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Summary
Summary
A vivid, sweeping history of mankind's battles with infectious disease, for readers of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Yuval Harari's Sapiens and John Barry's The Great Influenza .
For four thousand years, the size and vitality of cities, economies, and empires were heavily determined by infection. Striking humanity in waves, the cycle of plagues set the tempo of civilizational growth and decline, since common response to the threat was exclusion--quarantining the sick or keeping them out. But the unprecedented hygiene and medical revolutions of the past two centuries have allowed humanity to free itself from the hold of epidemic cycles--resulting in an urbanized, globalized, and unimaginably wealthy world.
However, our development has lately become precarious. Climate and population fluctuations and aspects of our prosperity such as global trade have left us more vulnerable than ever to newly emerging plagues. Greater global cooperation toward sustainable health is urgently required--such as the international efforts to harvest a Covid-19 vaccine--with millions of lives and trillions of dollars at stake.
Written as colorful history, The Plague Cycle reveals the relationship between civilization, globalization, prosperity, and infectious disease over the past five millennia. It harnesses history, economics, and public health, and charts humanity's remarkable progress, providing a fascinating and timely look at the cyclical nature of infectious disease.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kenny (Getting Better), a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, contextualizes the Covid-19 pandemic in this cogent study of mankind's fight against infectious diseases. Noting that "until recent decades, most people didn't live long enough to die of heart failure," Kenny celebrates modern medicine's progress against such scourges as smallpox and polio. He also explains that hunter-gatherer societies were most likely too small and too geographically isolated for infectious disease to be a major cause of death, and documents how the growth of cities and the charting of global trade routes led to worldwide pandemics. After detailing how improved sanitation and vaccines, among other developments, have reduced global death tolls, Kenny turns to troubling recent trends, including the overuse of antibiotics by humans and on livestock, which has led to antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria; the relative ease of developing bioweapons; and the anti-vaccine movement. Kenny offers a lucid assessment of successes (programs to enhance unemployment benefits and provide universal income support) and mistakes (late and overly long travel bans) in the global response to Covid-19, and calls for strengthening the World Health Organization and international agreements on drug quality and antibiotic use. The result is a worthy primer on a subject of pressing importance. (Jan.)
Kirkus Review
A long-view look at how viral and bacterial illnesses have influenced the course of human events. The bad news is that today, heart attacks and strokes are the leading causes of death. The good news, writes development expert Kenny, is that this "is evidence of humanity's greatest triumph: until recent decades, most people didn't live long enough to die of heart failure." Indeed, life expectancy has more than doubled around the world in the last 150 years, in part thanks to better diets and medical advances. The Covid-19 pandemic notwithstanding, infectious disease is not the devastating killer that it has been in the past, though it still kills plenty of people. The author charts the courses of those diseases, pegging their rising importance to the development of agriculture and the settling of humans in villages, towns, and cities, packed together to make a convenient target for such things as measles and cholera. "The more humans are loitering about," writes Kenny, "the greater the chance of illness." Some illnesses, such as trichinosis, have been all but eradicated, though in the case of that malady, Kenny hazards, it made for good enough reason for certain religious traditions to forbid the consumption of pork. New treatment methods, such as oral rehydration, have helped mitigate diarrheal diseases. Today, outside of Covid-19, many pandemic illnesses are lifestyle-related. As Kenny notes, these days, Chinese adults are about as likely to be obese as their American counterparts thanks to the availability of cheap processed food--and, he adds, "two out of five Earthlings have elevated blood pressure." The downsides of the current pandemic are numerous, but, as Kenny demonstrates, revealing his developmental interests, the old Malthusian effects of plagues in reducing inequality no longer apply. Though the author's popularizing approach is less scientifically rich than, say, David Quammen's, it still stands in a long tradition of informative plagues-and-people books such as Hans Zinsser's 1935 classic, Rats, Lice, and History. A timely, lucid look at the role of pandemics in history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Our earliest historical reaction to a surge of a new, severe infection was to try fleeing from it. From ancient times to now, outbreaks of contagious diseases promoted xenophobia and not infrequently a rise in authoritarianism. In his fact-filled and alarming overview of major infectious diseases past and present, economist Kenny discusses sources and vectors of epidemics, the toll of suffering and death, progress in controlling communicable diseases, and persistent problems. The rise of infections accompanied the expansion of agriculture and increased population density. Famine, war, travel, and trade have nurtured epidemics. Improved sanitation, better living conditions and nutrition, antibiotics, rehydration therapy, and vaccines have played major roles in combating infectious diseases. Yet a lack of preparation and an often sluggish response by governments across the globe to novel viruses, an overuse of antibiotics resulting in resistance, anti-vaccination movements, and poverty remain major impediments to conquering or at least limiting contagious diseases. Smallpox, malaria, bubonic plague, polio, measles, AIDS, yellow fever, Ebola, and COVID-19 are featured. Centuries ago, the poet Petrarch described the landscape of the Black Death as "empty houses, derelict cities, ruined estates, fields strewn with cadavers, a horrible and vast solitude encompassing the whole world." Much hard work lies ahead to avoid such a nightmarish scenario from ever returning.
Library Journal Review
Kenny (Close the Pentagon), director of technology and development at the Center for Global Development, chronicles the history of infectious disease over the past five millennia. By illustrating the cyclical nature of plagues and their impact on civilization (including responses to these existential threats), the relationship between civilization growth, unmanaged infectious diseases, and globalization is revealed. Developments such as improved sanitation systems and vaccines are used as evidence to explain a significant decrease in mortality. However, emerging threats like antibiotic-resistant bacteria and calls by some groups of people to avoid vaccinations threaten to eradicate advances in the longevity of humans. Although daunting in earlier chapters, overall Kenny has written a medical history about the nature of plagues that general readers will find accessible and easy to understand. Readers intimidated by other books of similar topics need not avoid this informative and colorful history. The author brings the book up to the present day, with discussions of 21st-century outbreaks and plagues. VERDICT Kenny's historical assessment of humanity's handling of infectious diseases, including both successes and failures, is a testament to the remarkable progress made in modern medicine and is a well-rounded overview of the history of plagues.--Rich McIntyre Jr., UConn Health Sciences Lib., Farmington
