Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease

Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease by Mark Harrison (Author). A lot as we take comfort within the belief that modern medicine and public well being ways can shield us from horrifying contagious ailments, such religion is dangerously unfounded. So demonstrates Mark Harrison on this pathbreaking investigation of the intimate connections between trade and illness throughout trendy history. For hundreds of years commerce has been the single most vital think about spreading diseases to totally different components of the world, the author reveals, and right this moment the identical is true. However in right this moment's global world, commodities and germs are circulating with unprecedented speed.

Starting with the plagues that ravaged Eurasia in the fourteenth century, Harrison charts both the passage of disease and the determined measures to prevent it. He examines the emergence of public health in the Western world, its subsequent development elsewhere, and a recurring pattern of misappropriation of quarantines, embargoes, and other sanitary measures for political or economic acquire-even for use as weapons of war. In concluding chapters the writer exposes the weaknesses of as we speak's public well being laws-a set of rules that not solely disrupt the worldwide economic system but additionally fail to guard the general public from the afflictions of trade-borne disease.

Mark Harrison clearly articulates the close relationship that trade and contagion have had because the 14th century CE. Mr. Harrison thoroughly analyzes the policies that first nations after which international locations have designed and carried out to attempt to protect themselves towards the nefarious effects of diseases on their respective economies and polities. The creator does an excellent job in displaying how the modern public well being system first emerged within the Western World and subsequently elsewhere. To his credit score, Mr. Harrison reminds his audience that the persistent abuse of sanitary measures for financial and political acquire is nothing new on the horizon. In summary, Mr. Harrison succeeds in making the inseparable couple of contagion and trade a topic of curiosity to a wide audience. 

Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease 

Mark Harrison (Author)

400 pages

Yale University Press (October 8, 2012)

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