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Pandemic Survival: It's Why You're Alive    by Ann Love, Jane Drake & Bill Slavin Amazon.com order for
Pandemic Survival
by Ann Love
Order:  USA  Can
Tundra, 2013 (2013)
Hardcover
* *   Reviewed by Hilary Williamson

Pandemic Survival: It's Why You're Alive, written by Ann Love and Jane Drake, and illustrated by Bill Slavin, takes a detailed look at the world's pandemic past, and our pandemic future.

Chapters address Prevention and Cure ('Everyone alive now is a descendant of survivors'); Ancient Stories, Modern Diagnoses; The Middle Ages (600-1500); The Age of Discovery (1500-1800); The Industrial Age (1800-1900); Antibiotics Before and After; and Global Village. In each, sidebars provide interesting details like Bacteria Fact-eria and Connecting the Bites.

The authors tell us about pandemics in history - what we know and what we guess - and how early cultures and physicians reacted to them. We read about outbreaks of bubonic plague; about the smallpox pandemic in the New World; about key innovators like the world's first epidemiologist, John Snow, who showed that cholera was carried by drinking water; about the Spanish flu, 'the worst flu pandemic in history'; and the modern plague, AIDS.

Finally, the last chapter, Global Village, addresses more recent pandemic panics like the SARS one in 2003; biological warfare; and three big lessons to be learned from pandemics. The book ends with a Glossary of terms like pathogen and vector. Though this informative volume is aimed at ages 9 to 12, older teens and adults will also be intrigued by it, particularly by its historical vignettes.

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