Showing titles in Contagious Diseases

Rachel is a palliative care doctor who looked after some of the most gravely unwell patients on the COVID-19 wards of her hospital. Amid the tensions, fatigue and rising death toll, she witnessed the courage of patients and NHS staff alike in conditions of unprecedented adversity. For all the bleakness and fear, she found that moments that could stop you in your tracks abounded. People who rose to their best, upon facing the worst, as a microbe laid waste to the population. Her new book, Breathtaking, is an unflinching insider's account of medicine in the time of coronavirus.

In this game-changing book, Keith Frayn, an international expert in human metabolism and nutrition, dispels common misconceptions about human metabolism, explaining in everyday language the important metabolic processes that underlie all aspects of our daily lives. Frayn describes the communication systems that enable our different organs and tissues to cooperate, for instance in providing fuel to our muscles when we exercise, and in preserving our tissues during fasting.

As globalisation spreads and as we destroy the ancient ecosystems, we encounter strange and dangerous infections that originate in animals but that can be transmitted to humans. Diseases that were contained are being set free, and the results are potentially catastrophic. In a journey that takes him from Southern China to the Congo, from Bangladesh to Australia, David Quammen tracks these infections to their source and asks what we can do to prevent some new pandemic spreading across the face of the earth.

Reports suggest that over 100m people around the world are living with Long COVID (more than 1.5m in the UK) yet reliable, clear information and guidance remains scarce. This book is the definitive guide to understanding, managing and treating the condition. Written by the world's leading immunologist Professor Danny Altmann and expert patient Gez Medinger, The Long COVID Handbook translates cutting-edge science, patient-led research and practical guidance with clarity.

In Phantom Plague, Vidya Krishnan, traces the history of tuberculosis from the slums of 19th-century New York to modern Mumbai. In a narrative spanning century, Krishnan shows how superstition and folk remedies made way for scientific understanding of TB, such that it was controlled and cured in the West.

From a case of hysterical paralysis to a pregnancy puncturing a lung, twenty-five of the most thrilling medical mysteries known to man (and doctor)."Vital Signs," a popular column featured in Discover Magazine, has long been a favorite of readers, showcasing, each month, fascinating new tales of strange illnesses and diseases that baffle doctors and elude diagnosis. Each tale is true and borders on the unbelievable. It's no wonder that throughout the years the column has become an unofficial textbook for medical students, interns, doctors, and anyone interested in human illness and staying healthy.

With the devastating effects of Covid-19 still rattling the foundations of our global civilization, we live in unprecedented times – or so we might think. But pandemics have been a constant presence throughout human history, as humans and disease live side by side. Over the centuries, our ability to react to these sweeping killers has evolved, most notably through the development of vaccines.

In The Black Death: New Lessons from Recent Research, celebrated medievalist Dorsey Armstrong shares the fascinating new story of this old pandemic—revealed by dedicated researchers working with 21st-century technologies and a knowledge of language and history that now provide input from all geographic areas of the medieval world. In seven engaging lectures, Professor Armstrong corrects explanations of the pandemic that are now known to be inaccurate and offers a more robust description of plague biology than has ever been known.

This humbling and revelatory book shows how infectious disease has shaped humanity at every stage, from the first success of Homo sapiens over the equally intelligent Neanderthals to the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. How did an Indonesian volcano help cause the Black Death, setting Europe on the road to capitalism? How could 168 men extract the largest ransom in history from an opposing army of eighty thousand? The latest science reveals that infectious diseases are not just something that happens to us, but a fundamental part of who we are.

With over 17,000 known diseases affecting humans, and countless poisons, carcinogens and toxins in our environment, it's a miracle that our bodies manage to keep us alive. And that is, of course, if they don't betray us themselves, whether through cancers or autoimmune conditions. Biomedical researcher Professor John Tregoning tells the unlikely story of how, against all odds, we manage to stay alive. Taking an organ-by-organ tour of the human body, Tregoning embarks on his own experimental quest, testing 'life-extending' diets and exercise regimes to separate fact from fad.

Despite advances in health care, infectious microbes continue to be a formidable adversary to scientists and doctors. Vaccines and antibiotics, the mainstays of modern medicine, have not been able to conquer infectious microbes because of their amazing ability to adapt, evolve, and spread to new places. Terrorism aside, one of the greatest dangers from infectious disease we face today is from a massive outbreak of drug-resistant microbes.

In January 2020, as people started dying from a new virus in Wuhan, China, few really understood the magnitude of what was happening. Except, that is, a small group of scientific misfits who in their different ways had been obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated - and with why the governments and the institutions that were supposed to look after us, kept making the same mistakes time and again. This group saw what nobody else did. A pandemic was coming. We weren't prepared.

The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholars and the general public. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story. In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people—one third of the known population—before it vanished.

Lyme disease infects a minimum of 300,000 people per year in the United States and millions more throughout the rest of the world. Symptoms run from mild lethargy to severe arthritis to heart disease to incapacitating mental dysfunction. Although tests have improved over the past decade, they are still not completely reliable, and antibiotics are only partially effective. Up to 35 percent of those infected will not respond to antibiotic treatment or will relapse.

In December 2013, a young boy in a tiny West African village contracted the deadly Ebola virus. The virus spread to his relatives, then to neighboring communities, then across international borders. The world's first urban Ebola outbreak quickly overwhelmed the global health system and threatened to kill millions. In an increasingly interconnected world in which everyone is one or two flights away from New York or London or Beijing, even a localized epidemic can become a pandemic. Ebola's spread sounded global alarms that the next killer outbreak is right around the corner.

On the eighth of February, Dr Dominic Pimenta encountered his first suspected case of coronavirus. Within a week, he began wearing a mask on the tube and within a month, he was moved over to the Intensive Care Unit to help fight the virus. Duty of Care is the first book to tell the full story of the COVID-19 pandemic from someone on the front line, working in one of the NHS's hardest hit areas.

In 2020, an invisible germ - a virus - wholly upended our lives. We're most familiar with the viruses that give us colds or Covid-19. But viruses also cause a vast range of other diseases, including one disorder that makes people sprout branch-like growths as if they were trees. Viruses have been a part of our lives for so long that we are actually part virus: the human genome contains more DNA from viruses than our own genes. Meanwhile, scientists are discovering viruses everywhere they look: in the soil, in the ocean, even in deep caves miles underground.

The most important fact about the coronavirus pandemic that turned the world upside down in 2020 is that our response to it has been an epic overreaction driven by a disastrous confluence of public and private interests - all of them purporting to “follow the science”. Since the lockdowns began, millions of Americans have relied on the reporting of Alex Berenson. Exposing the hysteria and manipulation behind the worst failure of public policy since World War I, this clear-eyed journalist has been a critical source of reason and truth.

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, Scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu and the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles, to the 1930 'parrot fever' pandemic and the more recent SARS, Ebola and Zika, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms.

COVID-19, monkeypox, bird flu, SARS, HIV, AIDS, Ebola; we are living in the Age of Pandemics – one that we have created. As the climate crisis reaches a fever pitch and ecological destruction continues unabated, we are just beginning to reckon with the effects of environmental collapse on our global health. Fevered Planet exposes how the way we farm, what we eat, the places we travel to and the scientific experiments we conduct create the perfect conditions for deadly new diseases to emerge and spread faster and further than ever.