Description
Feel a tickle in your throat? Do you still have that headache? Could you be falling victim to a deadly virus? From history's earliest days, bacteria and viruses have stalked humans. Stowing on wagons, ships and airplanes, these diseases traversed the globe, infecting people in city streets and isolated hamlets. Epidemics And Pandemics: Real Tales Of Deadly Diseases tells the tale of five of history's most critical contagions. In 1347, infected fleas hitched a ride from the steppes of Mongolia to the streets of Medieval Europe, bringing with them the Black Death. Five years later, one-third of Europe's population was dead. When Hernan Cortes arrived in Mexico in 1518, he carried a secret weapon, the smallpox virus helped Cortes defeat the mighty Aztec Empire and paved the way for European conquest of the New World as the disease destroyed the Native American population. A few years after the United States won independence from Great Britain, the capital city of Philadelphia faced an ordeal that threatened the nation's survival, an epidemic of Yellow Fever. After the First World War, the Spanish Flu of 1918 killed 50 million people around the world in just months. Later in that century, in the 1980s, a mysterious virus struck down gay men in the United States. AIDS quickly became a pandemic, infecting people from all walks of life. These five tales reveal the revolutionary power of disease to change history. In each story, readers learn about tragedy caused by ignorance and missed opportunity, but they will also discover heroic caregivers, civic leaders and scientists determined to save their world. .