Plague Cycle News Today

A Q&A with development economist Charles Kenny.

Covid-19 is unlikely to be eradicated but past societies learned to live with diseases

Covid-19 is unlikely to be eradicated, experts say, but societies in the past have learned to live with diseases

Smallpox, malaria, bubonic plague, polio, measles, and now, COVID-19 are counted among the devastating diseases that have taken their toll over the millennia. The medical advances that ultimately helped to contain them will be the focus of a History...

When Will the Pandemic Be Over? Self 3 hrs ago © Tierney/Adobe Stock Finally, it seems we have turned a corner with the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. More than 117 million individuals have been fully vaccinated. That’s about 35.4% of the population, with another 11% that have received at least one of the doses of mRNA vaccines. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children ages 12 to 15, meaning even more people will be eligible fo...

Article content From cholera to SARS and from the Black Death to today’s COVID-19 pandemic, both fiction and non-fiction books have provided unique insights into events that have significantly altered human history. Fictional books that have pandemics as backdrops provide a bit of an escape from the current situation while still providing perspective of how people are affected by outbreaks and plagues. Below are some titles the Brantford Public Library has that stand out as excellent pandemic...

Over a hundred thousand people have now died of Covid-19 in the UK alone; people around the world have been separated from their family and friends, and entire economies have come to a standstill. All of which raises an important question: how can the world prevent another pandemic? The obvious place to start is at the beginning – before a pathogen has been seeded around the world and serious damage has been caused. If we can predict where the next pandemic will come from, perhaps we can st...

by Charles Kenny (Scribner £20, 320 pp)  In 1962, the Nobel Prize-winning virologist Sir Frank Burnet wrote: The most likely forecast about the future of infectious disease is that it will be very dull. After outbreaks in the past few decades of bird flu, Ebola, SARS and Covid-19, we know how very wrong he was. Infectious disease has always been with us and arguably always will be. Charles Kennys book is a lively survey of our millennia-long struggle to defeat it. One of the first reliably re...

Cranbrook Public Library The Cranbrook Public Library is now open with extended hours (with some restrictions and reduced services.) We encourage patrons to limit their visits to 60 minutes. We also have a maximum number of patrons allowed in the building at one time, so you may be asked to wait. Please wear a mask during your visit. Masks are mandatory now (and must be worn in accordance with provincial guidelines for your entire visit). Library hours for February are: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Mon...

Is 2021 the next 1848 or 1968, a year of insurrection? It’s still January and we’ve had two seismic stormings of seemingly impregnable ramparts organized by very different sets of disaffected outsiders on social media. After the Capitol and Wall Street, which citadel will be targeted next? Anyone still in possession of their reason was obviously appalled to their very core by the Jan. 6 attack on our democracy. An assault on Wall Street hedge funds that seek to profit from the woes of troub...