CityReads|Eight Books on City and Infectious Diseases

CityReads 城读 2020-03-23

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Eight Books on City and Infectious Diseases

“Plagues are as certain as death and taxes.”by Krause

Throughout recorded history, epidemics have changed the world and influenced the trajectory of population, cities, nations as well as science, medicine, and health. From plague to smallpox to SARS to more recent outbreaks of influenza and coronavirus that is currently spreading in Wuhan and other regions in China and beyond, population trends influence and are influenced by infectious disease. Infectious diseases are traveling around the world in humans, in insects, in animals, and in food and food products … so we live in a world where globalization has permitted this interchange of humans and insects, meat, food products around the world. The evolution of major cities around the world has been checkered by tragic outbreaks of disease. Population density, which encourages free flow of goods and ideas, also eases the spread of diseases.

Specific infectious diseases connected with urbanization and cities can be divided into six categories: water and sanitation-related diseases, such as Cholera; vector-borne diseases, such as plague spread by fleas, Leishmaniasis spread by flies, malaria, Yellow Fever, Dengue, and Japanese encephalitis spread by mosquitoes, and Lyme, Babesia spread by ticks; respiratory infections, such as SARS, and coronavirus; sexually transmitted infections, such as HIV/AIDs; bioterrorism，such as Anthrax; and nosocomial & drug resistant bacteria.

To understand the past, present, and future of infectious diseases in the city, I have compiled 8 books on city and pandemics. I hope the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan can be controlled very soon and life will carry on as usual.

1.Albert Camus, translated by Stuart Gilbert, 1991.The Plague, Vintage.

A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature. In his novel, Camus captured everything that we were dealing with in the epidemic. In the end, Camus wrote:

“while cataracts of colored fire fell thicker through the darkness, that Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.

And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

2. William H. McNeill, 1976, Plagues and Peoples,1st Edition, Anchor

Plagues and Peoples offers a radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact--political, demographic, ecological, and psychological--of disease on cultures. From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, and to the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, the history of disease is the history of humankind.

The author, William McNeill, historian at University of Chicago, outlined the reasons Homo sapiens had been vulnerable to microbial assaults over the millennia. He saw each catastrophic epidemic event in human history as the ironic result of humanity’s steps forward. As humans improve their lots, McNeill warned, they actually increase their vulnerability to disease.

“It is, I think, worthwhile being conscious of the limits upon our powers,” McNeill said. “It is worth keeping in mind that the more we win, the more we drive infections to the margins of human experience, the more we clear a path for possible catastrophic infection. We’ll never escape the limits of the ecosystem. We are caught in the food chain, whether we like it or not, eating and being eaten.”

3.Laurie Garrett，1995，The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance，Penguin.

Humanity’s ancient enemies are, after all, microbes. They didn’t go away just because science invented drugs, antibiotics, and vaccines (with the notable exception of smallpox). They didn’t disappear from the planet when Americans and Europeans cleaned up their towns and cities in the postindustrial era. And they certainly won’t become extinct simply because human beings choose to ignore their existence.

This book explores the recent history of disease emergence, examining in roughly chronological order examples that highlight reasons for microbial epidemics and the ways humans respond, as cultures, scientists, physicians, bureaucrats, politicians, and religious leaders.

The book also examines the biology of evolution at the microbial level, looking closely at ways in which disease agents and their vectors are adapting to counter the defensive weapons used to protect human beings. In addition, The Coming Plague looks at means by which humans are actually aiding and abetting the microbes through ill-planned development schemes, misguided medicine, errant public health, and shortsighted political action/inaction.

Finally, some solutions are offered. Fear, without potential mitigating solutions, can be very volatile. It has, throughout history, prompted the lifelong imprisonment of the victims of a disease. Perhaps less onerously, it can lead to inappropriate expenditures of money and human resources aimed at staving off a real or imagined enemy.

What is required, overall, is a new paradigm in the way people think about disease. Rather than a view that sees humanity’s relationship to the microbes as a historically linear one, tending over the centuries toward ever-decreasing risk to humans, a far more challenging perspective must be sought, allowing for a dynamic, nonlinear state of affairs between Homo sapiens and the microbial world, both inside and outside their bodies. As Harvard University’s Dick Levins puts it, “we must embrace complexity, seek ways to describe and comprehend an ever-changing ecology we cannot see, but, nonetheless, by which we are constantly affected.”

4. John M. Barr, 2005. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, Revised edition, Penguin Books.

At the height of WWI, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon.

5. Steven Johnson，2007. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, Riverhead Books.

Faced with outbreaks of plague and cholera, scientists eventually discovered a data-driven way to pinpoint the source of the problem: spatial epidemiology, and in particular, disease mapping. the disease map stands out for its ability to change the way we think about population health.

“What [disease maps] ended up doing was making the idea of large-scale metropolitan living a sustainable one,” says Steven Johnson in a TED talk about his book, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.

6. S. Harris Ali, Roger Keil, 2008. Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City, Wiley-Blackwell.

This book is a collection of writings by scholars from seven countries on four continents on the SARS outbreak and its relation to infectious disease management in progressively global and urban societies. It connects newer thinking on global cities, networks, and governance and focuses on the ways pathogens interact with economic, political and social factors, ultimately presenting a threat to human development and global cities. It employs an interdisciplinary approach to the SARS epidemic, clearly demonstrating the value of social scientific perspectives on the study of cities and infectious disease in a globalized world.

7.Michael Emch, Elisabeth Dowling Root, Margaret Carrel, 2017.Health and Medical Geography, Fourth Edition, The Guilford Press.

Why are rainfall, carcinogens, and primary care physicians distributed unevenly over space? The fourth edition of the leading text in the field has been updated and reorganized to cover the latest developments in disease ecology and health promotion across the globe. The book accessibly introduces the core questions and perspectives of health and medical geography and presents cutting-edge techniques of mapping and spatial analysis. It explores the intersecting genetic, ecological, behavioral, cultural, and socioeconomic processes that underlie patterns of health and disease in particular places, including how new diseases and epidemics emerge. Geographic dimensions of health care access and service provision are addressed.

8.Lukas Engelmann, John Henderson, Christos Lynteris, 2018. Plague and the City, Routledge

Plague and the City uncovers discourses of plague and anti-plague measures in the city during the medieval, early modern and modern periods, and explores the connection between plague and urban environments including attempts by professional bodies to prevent or limit the outbreak of epidemic disease. Bringing together leading scholars of plague working across different historical periods, this book provides an inter-disciplinary study of plague in the city across time and space. The chapters cover a wide range of periods, geographical locations and disciplinary approaches but all seek to answer significant questions, including whether common motives can be identified, and how far knowledge about plague was based on an understanding of the urban space. It also examines how maps and photographs contribute to understanding plague in the city through exploring the ways in which the relationship between plague and the urban environment has been visualized.

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