Charles Kenny details a history of mankind's battles with infectious disease
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 Kenny's book is a lively survey of our millennia-long struggle to defeat it. One of the first reliably recorded pandemics was in Athens in the 5th century BC. A thousand years later, Yersinia Pestis, th...
Source: dailymail.co.uk