Thomas Bugnyar

most jarring during his discussion on the two pandemics so far this century, SARS and swine flu. When discussing SARS, he describes media coverage as ‘alarmist’, suggests that public health workers used the outbreak to demonstrate that their field was still relevant, and claims that firm actions by governments, such as imposing quarantine and closing schools, were more about restoring the confidence of investors than anything else. He even goes as far as to question whether the disease might have simply died out ‘naturally’. Although Harrison’s insights into how governments reacted during the SARS outbreak are fascinating, readers might interpret his arguments differently if given more information on the biology and epidemiology of the virus. For example, early in the outbreak it was not known that patients were only infectious when symptomatic, and it was only this fact that meant that spread of the disease could be halted through public health measures and that the dire predictions of some epidemiologists were not realised. Similarly, he suggests that the high number of projected deaths from swine flu were “used to garner more resources for a hitherto beleaguered branch of medicine”. But Harrison fails to explain that in the early days of the outbreak all evidence pointed towards swine flu being much more virulent than it turned out to be. Despite these quibbles, Harrison provides an illuminating account of the political and economic repercussions of epidemic disease in the past and in the modern era. Contagion is not for the faint of heart. It is rich in historical detail, and all of the resources are meticulously referenced, but there is little on what life was like for those affected by infectious disease, and even less on the biology of the pathogens, making for a very dry read. Indeed, the story of the Eclair stands out as one of the few accounts in the book where the reader can get a real sense of the characters involved and can fully engage with the narrative. Nevertheless, the book gives us a convincing insight into how the spread of infectious disease has profoundly influenced international politics and trade, and for this it should be applauded.