歴史上の主なパンデミック（ペスト、結核、マラリア、天然痘、コレラ、インフルエンザ、HIV/AIDS)について簡潔かつ包括的に解説し、公衆衛生の台頭、医学研究の爆発的な進展への関わり、社会的行動がパンデミックにいかに影響を与えてきたか、などを明らかにします。パンデミック研究は、医学的見地から興味深いものであると同時に文化や政治に対しても幅広い洞察を与えてくれます。貧困と疾病の関係や伝染病の地理的特徴を評価することで過去の経験から学び、将来の伝染病を予防するために、世界各国で政府が積極的に協力する必要性など、示唆に富む視点を提供します。(cf. Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know)
 

• Describes all the major pandemics in human history, including plague, tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox, cholera, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19
• Deftly combines scientific explanations with historical and cultural analysis
• Deals with current discussions over epidemic disease, such as COVID-19, the Ebola epidemic, the Zika virus, and the continued concern about avian flu

New to this Edition:

• Includes a new chapter on Covid-19 and its global impact
• Places Covid-19 in its historical context, drawing parallels with past pandemics

    
The 2014 Ebola epidemic demonstrated the power of pandemics and their ability not only to destroy lives locally but also to capture the imagination and terrify the world. In 2019 and the years that followed, the coronavirus pandemic infected every continent and took the lives of millions. In this updated edition, Christian W. McMillen provides a concise yet comprehensive account of pandemics throughout human history, illustrating how pandemic disease has shaped history and, at the same time, social behavior has influenced pandemic disease. Extremely interesting from a medical standpoint, the study of pandemics also provides unexpected, broader insights into culture and politics.
   
This Very Short Introduction describes history's major pandemics--plague, tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox, cholera, influenza, and HIV/AIDS--highlighting how each disease's biological characteristics affected its pandemic development. McMillen discusses state responses to pandemics, such as quarantine, isolation, travel restrictions, and other forms of social control, and pays special attention to the rise of public health and the explosion of medical research in the wake of pandemics, especially as the germ theory of disease emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, medicine is able to control all of these diseases, yet some of them are still devastating in much of the developing world. By assessing the relationship between poverty and disease and the geography of epidemics, McMillen offers an outspoken and thought-provoking point of view on the necessity for global governments to learn from past experiences and proactively cooperate to prevent any future epidemic.