Pandemic Flu Book Club
Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.
If you're interested in the dorky intricacies of pandemic flu, you might also like to know that the National Academies Press is offering Microbial Threats to Health: The Threat of Pandemic Influenza as a free download right now. This is a 2005 book, so it's not going to cover anything about this current variant of swine flu, but it should still be an interesting overview of the background science.
Also, for the record, I am not an author on this book. I'm just planning on reading it tonight.
the latest
latest episodes
when i read the title, i thought 'now that's thinking ahead - a suggested fiction reading and discussion list for when we're all laid up with the sweats and bored'...
by the way - my 'reCAPTCHA' words below the comments box - '400 dampest'.
Heh, avraamov, that's actually not a terrible idea. Even if you never contract swine flu, you'll most likely going to contract flu of some sort. What would you suggest for that reading list?
When I was non-swineflu sick back in January, I read "Fledgling" by Octavia Butler.
I don't think we're anything close to pandemic...yet
i'm in Ben Marcus land right now - that would certainly help with the feverish hallucinations.
No, you're right. The title referred to the title of the book. We most definitely aren't in a pandemic right now, but the stuff in this book will probably shed some light on the science that's being talked about in the news and on the decisions being made by public health officials.
#1, 2:
May I recommend Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter, or La Peste (The Plague) by Albert Camus?
(And for younger readers, there's always The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed by Bruce Coville...)