Antibiotic Resistance, Agriculture, and the Plague

Antibiotics have ended the uncontrollable outbreaks of plague in humans that stalked our ancestors. Today, outbreaks are usually snuffed out after a couple of cases with antibiotic treatment of patients, prophylactic treatment of contacts and vector control. Our greatest risks from plague today are a pneumonic plague outbreak/attack and the emergence of antibiotic resistance. Beginning...

Opening the Plague Files

Book Citation: A.P. Cook & N.D. Cook.  The Plague Files: Crisis Management in Sixteenth-Century Seville.  Louisiana State University Press, 2009. 296 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8071-4360-5. Topic: Public Health Crisis Management Time and Place: Seville, Spanish Empire, 1579-1581. Audience:  Those interested in history, crisis management, public health, and political science; written for a general audience. Discussion: The...

The Landscape of Super-Spreading

Super-spreading individuals and disease hot spots have been known for over a century, but rarely have they been considered together. Sara Paull and colleagues [1] have pulled together all of the recent work the ecology of disease hot spots and transmission heterogeneity (super spreading) to explore the continuum between individual transmission heterogeneity and the landscape...

American World War II Plague Posters

These posters were found in the Otis Historical Archives National Museum of Health & Medicine flicker site housing photos and graphics from the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC. These government produced World War II  images are now public domain. If you look closely at the faces on the fleas, the poster...

Japanese Use of Plague during World War II

I've been reading Sheldon Harris' Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-up. (Rev. ed, 2002), considered the definitive book on biological warfare in the Pacific theater during WWII. My primary interest is in Japanese research and use of plague in their biological warfare program.  Since this blog is, in part, a...

Plague at the Siege of Caffa, 1346

The first stage of the Black Death among Europeans was said to begin with the whoosh of a Mongol trebuchet. Gabriele De' Mussi, a lawyer from near Genoa writing in about 1348, is believed to have recorded the account of the earliest use of plague as  weapon of war at Caffa in 1346. "The dying...

Paul Slack’s Plague: A Very Short Introduction

Book Citation: Paul Slack. (2012) Plague: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0-19-958954-8. Pocket size paperback, 138 pages. $11.95 {#307 of Oxford's Very Short Introduction series} Topic: The Plague Time and Place: Primarily Europe from c. 540- c. 1910 Audience: General audience. Intended as an introduction to the topic for anyone with...

Outlining a Project: Human Plague

I've had a bit of a blogging slump lately. I came back from the medieval congress with too many things on my mind to settle down to write a post. Nevertheless, it has been a productive couple of weeks. I've been working on an outline for one of the book projects that I mentioned quite...

Contagions Round-up 22: Unusual Pathologies & Prevention Schemes

I haven't had much time to blog lately, but the rest of you sure have! My reader is chuck full again! Here are some of the links that have caught my eye over the last several weeks. Past Horizons reports that Charles Darwin has been cleared of delaying and altering his work after receiving information...