timely title: ‘Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu’
Written on April 28, 2009
Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu by Philip Alcabes (PublicAffairs, April 13, 2009) appeared shortly before the current swine flu outbreak. (& it has a Kindle edition)
Product description from the publisher:
The average individual is far more likely to die in a car accident than from a communicable disease…yet we are still much more fearful of the epidemic. Even at our most level-headed, the thought of an epidemic can inspire terror. As Philip Alcabes persuasively argues in Dread, our anxieties about epidemics are created not so much by the germ or microbe in question—or the actual risks of contagion—but by the unknown, the undesirable, and the misunderstood.
Alcabes examines epidemics through history to show how they reflect the particular social and cultural anxieties of their times. From Typhoid Mary to bioterrorism, as new outbreaks are unleashed or imagined, new fears surface, new enemies are born, and new behaviors emerge. Dread dissects the fascinating story of the imagined epidemic: the one that we think is happening, or might happen; the one that disguises moral judgments and political agendas, the one that ultimately expresses our deepest fears.
See also: article at Smithsonian.com
Author’s website added 4/29
As I friend of Alcabes, I suspect he is pretty queasy with the individual deaths, of course. But he has a great blog post about swine flu in the news. He argues WHO, CDC, and international public health officers are doing sound public health and we should avoid a panic paradigm: http://www.philipalcabes.com
Judith, Thanks for the link. I’ve added it to the post.