7 Plague Books You Should Read Before You’re Quarantined

Ebola, SARS, Hendra, AIDS, and countless other deadly viruses all have one thing in common: the bugs that transmit these diseases all originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. In this gripping account, David Quammen takes the reader along on this astonishing quest to learn how, where from, and why these diseases emerge and asks the terrifying question: What might the next big one be?

Unclean water, overuse of antibiotics is creating drug-resistant diseases, easy international travel allows diseases to hop natural barriers that use to stop them are some - all of these create a world where devastating diseases finally get the upper hand. Garrett takes you on a fifty-year journey through the world's battles with microbes and examines the worldwide conditions that have culminated in recurrent outbreaks of newly discovered diseases, epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas, and mutated old diseases that are no longer curable.

Remember "Mad Cow Disease"? This brilliant and completely gripping detective story is terrifying about the source, causes and ramifications of Prion diseases. Richard Rhodes follows virus hunters on three continents as they track the emergence of a deadly new brain disease that first kills cannibals in New Guinea, then cattle and young people in Britain and France—and that has already been traced to food animals in the United States. You will think twice about where you hamburger came from and you will never use bone meal on your roses again!

Before Ebola, SARS. AIDS or the 1918 Flu there was the bubonic plague, the "Black Death" which devastated fourteenth century Europe, wiping out between 70 and 200 million people - young and old, rich and poor, peasants and kings - and irrevocably changed the lives of those who survived. This fascinating history looks anew a the science of the plague and the ramifications to society - and history - that it wrought.

The universal human instinct is to run from an outbreak of disease like Ebola. These doctors run toward it. Their job is to stop epidemics from happening. They are the disease detective corps of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal agency that tracks and tries to prevent disease outbreaks and bio-terrorist attacks around the world. McKenna takes us inside the organizationas to meet and travel with the young doctors who travel the world searching out and naming the next disease.

When we think of plagues, we think of AIDS, Ebola, anthrax spores, and, of course, the Black Death. But in 1918 the Great Flu Epidemic aka The Spanish Flu killed an estimated 40 million people virtually overnight, mystifyingly attacking the young and healthy first. If such a plague returned today, taking a comparable percentage of the U.S. population with it, 1.5 million Americans would die. Heart stopping investigative reporting that tells the story of the flu and the efforts to study it in revived form - and what happens if it comes back.

The bestselling landmark account of the first emergence of the Ebola virus. A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. This hair-raising account tells the dramatic story of that team and of the rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.