Viral War

“I cannot make sense of this data from Sine. I have never seen so much woman in any sample before.” John Djerassi, the genomic profiling expert looked pondering at Samuel. He smiled, as he continued: “Looks like the Perfect Woman.” It should have been an easy case for Samuel, a New York traffic police officer. “Rapid closure with a perfect report, which can support your resume,” was the guidance from his boss. But when Sine died a violent death, Samuel suddenly found himself embedded in a hugely complicated case with scrupulous utilization of modern biological sciences at its core for a viral war leading to extinction of all people, except those of a certain kind.

In March 2020, the World Health Organization designated the viral disease COVID-19 a pandemic. Dr. Aileen Burford-Mason’s new book, The War Against Viruses, explains how we can help reduce the risk and severity of COVID-19 infection. But it goes beyond this, showing how staying well in general, and avoiding winter colds and flus in particular, is possible with optimal nutrition. When operating efficiently, the immune system represents biological teamwork at its best: a symphony of protective cells and biomolecules acting together to rapidly recognize potentially harmful microbes and eliminate them. The orchestration of this complex system depends on a continuous and ample supply of essential components—vitamins, minerals, beneficial fats and other nutrients—to function properly. But a growing body of research shows that the nutritional content of our food has sharply declined over the course of the last century. As the use of high-yield industrial farming practices has increased, so the nutritional content has decreased. The War Against Viruses shows how without a rounded intake of essential nutrients our immune response may be compromised, especially during emergencies. The book provides evidence-based advice on how to recognize gaps in our nutritional arsenal. Dr. Burford-Mason creates a personal supplement regime that can overcome potential dietary shortfalls by strengthening our immune response to infection, thus helping to reduce the potential for lethal illness.

Viral Language considers a range of different types of public communication and their discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to investigate health communication. The authors introduce and apply a range of approaches informed by linguistic theory to investigate experiences of the pandemic across a variety of public contexts. In doing so, they demonstrate how experiences of health and illness can be shaped by political messaging, scientific research, news articles and advertising. Through a series of case studies of Covid-related texts, the authors consider aspects of language instruction, information and innovation, showcasing the breadth of topics that can be studied as part of health communication. Furthermore, each case study provides practical guidance on how to carry out investigations using social media texts, how to analyse metaphor, how to track language innovation and how to work with text and images. Viral Language is critical reading for postgraduate and upper undergraduate students of applied linguistics and health communication.

The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 took the lives of between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and the United States suffered more casualties than in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined. Yet despite these catastrophic death tolls, the pandemic faded from historical and cultural memory in the United States and throughout Europe, overshadowed by World War One and the turmoil of the interwar period. In Viral Modernism, Elizabeth Outka reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry. Outka shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic’s hidden but widespread presence. She investigates the miasmic manifestations of the pandemic and its spectral dead in interwar Anglo-American literature, uncovering the traces of an outbreak that brought a nonhuman, invisible horror into every community. Viral Modernism examines how literature and culture represented the virus’s deathly fecundity, as writers wrestled with the scope of mass death in the domestic sphere amid fears of wider social collapse. Outka analyzes overt treatments of the pandemic by authors like Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe and its subtle presence in works by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats. She uncovers links to the disease in popular culture, from early zombie resurrection to the resurgence of spiritualism. Viral Modernism brings the pandemic to the center of the era, revealing a vast tragedy that has hidden in plain sight.

Read the devastating story of the Spanish flu - the twentieth century's greatest killer – and discover what it can teach us about the current Covid-19 pandemic. 'Both a saga of tragedies and a detective story... Pale Rider is not just an excavation but a reimagining of the past' Guardian With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster, not only of the twentieth century, but possibly in all of recorded history. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I. In Pale Rider, Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain, and from South Africa to Odessa. She shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered; and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test. Laura Spinney demonstrates that the Spanish flu was as significant – if not more so – as two world wars in shaping the modern world; in disrupting, and often permanently altering, global politics, race relations, family structures, and thinking across medicine, religion and the arts. ‘Weaves together global history and medical science to great effect ... Riveting.’ Sunday Times

This book argues that the catastrophe of COVID-19 provided a momentous time for groups, institutions, and states to reassess their worldviews and relationship to the entire world. Following multiple case studies across dozens of countries throughout the course of the pandemic, this book is a timely contribution to cultural knowledge about the pandemic and the viral politics at the heart of it. Mapping the various forms of global consciousness and connectivity engendered by the crisis, the book offers the framework of "viral worlding," defined as viral forms of relationality, becoming, and communication. It demonstrates how worlding or world-making processes accelerated with the novel coronavirus. New emergent forms of being global "went viral" to address conditions of inequality as well as forge possibilities for societal transformation. Considering the tumult wrought by the pandemic, Bui analyzes progressive movements for democracy, abolition, feminism, environmentalism, and socialism against the world-shattering forces of capitalism, authoritarianism, racism, and militarism. Focusing on ways the pandemic disproportionately impacted marginalized communities, particularly in the Global South, this book juxtaposes the closing of their lifeworlds and social worlds by hegemonic global actors with increased collective demands for freedom, mobility, and justice by vulnerable people. The breadth and depth of the book thus provides students, scholars, and general readers with critical insights to understanding the world(s) of COVID-19 and collective efforts to build better new ones.

This series started in 1981 with the Erice Seminars when the danger of a nuclear East-West confrontation was menacing the world. The volumes reproduce the crucial steps, from the Nuclear Winter to the Strategic Defense Initiative. After the collapse of the U.S.S.R., new emergencies are now to be faced such as the danger of proliferation of Weapons for Mass Destruction (WMD), the North-South confrontation on ecological problems and the new deal for Science and Technology to help developing countries in their struggle for a better standard of life. The Erice Seminars have attracted the attention of world leaders in Science, Technology and Culture. Contents:Conversion of Military Resources (A Zichichi, E Teller, J-D Qian, E P Velikhov, W A Barletta & S Schriber)Improving Energy Efficiency (N Hingorani, L-G Yan et al & M Levine)Non-Fossil Energy Sources (S Golan, A J Glass, P de Laquil & Y-P Huo)Aids (J Esparza, R C Gallo, S-D Lu, G de Thé, G Ada, F Wong-Staal, D Zagury et al. & V Franchini)Regional World Lab Projects (G I Palshin, R A Gohogidze, A M Finkelshtein & M Zdanov)Environmental Monitoring (R Bojkov, N Moiseev & G Barenboim)Science and Technology for Developing Nations (T D Lee, K Siegbahn, J K D Söderman, G Visconti & E Boschi)The Problem of the Soil and the Population Increase: 6 Billion in the Year 2000 (A Zichichi & G-Z Zhou)Greenhouse Gases and the Ozone Problem (A T Crane, P-Q Chen, R Schock & M-X Wang)The Chemical Weapon Problem (Y-J Gu)The World Lab Branch in the USSR (E P Velikhov)Common Project Against Cosmic Objects (E Teller) keywords: