Acknowledgments
This book is the product of over a decade of research and thinking about infectious disease. My interest in epidemics and pandemics began in 2005 when I went to speak to John Oxford, then Professor of Virology at Queen Mary and Westfield School of Medicine in East London, about avian influenza. A few months earlier a strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus had sparked a spate of deaths in Vietnam, and I had asked John to give me a tutorial on the ecology and virology of influenza before heading to Hanoi to write a feature article for The Observer. Very quickly our conversation turned to other notable outbreaks of infectious disease, including the 1918–19 Spanish influenza pandemic. It was the beginning of an obsession with influenza that has led, by way of a PhD and a research fellowship, to a deeper engagement with the history of bacteriology and disease ecology. That research has been generously supported by the Wellcome Trust, allowing me to visit archives in the United States and Australia, where I was able to consult primary documents on the Spanish flu as well as several of the other epidemics canvassed in this book. In 2015, the Wellcome Trust also funded my travel to Sierra Leone to document the impressions of patients, clinicians, and research scientists swept up in the Ebola epidemic, and in Chapter 8 I have drawn on several of these interviews.
Since 1918 there has been a huge change in the scientific understanding of infectious disease and of virology in particular, and I am acutely aware of the scope for error in seeking to summarize this shifting scientific knowledge in relation to such a wide range of infectious pathogens. I have been fortunate in being able to consult some of the leading experts in their fields to help me avoid more obvious errors and summarize past and current scientific knowledge of these pathogens accurately (any errors that remain are my own). In particular, I would like to thank the following for their comments on specific chapters and passages: Wendy Barclay, Kevin De Cock, David Fraser, David Heymann, Michael Kosoy, Ernesto Marques, Joe McDade, David Morens, Malik Peiris, Celina Turchi and Liana Ventura.
I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists who helped me locate key documents and who directed my attention to collections that I might otherwise have missed. In particular: Diane Wendt, Curator of Medicine and Science at the National Museum of American History; Louise E. Shaw, Curator of the David J. Sencer CDC Museum; and Polina E. Ilieva, the Head of Archives and Special Collections at the University of California San Francisco. My thanks also to the staff at the Wellcome Library in London, the National Library of Medicine and National Archives in Bethesda, Maryland, and the librarian in the Library of Congress’s newspaper room, who helped me locate the January 1930 report in Hearst’s American Weekly about the outbreak of parrot fever in the theatrical troupe in Buenos Aires.
Writing a book—especially one of this size—is not a task to be undertaken lightly, and for urging me on and encouraging me that my initial proposal would find an enthusiastic editor, I would like to thank my agent, Patrick Walsh. I would also like to thank Anne Bogart for her knowledge of Los Angeles and her comments on the pneumonic plague chapter, and my wife, Jeanette, who perhaps missed her vocation as a copy editor but has more than made up for it since. No one has read more drafts than she has, and I cannot thank her enough for her intellectual and emotional support. Finally, I am very pleased that the editors who “got” this book and wanted to publish it were John Glusman, whom I had previously worked with at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Jon de Peyer at Hurst.
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