The ongoing COVID-19 disater--and the universal realization of the unceasing threat of even worse pandemics in the future--has resulted in a wealth of books, scientific papers, and journalistic analyses on the politics, medicine, and human tragedy of recent events. The Nature of Pandemics is not an outcrop of COVID-19 publication frenzy. It was conceived in the period between the SARS and Ebola pandemics, intended to address the critical, but commonly overlooked issues, that limit our readiness, immediate recognition, and rapid response to pandemic outbreaks.
The book is the first to look holistically at the nature of pandemics as a phenomenon, and the challenges of mounting an organized, concerted global response to a worldwide lethal bioevent. While the majority of healthcare professionals at national and international levels recognize the danger, the establishment of consistent and effective countermeasures in the form of a global anti-pandemic network is, at best, still sporadic and inconsistent. The need to react quickly, and unhesitatingly mobilize all needed resources--rather than embark on a slow, deliberative and politically safe approach--is probably the paramount obstacle to the effective containment of a pandemic disease.
Chapters are written by internationally known and widely respected experts from the US, Canada, Europe, Africa, and South America. They represent a cross-section of professions, many with academic and medical prominence supported by their direct involvement at the very forefront of the war against pandemic outbreaks, several knowing the personal and operational challenges involved with counter-pandemic responses. All involved are active in their respective fields and offer practical, real-world expertise based on hands-on work at the front lines, providing profound, first-hand knowledge and recommendations for best practices. The opinions, often highly personal and perhaps even controversial, are based as much on theoretical considerations as on their extensive personal and highly insightful experience.
As such, The Nature of Pandemics offer a multifaceted insight into problems that, if ignored initially, come to mar all subsequent response and mitigation efforts. The approach is rigorously intellectual and, in a field that often evokes passions, is equally rigorously dispassionate. It has to be so: in the modern world of pandemics past is the prologue. Coverage provides solutions in developing readiness and mobilizing response to the current pandemic, and future ones. Addressing, military and security issues, government roadblocks to response, mutual aid agreements, ethics, global health organizations and response agencies--and the harsh realities of potential mass fatalities--the book examines the myriad complexities of pandemics and the real threat outbreaks.
About the Author: Dr. Dag von Lubitz is a mondialist and conceptualist with an academic career at the leading universities and research institutions of Europe and the US. Author of over 220 papers, book chapters, and books, and the laureate of several major national and international awards for achievement in science and human affairs. Currently an adjunct research professor at Central Michigan University (CMU). First to bring the concept of Teams of Leaders into the civilian world, Dr. von Lubitz works in the US and EU focusing on global healthcare, crisis decision-making and leadership, and on homeland defence and security issues.
Professor Candace Gibson earned her PhD in biochemistry from MIT and went on to a highly successful research career in neuroscience. Dr. Gibson is also recognized as one of the pioneers of Canadian e-learning, e-health, and health informatics education receiving the AFMC-Canada Health Infoway e-Health award in 2013 and Tribute to Excellence from the Canadian Health Information Management Association (CHIMA) in 2016. Dr. Gibson has authored more than 100 publications in experimental neuroscience, health informatics, and health information management. After several senior academic appointments Dr. Gibson retired as the Vice Dean (A), Basic Medical Sciences, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University, London, Canada.
