{"product_id":"contagious-priscilla-wald-9780822341284","title":"Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative","description":"How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines--of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes--produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The \"outbreak narrative\" begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and contagion, and ends with the epidemiological work that contains it. Priscilla Wald argues that we need to understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative because the stories we tell about disease emergence have consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes. They upset economies. They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, locales, behaviors, and lifestyles. \u003cp\u003eWald traces how changing ideas about disease emergence and social interaction coalesced in the outbreak narrative. She returns to the early years of microbiology--to the identification of microbes and \"Typhoid Mary,\" the first known healthy human carrier of typhoid in the United States--to highlight the intertwined production of sociological theories of group formation (\"social contagion\") and medical theories of bacteriological infection at the turn of the twentieth century. Following the evolution of these ideas, Wald shows how they were affected by--or reflected in--the advent of virology, Cold War ideas about \"alien\" infiltration, science-fiction stories of brainwashing and body snatchers, and the HIV\/AIDS pandemic. \u003ci\u003eContagious \u003c\/i\u003eis a cautionary tale about how the stories we tell circumscribe our thinking about global health and human interactions as the world imagines--or refuses to imagine--the next Great Plague.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Priscilla Wald\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 082234128X\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780822341284\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Duke University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 01\/09\/2008\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 392\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.45lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.10h x 6.30w x 1.20d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReview Citation(s): \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eChoice\u003c\/i\u003e 09\/01\/2008 pg. 139\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Priscilla Wald","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48086970401023,"sku":"9780822341284","price":124.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_7ba3ea4b-bc3a-4cce-860a-de1ebdc5e236.jpg?v=1769097554","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/contagious-priscilla-wald-9780822341284","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}