Deadly Companions: How microbes shaped our history [Kindle Edition]
Author: Dorothy H. Crawford | Language: English | ISBN: B000SK40TY | Format: PDF, EPUB
Deadly Companions: How microbes shaped our history
Download books file now Deadly Companions: How microbes shaped our history for everyone book with Mediafire Link Download Link Ever since we started huddling together in communities, the story of human history has been inextricably entwined with the story of microbes. They have evolved and spread amongst us, shaping our culture through infection, disease, and pandemic. At the same time, our changing human culture has itself influenced the evolutionary path of microbes. Dorothy H. Crawford here shows that one cannot be truly understood without the other.Beginning with a dramatic account of the SARS pandemic at the start of the 21st century, she takes us back in time to follow the interlinked history of microbes and man, taking an up-to-date look at ancient plagues and epidemics, and identifying key changes in the way humans have lived - such as our move from hunter-gatherer to farmer to city-dweller - which made us vulnerable to microbe attack.Showing how we live our lives today - with increasing crowding and air travel - puts us once again at risk, Crawford asks whether we might ever conquer microbes completely, or whether we need to take a more microbe-centric view of the world. Among the possible answers, one thing becomes clear: that for generations to come, our deadly companions will continue to shape human history. Direct download links available for Deadly Companions: How microbes shaped our history
Download books file now Deadly Companions: How microbes shaped our history for everyone book with Mediafire Link Download Link Ever since we started huddling together in communities, the story of human history has been inextricably entwined with the story of microbes. They have evolved and spread amongst us, shaping our culture through infection, disease, and pandemic. At the same time, our changing human culture has itself influenced the evolutionary path of microbes. Dorothy H. Crawford here shows that one cannot be truly understood without the other.Beginning with a dramatic account of the SARS pandemic at the start of the 21st century, she takes us back in time to follow the interlinked history of microbes and man, taking an up-to-date look at ancient plagues and epidemics, and identifying key changes in the way humans have lived - such as our move from hunter-gatherer to farmer to city-dweller - which made us vulnerable to microbe attack.Showing how we live our lives today - with increasing crowding and air travel - puts us once again at risk, Crawford asks whether we might ever conquer microbes completely, or whether we need to take a more microbe-centric view of the world. Among the possible answers, one thing becomes clear: that for generations to come, our deadly companions will continue to shape human history. Direct download links available for Deadly Companions: How microbes shaped our history
- File Size: 1340 KB
- Print Length: 264 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0199561443
- Publisher: OUP Oxford; 1 edition (October 25, 2007)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000SK40TY
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #167,822 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #37 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Internal Medicine > Infectious Disease > Communicable Diseases
- #64 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Special Topics > History
Bacteria have a bad reputation. We think of them as causing illness, and that's correct, of course, but overwhelmingly they do not cause us harm. Without them, indeed, we could not digest our food, and elements could not be recycled into the environment. They have been performing this sort of vital service for around 600 million years. There are a million or so microbes we know about, and of them, only 1,415 are known to cause disease in humans, with the rest steadily chugging away to keep the world in balance. Those pathogenic ones are the main subject in _Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History_ (Oxford University Press) by Dorothy H. Crawford. A microbiologist, Crawford has written plenty of scientific papers, but here (as in a previous book about viruses) she writes for a popular audience to show how microbes, especially the ones that bother and kill us, have affected the humans that are interlopers in their world. We must never forget that most microbes are our companions and are not deadly, and that we live in a mutually beneficial partnership with millions of them. But it is their world: "We relative newcomers to the planet," ominously writes Crawford, "emerge from the safe environment of our mother's womb pristine, untouched by the infectious microbes, but within hours our bodies are colonised by swarms of them, all intent on living off this new food source."
Microbes don't mean to hurt us, of course, and despite the upsurge of religious feeling that accompanies any plague, there is no reason to think that they are doing anything but their natural cycles without any supernatural tinkering to deliver lessons to afflicted humans. The great problem with infective microbes is that they can change faster than we can.
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