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Outbreak!
Outbreak!: 50 Tales of Epidemics that Terrorized the World | Beth Skwarecki
2 posts | 4 read | 1 reading
From ancient scourges to modern-day pandemics! Throughout history--even recent history--highly contagious, deadly, and truly horrible epidemics have swept through cities, countrysides, and even entire countries. Outbreak! catalogs fifty of those incidents in gruesome detail, including: The Sweating Sickness that killed 15,000, including Henry VIII's older brother Syphilis, the "French Disease," which spread throughout Europe in the late fifteenth century The romantic disease: tuberculosis, featured in La Boheme, La Traviata, and Les Miserables The worldwide outbreak of influenza in 1918, which killed 3 percent of the population The mysterious appearance of HIV in the 1980s The devastating spread of Ebola in West Africa in 2014 From ancient outbreaks of smallpox and plague to modern epidemics such as SARS and Ebola, the stories capture the mystery and devastation brought on by these diseases. It's a sickeningly fun read that confirms the true definition of going viral.
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JenniferdeBie
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The title says it all. Skwarecki devotes a few pages each to 50 different epidemics through the centuries, from leprosy in the 12th century, to the seemingly endless rounds of smallpox, to Ebola more recently. And a haunting line about coronaviruses in the SARS chapter.

Anyway, a good overview of myriad plagues and epidemics across history without bogging the reader down on any single one.

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Ephemera
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A chronological history of 50 epidemics that terrorized the populace in which they occurred. Each chapter is about 3 pages long and gives a brief recap of the facts and the disease. I‘ve always been interested in epidemic and pandemic outbreaks because I find it very ironic that humans, who are at the top of the evolutionary pile, can be almost wiped out by a virus or bacteria we can‘t even see without a microscope.