Death in a Small Package: A Short History of Anthrax (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease) [Hardcover]
Author: Susan D. Jones | Language: English | ISBN: 0801896967 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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A disease of soil, animals, and people, anthrax has threatened lives for at least two thousand years. Farmers have long recognized its lasting virulence, but in our time, anthrax has been associated with terrorism and warfare. What accounts for this frightening transformation? Death in a Small Package recounts how this ubiquitous agricultural disease came to be one of the deadliest and most feared biological weapons in the world.
Bacillus anthracis is lethal. Animals killed by the disease are buried deep underground, where anthrax spores remain viable for decades or even centuries and, if accidentally disturbed, can cause new infections. But anthrax can be deliberately aerosolized and used to kill—as it was in the United States in 2001.
Historian and veterinarian Susan D. Jones recounts the life story of anthrax through the biology of the bacillus; the political, economic, geographic, and scientific factors that affect anthrax prevalance; and the cultural beliefs about the disease that have shaped human responses to it. She explains how Bacillus anthracis became domesticated, discusses what researchers have learned from numerous outbreaks, and analyzes how the bacillus came to be weaponized and what this development means for the modern world.
Jones compellingly narrates the biography of this frightfully hardy disease from the ancient world through the present day.
- Series: Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease
- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1 edition (September 23, 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0801896967
- ISBN-13: 978-0801896965
- Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #832,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
In Death in a Small Package: A Short History of Anthrax (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), historian and veterinarian Susan Jones asks how a ubiquitous agricultural disease became, first, an industrial disease, and later, a biological weapon. To address this question, Jones combines extensive archival material (e.g. the field notebooks and laboratory notebooks of anthrax researchers) with some of the latest scientific knowledge, particularly genetic and epidemiological data about Bacillus anthracis. The primary units of Jones' analysis then are the microorganism itself, Bacillus anthracis, the disease it causes, anthrax, and the efforts of humans to control both. In particular, Jones' focuses focus the complex interactions of the disease-causing agent with the human and animal victims of that disease and their environment.
Ultimately, Jones argues that anthrax's transformation from an agricultural disease to a biological weapon over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries was shaped by social, political, and economic factors (such as the establishment of global trade networks and the imperatives of wartime) and by the biology of Bacillus anthracis (particularly its unique life cycle, where it must kill its host to complete its life cycle, and where, in spore form, it can remain viable for decades--potentially centuries--undisturbed in the soil, resistant to sun, wind, and rain, until it is consumed by a new host and its virulence is reactivated). Moreover, Jones argues that Bacillus anthracis has undergone major changes in its ecology and its evolutionary pattern of development due to its interaction with humans.
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