Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World
Author: Irwin W. Sherman1Category: General Interest; History of Science
Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World is now available on Wiley.comMembers, use the code ASM20 at check out to receive your 20% discount.
Diseases have significantly shaped the course of the world's history. From the fourteenth-century plague to HIV/AIDS today, diseases have fundamentally altered the shape of society, politics, and culture. In a sweeping, thoughtful account, Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World considers the history of twelve important diseases: their impact, their consequences, their costs, and the lessons learned. Examining hemophilia, blight, tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox, bubonic plague, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, syphilis, porphyria, and AIDS, this book not only covers the diseases' histories but also addresses public health responses and societal upheavals. Historical perspectives on these diseases will be indispensable for a better understanding of how we and our forebears survived the onslaught of “plagues” and how we might avoid their devastating consequences in the future.
Crucial to this examination is exploring how past experience can help us to deal effectively with “coming plagues.” Whether attempts to control outbreaks were successful or not, lessons can be learned that are crucial for disease containment today. Most significantly, this book explains the lessons learned from attempts to contain past disease outbreaks and how that knowledge can be utilized in the future. Despite the challenges that a major epidemic presents, Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World also details various past successes in which diseases were brought under control and social disorder was minimized.
For more on the book and information on requesting an examination copy please visit http://www.asmscience.org/instructors
Paperback, 219 pages, illustrations, index.
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Chapter 1 : The Legacy of Disease: Porphyria and Hemophilia
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Abstract:
Porphyria, a hereditary error of metabolism, is linked to the body’s production of the pigment hemoglobin, which gives color to our red blood cells and grabs oxygen molecules as blood courses through the lungs. Hemoglobin consists of a protein, globin, coupled to a nonprotein molecule, heme. Heme, an iron complex within a ring structure called porphyrin, is synthesized in the red cells and liver. The pathway of heme manufacture can be thought of as if it were a river flowing downstream with a series of eight waterwheels along the way; each waterwheel is a cellular factory for making heme intermediates, i.e., porphyrins. The porphyrin intermediates also spill over into the urine during an attack. In an individual with porphyria, fresh urine is colorless, but on exposure to air and light for several hours it turns the color of port wine. The pedigree of porphyria can be traced back as far as Mary Queen of Scots. The disease that Queen Victoria passed on to her offspring was hemophilia or “bleeders’ disease.” Hemophilia (literally “love of blood”) involves a failure of the blood to clot within a normal time. The defect is caused by a missing protein in the plasma, the liquid part of the blood, which is necessary for clot formation. The danger for a person with hemophilia is that even a small wound or bruise may lead to severe and uncontrolled internal bleeding and death. Porphyria and hemophilia illustrate how closely intertwined are disease and culture.
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Chapter 2 : The Irish Potato Blight
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In 1833, as the number of sick immigrants arriving in Canada dwindled, the Grosse-Ile detention station fell silent. A decade later, however, it once again became active due to the changes that were taking place in Ireland. Four physicians at Grosse-Ile, aided by a crew of eight, worked from dawn until dark every day digging trenches and burying the dead three deep. The potato, introduced into Europe by the mid-18th century, was never a cash crop; however, because it was better adapted to the cool, moist conditions in Ireland than other crops, most of the Irish population was dependent on it as a supplemental food source by 1800. The Irish peasants on the worst land came to rely almost exclusively on potatoes to store over the winter and to feed themselves and their livestock, especially the pigs. Potato plants mature faster than most crops, taking 90 to 120 days, and edible tubers can be harvested in 60 days. The potato tuber is higher in protein than soybean, and half a potato can provide half of the human daily requirement of vitamin C. The social and political impacts of the Great Hunger or the Irish Potato Famine (1845 to 1849) were profound.
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Chapter 3 : Cholera
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Cholera is a horrible disease. At first, the symptoms produce no more than a surprised look as the bowels empty without any warning. In the 19th century, quarantine involved the inspection of ships, cargo, and passengers for evidence of contagious diseases. Inspections were conducted at an offshore quarantine station where ships were berthed and the passengers were examined for cholera, typhus, smallpox, leprosy, yellow fever, and plague. The federal quarantine was to be for 20 days but would apply only to steerage immigrant passengers, and not cabin passengers, even if they originated from the same cholera-ridden port. In 1892 a prominent New York physician said, “The history of every cholera epidemic in this country has proven that the disease entered our port on account of defective quarantine and it has been carried to us mainly by filthy immigrants.” To treat the violent diarrhea of cholera, health authorities in Germany, England, and France recommended a variety of nostrums and quack remedies: vinegar, camphor, wine, horseradish, mint, mustard plaster, leeches, bloodletting, laudanum, calomel, steam baths, and hot baths. Today, oral rehydration treatment (ORT) involves oral or intravenous administration of a solution containing glucose, sodium chloride, potassium, and lactate. It has been claimed that pollution, especially sewage, has ended more lives than smallpox and bubonic plague. Cholera, the most feared of all these sewage-related diseases, has provoked global horror and terror.
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Chapter 4 : Smallpox: the Speckled Monster
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Over the centuries, smallpox has killed hundreds of millions of people. In the 20th century alone, it killed at least 300 million people. Smallpox is indiscriminate, with no respect for social class, occupation, or age; it has killed or disfigured princes and paupers, kings and queens, children and adults, farmers and city dwellers, generals and their enemies, rich and poor. Smallpox traveled to West Africa with the caravans that moved from North Africa to the Guinea Coast. The cause of smallpox is a virus, one of the largest of the viruses; with proper illumination it can actually be seen under a light microscope. Most commonly the smallpox virus enters the body through droplet infection by inhalation. However, it can be transmitted by direct contact or through contaminated fomites (inanimate objects) such as clothing bedding, blankets, and dust. During the first week of infection there is no sign of illness; however, the virus can be spread by coughing or by nasal mucus at this time. The virus moves on to the lymph nodes and then to the internal organs via the bloodstream. There are two varieties of the smallpox (variola) virus: major and minor. They can be distinguished by differences in their genes. Smallpox spreads more rapidly during the winter in temperate climates and during the dry season in the tropics. Vaccination against smallpox results in protection because the antibodies produced against Variola vaccinae are able to neutralize the variola major virus.
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Chapter 5 : Bubonic Plague
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In the 1850s, Koch, Pasteur, and their microbe-hunting cohorts, armed with a disease-causing theory as well as microscopes with improved powers of magnification, began searching for agents that might be the cause of plague epidemics. During the past two millennia, there have been three great bubonic plague pandemics. These resulted in social and economic upheavals unmatched by those due to armed conflicts or any other infectious disease. One of the plague pandemics, called the plague of Justinian, came to the Mediterranean from an original focus in northeastern India or via Central Africa. The buboes continue to enlarge, sometimes reaching the size of a hen’s egg, and when they burst there is agonizing pain. Death can occur 2 to 4 days after the onset of symptoms. However, in some cases the bacteria enter the bloodstream. The second form of the disease, which may occur without the development of buboes, is called septicemic plague and is characterized by fever, chills, headache, malaise, and massive hemorrhaging, leading to death. As with humans, the disease in fleas has a distinctive pattern. More than 80 different species of fleas are involved as plague vectors. Plague is endemic in many countries in Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Americas.
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Chapter 6 : Syphilis: the Great Pox
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In 1913, when Hideyo Noguchi isolated the same microbe from the brains of patients with insanity and paresis due to late-stage syphilis, it became clear that all of the stages of the disease were linked to one “seed of contagion,” Treponema pallidum. Although the closely related treponemes that cause yaws (T. pallidum subsp. pertenue), treponarid (T. pallidum subsp. endemicum), and pinta (T. carateum) are >95% genetically alike, a single gene (called tpp15) marks T. pallidum as distinct. Syphilis is a disease of cities, and with the high population density, changes in social habits, wearing of clothing, less frequent sharing of eating utensils, and unique opportunities for rapid transmission, the propagation of the milder forms of treponemes was reduced, allowing transmission of only the more virulent venereal forms. Treponemes are present in all the tissues but especially the blood, and there is a high level of syphilis antigen. Serologic tests (such as the Wasserman, VDRL, and RPR [rapid plasma reagin] tests) are positive. Syphilis can be transmitted from the mother to the developing fetus via the placental blood supply, resulting in congenital syphilis; this is most likely to occur when the mother is in an active stage of infection. Its control will require comprehensive programs for diagnosis as well as treatment, but it is critical that these be suited to the social and cultural dynamics of this sexually transmitted disease.
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Chapter 7 : Tuberculosis: the People's Plague
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Tuberculosis (TB) is an ancient disease that has plagued humans throughout recorded history and even earlier. TB of the lungs is the most familiar form of the disease, giving rise to the slang word “lunger.” When localized to the lungs, TB can run an acute course, causing extensive destruction of lung tissue in a few months—so-called galloping consumption. TB can affect organs other than the lungs, including the intestine and larynx; sometimes the lymph nodes in the neck are affected, producing a swelling called scrofula. The word “tuberculosis” refers to the fact that the disease causes characteristic small knots or nodules called “tubercles” in the lungs. Franciscus Sylvius first described these in 1650; he also described their evolution into what he called lung ulcers. To the Victorians, the blood in the sputum blended metaphorically with menstrual blood, and so in a strange way sickness and death were blended with eroticism and procreation. Mycobacterium tuberculosis and M. avium are human pathogens that cause lung disease. M. avium causes opportunistic infections in immunocompromised people (e.g., those with AIDS); its symptoms can include weight loss, fevers, chills, night sweats, abdominal pains, diarrhea, and overall weakness. Coughing, pallor, spitting of blood, night sweats, and painful breathing signify that the disease is active. The lesion becomes infiltrated with lymphocytes and macrophages, and a delayed hypersensitivity reaction, similar to that experienced with a bee sting, occurs. Today it is recognized that tuberculosis is an infectious and a societal disease.
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Chapter 8 : Malaria
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Malaria is an ancient disease. The human malaria parasites, Plasmodium falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. malariae, are transmitted through the bite of an infected female anopheline mosquito when, during blood feeding, she injects sporozoites from her salivary glands. All of the pathology of malaria is due to parasite multiplication in erythrocytes. The long-term consequences of malaria infections are an enlarged spleen and liver as well as organ dysfunction. Falciparum infections are more severe and, when untreated, can result in a mortality rate of 25% in adults. Falciparum malaria accounts for 50% of all clinical malaria cases and is responsible for 95% of malaria-related deaths. P. vivax and P. ovale malarias also have the capacity to relapse; that is, parasites can reappear in the blood after a period when none were present. Since all of the pathology of malaria is due to parasites multiplying in the blood, most antimalarials are directed at these rapidly dividing stages. Chloroquine and amodiaquine are synthetic antimalarials developed in the 1940s. Regrettably, little is known about the molecular mode of action of many of these drugs or the mechanisms of resistance, although it has been contended that multidrug resistance to halofantrine, mefloquine, chloroquine, and quinine is due to mutations. The vaccines being contemplated are not based on killed or attenuated stages, but, instead, attention is focused on subunit vaccines consisting of selected antigens. The World Health Organization claims that there are over 100 malaria vaccines under development.
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Chapter 9 : Yellow Fever: the Saffron Scourge
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In September 1793, the federal government was forced to shut down when six clerks in the Treasury Department contracted yellow fever, five others fled to New York, and three workers in the post office and seven officers in the Customs Service became ill. Alexander Hamilton, who at the time was the Secretary of the Treasury, came down with yellow fever and left Philadelphia, but after being refused entry into New York City he and his wife traveled to Green Bush in upstate New York to stay with his wife's father. Yellow fever came to be known as Bronze John or the Saffron Scourge because of its telltale symptom: jaundice. Fear of the Saffron Scourge drove many people from the coastal communities, and those who could afford to do so left the South during what was called the summer "sickly season." Yellow fever did not occur in winter in parts of the American South where winters were cold and frosty. Perhaps most importantly, at the time no one knew what caused yellow fever or how to stop its spread. In one area 15 mosquitoes that had previously bitten yellow fever patients were released and allowed to bite volunteers; volunteers on the other side of the screening were not exposed to mosquitoes. The building of the Panama Canal was seriously affected by the problems of mosquito-borne disease, principally yellow fever. The last fatal case of yellow fever occurred in Panama in 1906.
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Chapter 10 : The Great Influenza
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Over the centuries, influenza epidemics were ascribed to the alignment of the stars or poisonous vapors (miasmas) as well as the weather, but by the 19th century the leading candidate was a bacterium (named Haemophilus influenzae by the German microbe hunter Richard Pfeiffer) found in the throats of patients suffering from the disease. In 1940 a distinctly different strain of influenza virus was isolated from a human; it was named influenza B virus. Subsequent studies showed that both the influenza A and B viruses could be grown in chicken embryos and that infected fluid from such embryos would clump chicken red blood cells. Control of cholera depends on the separation of sewage from drinking water; control of malaria depends on the eradication of mosquitoes and treatment of the infected individual; control of viral diseases such as measles, mumps, smallpox, polio, and yellow fever depends on the isolation of the virus and production of a protective vaccine. But influenza is different. Seventy years after the isolation of the causative agent and the development of vaccines, influenza remains the only infectious disease that appears periodically in life-threatening pandemics. The 1918 outbreak of influenza remains one of the world’s greatest public health disasters. Some have called it the 20th century’s weapon of mass destruction. It killed more people than the Nazis and far more than did the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The epidemic spread globally, moving outward in ever-enlarging waves.
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Chapter 11 : AIDS: the 21st Century Plague
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Two laboratories—one in France headed by Luc Montagnier and one at the National Institutes of Health in the United States headed by Robert Gallo—identified a virus that was named human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV) III by Gallo and lymphadenopathy virus (LAV) by Montagnier. The virus was found in tissues of patients with AIDS. Today both are recognized to be the same virus. The virus was renamed human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and the disease complex it produced was called acquired immunodeficiency disease syndrome (AIDS). HIV is able to cause AIDS because it can infect and destroy the white blood cells critical to the normal functioning of the immune system. In addition, severe athlete’s foot and white patches on the tongue, due to Epstein-Barr virus, can occur. Once these symptoms appear, the person is said to have AIDS-related complex (ARC). HIV-2 is less pathogenic than HIV-1, and individuals infected with HIV-2 are less at risk for developing AIDS. The most commonly used drug, azidothymidine (AZT), delays the onset of AIDS by inhibiting viral multiplication. The modern plague of AIDS will continue to rise in the coming years as a result of infections that have already occurred, and it will decimate the ranks of the young men and women who are in their most productive years. Today, the modern plague of AIDS is a forceful reminder that the global impact of infectious disease is yet to be blunted.
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Doody Enterprises
18 February 2013
At A Glance
Diseases have significantly shaped the course of the world's history. From the fourteenth-century plague to HIV/AIDS today, diseases have fundamentally altered the shape of society, politics, and culture. In a sweeping, thoughtful account, "Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World" considers the history of twelve important diseases: their impact, their consequences, their costs, and the lessons learned. Examining hemophilia, blight, tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox, bubonic plague, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, and syphilis, this book not only covers the diseases' histories but also addresses public health responses and societal upheavals. Historical perspectives on these diseases will be indispensable for a better understanding of how we and our forbearers survived the onslaught of "plagues" and how we might avoid their devastating consequences in the future. Crucial to this examination is exploring how past experience can help us to deal effectively with "coming plagues." Whether attempts to control outbreak successful or not, lessons can be learned that are crucial for disease containment today. Most significantly, this book explains the lessons learned from attempts to contain past disease outbreaks and how that knowledge can be utilized in the future. Despite the challenges that a major epidemic presents, "Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World" also details various past successes in which diseases were brought under control and social disorder was minimized.
Description
This book examines 12 important diseases from a historical perspective. Each chapter provides a description of the disease, its origins, symptoms, how it is acquired, treatment, control measures, and its consequences. In these sections the author examines the impact of disease on humans, from social perceptions and stigmatization of those afflicted to changes in populations due to emigration and immigration. The discussions center on periods when each disease was at its height, as measured by either the greatest number of people affected (the plague), political upheaval (porphyria and hemophilia), or great changes in demographics (late blight of potato). The author also offers insights about the consequences of each disease addressing areas of lessons learned, current status, and chances for future outbreaks.
Purpose
The purpose is to present a historical account of disease and its impact on society. The book examines the nature of disease and the human response in terms of attempts to control its spread and limit its consequences. By focusing on the past, the author sets the framework for discussions on lessons learned so we may better understand how we may respond to future outbreaks.
Audience
The book is intended for general readers who have an interest in history and biology, biology students, and teachers who wish to include more information on the history and impact of disease in their courses. It should also be useful in microbiology courses as a supplemental reader as 10 of 12 diseases covered are microbial pathogens. The author, professor emeritus at the University of California, Riverside, has published numerous scholarly papers and four books in this area.
Features
Most of the diseases are caused by microbial pathogens, but two are genetic disorders (porphyria and hemophilia). Historical accounts of bacterial disease include cholera, the plague, syphilis, and tuberculosis. The impact of viral epidemics is illustrated by smallpox, yellow fever, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and HIV. The impact of disease on a population dependent upon subsistence farming is illustrated by the Irish potato blight, in which the causative agent was a water mold. Interestingly, this is also the only disease included that is not a human pathogen, but its effects were to drastically change the demographics of the United States in the mid-19th century. The story of the devastating effects of the protozoan parasite which causes malaria is also told along with the efforts to control it and its impact on Africa. The book is well written, but does not contain any figures or tables, data presentation, or any illustrations.
Assessment
The book is easy to read and enjoyable. However, it tends to repeat information from the author's previous book, The Power of Plagues (ASM Press, 2006). Many of the diseases discussed in that book (the plague, malaria, cholera, and syphilis, tuberculosis, and smallpox) appear here and in familiar format. There is extensive overlap in the author's general discussion of epidemiology or spread of disease in populations and the sections on the basic reproductive ratio of the disease (the disease multiplier, Ro), as well as explanations of how each disease is transmitted. However, in this book, the author focuses more on the changes and the impact of disease upon society, making it a nice complement to the previous work and a good read for those interested in the whole story behind some of the world's most tumultuous times.
Doody Enterprises
Reviewer: Erick Snellman, PhD (The Citadel)
Review Date: Unknown
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