, for example, was first identified
by Charles Kenny (Scribner £20, 320 pp)
In 1962, the Nobel Prize-winning virologist Sir Frank Burnet wrote: The most likely forecast about the future of infectious disease is that it will be very dull.
After outbreaks in the past few decades of bird flu, Ebola, SARS and Covid-19, we know how very wrong he was.
Infectious disease has always been with us and arguably always will be. Charles Kenny s book is a lively survey of our millennia-long struggle to defeat it.
One of the first reliably recorded pandemics was in Athens in the 5th century BC. A thousand years later, Yersinia Pestis, the bacteria that caused the Black Death, paid its first visit to Mediterranean shores. The Byzantine historian Procopius described a pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated . It returned to Europe most cruelly in the years 1348-9, when half the population may have died.