Phantom Plague
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Phantom Plague
''Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped our History'' is a 2022 non-fiction book about the history of tuberculosis by health journalist Vidya Krishnan''.'' It covers the history of tuberculosis through the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries, from early understandings of the disease to modern public health and pharmaceutical interventions. The book explores how flawed philanthropy, politics, racism, and anti-science rhetoric have led to "medical apartheid". Production Krishnan wrote ''Phantom Plague'' over seven years, therefore before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Summary ''Phantom Plague'' covers the history of tuberculosis covering 19th-century New York City slums to present day India. It contrasts the spread of tuberculosis through crowded urban settlements, but also mentions affluent tuberculosis patients such as George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frédéric Chopin, and the Brontë sisters. The book documents early folk remedies, attempted public ...
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Vidya Krishnan
Vidya Krishnan is a health-focused Indian investigative journalist and author, based in Montreal. Krishnan reported that she was the survivor of sexual harassment at India Today in 2018 and received online abuse and death threats due to her reporting about the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. She comes from a tamil brahmin family and is known for her book about '' Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped our History.'' Career Krishnan started her career in 2003 at '' The Pioneer'' newspaper. As a freelance journalist, she regularly writes for Foreign Policy, The Caravan, and The Atlantic, and was previously the health editor for ''The Hindu''. She has reported on issues including the Rohingya genocide, tuberculosis'','' the right to health movement, and ethical standards in Indian clinical trials of pharmaceutical drugs. In 2020, after years of health reporting, Krishnan spoke about navigating high levels of online harassment while reporting on COVID-19 including receiving dea ...
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Germ Theory Of Disease
The germ theory of disease is the currently accepted scientific theory for many diseases. It states that microorganisms known as pathogens or "germs" can lead to disease. These small organisms, too small to be seen without magnification, invade humans, other animals, and other living hosts. Their growth and reproduction within their hosts can cause disease. "Germ" refers to not just a bacterium but to any type of microorganism, such as protists or fungi, or even non-living pathogens that can cause disease, such as viruses, prions, or viroids. Diseases caused by pathogens are called infectious diseases. Even when a pathogen is the principal cause of a disease, environmental and hereditary factors often influence the severity of the disease, and whether a potential host individual becomes infected when exposed to the pathogen. Pathogens are disease-carrying agents that can pass from one individual to another, both in humans and animals. Infectious diseases are caused by biological a ...
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History Of Medicine
The history of medicine is both a study of medicine throughout history as well as a multidisciplinary field of study that seeks to explore and understand medical practices, both past and present, throughout human societies. More than just history and medicine, this field of study incorporates learnings from across disciplines such as anthropology, economics, health sciences, sociology, and politics to better understand the institutions, practices, people, professions, and social systems that have influenced and shaped medicine throughout the ages. As a documentation of medicine over time, the history of medicine shows how societies have changed in their approach to illness and disease from ancient times to the present. Early medical traditions include those of Babylon, China, Egypt and India. The Hippocratic Oath was written in ancient Greece in the 5th century BCE, and is a direct inspiration for oaths of office that physicians swear upon entry into the profession today. In ...
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Books About Diseases
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a bo ...
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Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, in which case it is known as latent tuberculosis. Around 10% of latent infections progress to active disease which, if left untreated, kill about half of those affected. Typical symptoms of active TB are chronic cough with blood-containing mucus, fever, night sweats, and weight loss. It was historically referred to as consumption due to the weight loss associated with the disease. Infection of other organs can cause a wide range of symptoms. Tuberculosis is spread from one person to the next through the air when people who have active TB in their lungs cough, spit, speak, or sneeze. People with Latent TB do not spread the disease. Active infection occurs more often in people with HIV/AIDS and in those who smoke. Diagnosis of active TB is ...
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Books About Health
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a bo ...
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Scroll
A scroll (from the Old French ''escroe'' or ''escroue''), also known as a roll, is a roll of papyrus, parchment, or paper containing writing. Structure A scroll is usually partitioned into pages, which are sometimes separate sheets of papyrus or parchment glued together at the edges. Scrolls may be marked divisions of a continuous roll of writing material. The scroll is usually unrolled so that one page is exposed at a time, for writing or reading, with the remaining pages rolled and stowed to the left and right of the visible page. Text is written in lines from the top to the bottom of the page. Depending on the language, the letters may be written left to right, right to left, or alternating in direction (boustrophedon). History Scrolls were the first form of editable record keeping texts, used in Eastern Mediterranean ancient Egyptian civilizations. Parchment scrolls were used by the Israelites among others before the codex or bound book with parchment pages was invented b ...
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Kirkus Reviews
''Kirkus Reviews'' (or ''Kirkus Media'') is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980). The magazine is headquartered in New York City. ''Kirkus Reviews'' confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature. ''Kirkus Reviews'', published on the first and 15th of each month; previews books before their publication. ''Kirkus'' reviews over 10,000 titles per year. History Virginia Kirkus was hired by Harper & Brothers to establish a children's book department in 1926. The department was eliminated as an economic measure in 1932 (for about a year), so Kirkus left and soon established her own book review service. Initially, she arranged to get galley proofs of "20 or so" books in advance of their publication; almost 80 years later, the service was receiving hundreds of books weekly and reviewing about 100. Initially titled ''Bulletin'' by Kirkus' Bookshop Service from 1933 to 1954, the title was ...
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Madhukar Pai
Madhukar Pai (also known as Madhu Pai) is an Indian medical doctor, academic, advocate, writer, and university professor. Pai's work is around global health, specifically advocacy for better treatment for tuberculosis with a focus on South Africa and India. Pai is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Global and Public Health in the School of Population and Global Health and holds a Canada Research Chair in Epidemiology and Global Health at McGill University. Education Pai completed medical training and his community medicine residency at the Christian Medical College Vellore, India. He received his Ph.D in epidemiology from University of California, Berkeley. He also did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Francisco. Committees and editorial boards Pai serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee of FIND (the global alliance for diagnostics) and is on the World Health Organization's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on In Vitro Diagnosti ...
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Multidrug-resistant Tuberculosis
Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is a form of tuberculosis (TB) infection caused by bacteria that are resistant to treatment with at least two of the most powerful first-line anti-TB medications (drugs): isoniazid and rifampin. Some forms of TB are also resistant to second-line medications, and are called extensively drug-resistant TB ( XDR-TB). Tuberculosis is caused by infection with the bacterium ''Mycobacterium tuberculosis''. Almost one in four people in the world are infected with TB bacteria. Only when the bacteria become active do people become ill with TB. Bacteria become active as a result of anything that can reduce the person's immunity, such as HIV, advancing age, diabetes or other immunocompromising illnesses. TB can usually be treated with a course of four standard, or first-line, anti-TB drugs (i.e., isoniazid, rifampin, pyrazinamide and ethambutol). However, beginning with the first antibiotic treatment for TB in 1943, some strains of the TB bacteri ...
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Latent Tuberculosis
Latent tuberculosis (LTB), also called latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) is when a person is infected with ''Mycobacterium tuberculosis'', but does not have active tuberculosis. Active tuberculosis can be contagious while latent tuberculosis is not, and it is therefore not possible to get TB from someone with latent tuberculosis. The main risk is that approximately 10% of these people (5% in the first two years after infection and 0.1% per year thereafter) will go on to develop active tuberculosis. This is particularly true, and there is added risk, in particular situations such as medication that suppresses the immune system or advancing age. The identification and treatment of people with latent TB is an important part of controlling this disease. Various treatment regimens are in use for latent tuberculosis. They generally need to be taken for several months. Transmission Latent disease ''"TB Bacteria Are Spread Only from a Person with Active TB Disease ... In people ...
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