Infectious disease

By most accounts, the history of AIDS begins sometime in the late 1970s, before the first official cases were diagnosed in 1981 among a handful of gay men. But a striking new book by Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, upends medical history. In “The Origins of […]

For the second time in history, an infectious disease has been eradicated. In 1979, smallpox was the first disease to be successfully wiped away. Now, a little-known disease called rinderpest is now joining the list. Rinderpest means “cattle plague” in German, and is a relative of the measles virus that infects cattle, deer, and other […]

Author Marc Lappé suggests an approach to healing which relies less on chemical drugs and more on the body’s natural defenses. He’s convinced that the human impact on the natural world is at the root of many new strains of infectious diseases which are filling our hospitals, including AIDS and tuberculosis. This program originally aired […]

Author Marc Lappé suggests an approach to healing which relies less on chemical drugs and more on the body’s natural defenses. He’s convinced that the human impact on the natural world is at the root of many new strains of infectious diseases which are filling our hospital, including AIDS and tuberculosis.

Many of the major infectious diseases that plague humans- like cholera, small pox and AIDS- first evolved in animals. And at some point these diseases all made the leap from animals to people. Traditional medicine has approached the problem by searching f