The image of the "War on Terror" as a sort of open-ended, constantly shifting, ever-permeable conflict is a rightfully daunting one, conjuring up confusion and questions about how such a conflict might end, and how a victor might be declared. But there is another war that has gone on far longer than the War on Terror, and which has itself caused catastrophic loss of life, not to mention confusion, uncertainty, and fear.
It is the ongoing conflict between people and germs.
In When Germs Travel, medical historian and physician Howard Markel tracks six major epidemics which have invaded America, and the fears and social conflict they have unleashed. As he notes early on, at the turn of the 19th century, discoveries about a number of infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, caused many in the medical community to assume that "the conquest of deadly infectious scourges was at hand." For example, in one popular medical tome in 1890, the author wrote, "we no longer grope after some mysterious, intangible thing, before which we must bow down or burn something as if it were some demon which we would exorcise."
In his selection of diseases, Merkel drives home the enduring fragility of the American public heath system, as well as the threatening possibilities associated with global travel. As he explores the issues of tuberculois, bubonic plague, trachoma, typhys, cholera, and AIDS, he highlights how quickly reasonable health concerns can translate into fear, hysteria, and a public frenzy for political action—any political action.
In the context of each of his chosen epidemics, Merkel builds a historical narrative of the individuals caught up in the struggle over the disease in counterpoint to his dicussion of the disease itself and the reaction to it. The chapter on incidents of typhus on the Mexican border in the early 1900s and the efforts to control the introduction of the disease to the U.S. is representative of international politics at its worst; terrified of the disease, U.S. health officials in Texas wanted the Mexican workers crossing the border "deloused" every day, but lacked the facilities to do so and regarded requesting to use the Mexican facilities (across the border) somewhat impolitic. The result was that they used of a mixture of kerosene, gasoline, and vinegar—a combustible cocktail to be certain, and one which lead to deadly results when someone happened to light a cigarette near where a group of Mexicans were being "deloused."
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