From the masters of storytelling-meets-science and co-authors of Quackery, Patient Zero tells the long and fascinating history of disease outbreaks-how they start, how they spread, the science that lets us understand them, and how we race to destroy them before they destroy us. Written in the authors' lively and accessible style, chapters include page-turning medical stories about a particular disease or virus-smallpox, Bubonic plague, polio,...

"The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth--from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson. But despite a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people, it exists in our memory as an afterthought to World War I. In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney traces the overlooked pandemic to reveal...

An award-winning genetic researcher and a tenacious journalist examine each phase of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the largest and deadliest of its kind. Their postmortem identifies factors that kept key information from reaching doctors, complicated the government's response to the crisis, and left responders unprepared for the next outbreak.--

In the early nineteen hundreds, sixteen-year-old Prudence Galewski takes a job assisting the head epidemiologist at New York's Department of Health and Sanitation, investigating the case of "Typhoid Mary," a woman who is infecting others with typhoid fever.