| | No bugs on board |  |
| | |
| | Contagion: How commerce has spread disease |
| | by Mark Harrison, Yale University Press, £25/$38 |
| | |
| | Reviewed by David Cohen |
| | |
| 1 | | ANYONE who has travelled through an airport has |
| | surely noticed the rather long list of items that are |
| | prohibited on board a plane. But along with the |
| | more understandably forbidden articles, such as |
| | guns, knives, grenades and canisters of petrol, |
| | there is often a list of seemingly innocuous cargo: |
| | fresh foodstuffs. In Australia, even muddy shoes |
| | are frowned upon. It may seem a bit excessive, but |
| | these prohibitions are the climax of a long |
| | historical trend and are motivated, as Mark Harrison reveals in Contagion, |
| | by a mixture of public-health, food-safety and protectionist trading |
| | policies. |
| 2 | | Harrison's erudite study of the impact of global commerce and travel |
| | on the spread of disease charts how the responses of governments and |
| | traders to outbreaks evolved, from the Black Death some 650 years ago, |
| | to the recent outbreaks of SARS and avian flu. As Australia's muddy-shoe |
| | ban intimates, disease vectors are a serious concern. Viruses and |
| | bacteria that travel in soil or food can have a disastrous impact on crops |
| | and livestock, and the spread of human diseases such as yellow fever and |
| | malaria can be devastating for public health. A particularly deadly strain of |
| | malaria was exported from Africa to the rest of the world by the slave |
| | trade, for example. |
| 3 | | It was as a consequence of the Black Death that "quarantine" came |
| | into vogue as the preferred means of disease control. Simultaneously it |
| | became a potent weapon of economic warfare. Harrison goes to great |
| | pains to point out that throughout history, governments have needed little |
| | encouragement to adopt quarantine and import bans as weapons of |
| | foreign policy and economic advantage, often with tragic consequences |
| | for the "victim" states where the infections originated. |
| 4 | | Contagion is a thorough, well-researched and thoughtful tome, and |
| | Harrison includes some interesting asides about the history of medicine. |
| | But be warned, his writing style is academic in nature and dry in tone. Not |
| | as infectious as one might have hoped. |
| | |
| | NewScientist, 2012 |
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