"While influenza is now often thought of as a common but mild disease, it still kills more than thirty thousand people in the United States each year. Dr. Jeremy Brown, a veteran ER doctor and director of the Office of Emergency Care Research at the National Institutes of Health, talks with leading epidemiologists, policy makers, and the researcher who first sequenced the genetic building blocks of the original 1918 virus to offer both a comprehensive history and a road map to protect us from the next outbreak.

Dr. Brown explores the terrifying and complex history of the flu virus and looks at the controversy over vaccinations and the federal government’s role in preparing for pandemic outbreaks. Though a hundred years of advancement in medical research and technology have passed since the 1918 disaster, Dr. Brown warns that many of the most vital questions about the flu virus continue to confound even the leading experts."

Off to a new reader!

Finally ready to start another round of the Biographies of Things book box, which means I have to realize that I never catalogued the ones that were in the box when it returned to me. This one is good for another round.

This book is now part of the Biographies of Things book box and is off to tour the country. Hopefully along the way it finds an interested reader and a new home.

Any future reader or recipient of this book is encouraged to leave a journal entry here on the BookCrossing site to let prior readers know the fate of the book. You can make an anonymous entry without joining the BookCrossing movement, but if you are interested in joining, it is a free and spam-free community where your contact information is not shared with others. Best of all, members receive private messages via e-mail from books like this one when those books are journaled, allowing for long-term relationships between books and readers.

I'm claiming this one from the latest round of the Biographies of Things bookbox. (Influenza almost seems tame after COVID, but it's - pardon the expression - still nothing to be sneezed at!)

Later: I've read a number of works about various plagues and diseases, as well as the research into identifying, curing, and preventing them. This one features some intriguing looks at how people have coped with the 'flu from early times to modern-day - with discussions of the sometimes-contentious relationships between medical science, business, and government, especially when an epidemic is involved!

One chilling note: the book came out in 2018, and early on the author notes "We don't know when or where the next viral pandemic will occur, but it will occur." Yes. Yes it will. {rueful grin}

[Other books about influenza that I've enjoyed: Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 And the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata, and The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history by John M. Barry.]

I left this book in this handsome Little Free Library; hope someone enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in ME here.]

** Released for the 2023 Keep Them Moving challenge. **