Product Description
It may sound innocuous compared to war, plague and famine, but flu is in fact one of the world's biggest killers. Strains of the virus are always in circulation but every so often a new and particularly virulent one comes along, to which we have no historic immunity - when that happens the consequences are devastating. This fascinating book explores the havoc caused by the world's most deadly virus - and the destruction left in its wake. From its initial identification by the Greek physician Hippocrates in the 4th century BC to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and beyond, Tom Quinn explores the social, medical and scientific ramifications of the major outbreaks that have occurred over the centuries - and the potential consequences should such a pandemic occur in the modern world, an event that many believe is just a matter of time. The likelihood and impact of a pandemic caused by the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of avian flu jumping species is also explored, along with recent scientific attempts to alter the structure of the virus in order to destroy it or attenuate its virulence.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 2.0 based on 1 review)

an inch deep and a mile wide by doc peterson (Portland, Oregon USA)

2 Stars
January 31, 2009
Hoping for a social history of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, I picked up Quinn's _Flu: a social history of influenza_. What I got instead was a broad (and somewhat shallow) history of the disease itself from ancient times to the present. While I can't claim the title was misleading, I was disappointed given my expectations. Even now properly diagnosing disease can be an uncertain proposition. Attempting to diagnose diseases that struck hundreds (even thousands) of years ago is even more problematic - yet this does not discourage Quinn from postulating that various epidemics from the 15th century forwards were the flu. There are a number of problems with this, the first (and greatest) are the variety of symptoms described: three different physicians may describe several different symptoms of the same disease - or, perhaps - they are different diseases (as one sickness weakens the body to become susceptible to others). As a social history, Quinn also leaves something to be desired. Certainly medicine has made some remakable strides in the last 500 years, and may treatments to disease were as potentially lethal as the illness itself - this is hardly new. Yet this sort of retelling treatment horror stories is the bulk of his social history - very little about how disease effected population migration, wages and standards of living, gender realations or power-dynamics is addressed. My greatest disappointment, however, was in his all-too-brief discussion of the 1918 - 1919 Pandemic. Nothing new was presented here, Quinn instead summarizing and re-telling what others have written on the epidemic: its causes, its spread, its lethality. For those interested in epidemiology for the lay-person, I strongly recommend The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History which not only explains the biology of viruses in an accessable manner, but whose discussion of the pandemic is much more detailed and rich. Another masterpiece on the pandemic (and the book that began my interest on the subject) is Alfred Crosby's America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 This book pales in comparison.

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