This book offers an accessible reference on epidemic and pandemic diseases that provides background information and history, explains why pandemics are a newly emerging threat, identifies the difficulties in coping with them, and provides hope in the form of modern medicine.

Global Pandemic Threats: A Reference Handbook provides all-encompassing coverage that introduces key concepts and traces the history of pandemics, enabling readers to grasp the complexity of the global problem and the difficulties of executing effective solutions. Written in an easy-to-understand manner, it provides a go-to resource that systematically addresses dozens of diseases of the past as well as re-emergent or newly emerging pathogens that have the potential of becoming pandemics.

The book’s extensive coverage of past pandemics includes bubonic plague, cholera, influenza, measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and yellow fever, and the re-emergence of malaria, measles, pertussis (whooping cough), poliomyelitis, and other contagious diseases. It discusses a broad range of newly emerging viral threats, such as AIDS/HIV, avian flu, anthrax, botulism, Ebola, E. coli, Gulf War syndrome, hanta virus, Lassa virus, Lyme disease, Marburg virus, MERS, MRSA, Ricin, Sin Nombre virus (SNV), and West Nile virus. The work offers perspectives from individuals interested and involved in the fight, including medical professionals and health care workers; profiles of key organizations and persons; a helpful timeline of past and present pandemic outbreaks; and a glossary of key terms and concepts.

Provides readers an understanding and appreciation of the extent of the devastation of pandemic diseases of the past centuries

Shows how the pioneers of modern medicine conquered contagious diseases of the past that had been scourges in human history

Documents and explains the development of newly emerging viral diseases that have the potential of becoming pandemic outbreaks that kill millions

Employs primary documents ranging from data from reports from the CDC and WHO to firsthand accounts of past pandemics and their deadly impact