Time to Get Serious About Public Health

In Sierra Leone, where recent public health campaigns are saving children’s (and parents’) lives.

by Richard Conniff

The PBS/Channel 13 show “The Open Mind” has just aired its interview with me about my book Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion. You can take check out the interview here or if 28 minutes is too big a commitment, take a look at the transcript below

HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind, and I’m delighted to welcome our guest today, Richard Conniff. He’s author of Ending Epidemics, A History of Escape from Contagion. Richard, thank you so much for joining me today.

CONNIFF: Thanks. Good to be here.

HEFFNER: Richard, there’s some dispute about whether three years since COVID-19 struck we’re still in what you could call a pandemic. Where do you come out on that?

CONNIFF: Yeah, I think we’re still in a pandemic in the sense that it’s going to come back again seasonally. It’s going to be global, it’s evolving everywhere, and those who aren’t protected, who haven’t gotten vaccinated will be at risk.

HEFFNER: When you titled your book Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion, and specifically you identify epidemic, as opposed to pandemic, that was intentional?

CONNIFF: Yeah, that’s intentional. Epidemics are a lot more common. They occur regionally or in individual nations, and pandemics, where it’s the entire world are relatively rare events.

People, especially in this country take for granted our current state of health
and have no conception of the frequency of epidemic disease in our past.

Richard Conniff

HEFFNER: Take us through, in your mind, whether or not the public sufficiently understands that what we encountered in this pandemic was something that for decades and centuries, many strata of society had suffered in what you call epidemics, as opposed to pandemics. Is that fully understood or was that one of the motivations in writing this book?

CONNIFF: Yeah, I don’t think it’s understood at all. It is the reason I wrote the book that is I think people, especially in this country take for granted our current state of health and have no conception of the frequency of epidemic disease in our past and not even in our distant past. So I think I wrote it partly because I’m old. I was born in the middle of the 20th Century, and my father and my uncle both had polio. When I was five, I was in kindergarten. The polio vaccine became available for the first time. And at that point you know, what had been polio season became summer again. And two years before I was born, there was still smallpox in this country. And whooping cough was quite common. It killed 4,000 people a year in the United States. Children. I shouldn’t just say people. It was children under the age of five for the most part. Diphtheria. I live in New England, and there was a massive epidemic of diphtheria in the middle of the 18th century. Okay, I’m going back ways now, but it’s interesting because entire families, 13 children in one family just gone over a period of days. So yeah, there’s a long history of highly infectious diseases. One other example I had measles. People think measles is a trivial disease now. Doctors don’t even see measles anymore, but measles was a brutal experience about 550,000 kids had it the year I had it. 550 died. And so yeah, these are things that people don’t even think about anymore and don’t think about why we are free of these diseases.

ENDING EPIDEMICS: Announcing My New Book

If you’re one of the good people who have enjoyed my previous books, you could be a great help with my new one, Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion. Purchase the book with that link before April 11, using the code PREORDER15, and you’ll save 15%.

Here are few early notices for the book, to give you an idea why pre-ordering might be a good idea for you:

Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer, writes: “Ending Epidemics is an important book, deeply and lovingly researched, written with precision and elegance, a sweeping story of centuries of human battle with infectious disease. Conniff is a brilliant historian with a jeweler’s eye for detail.  I think the book is a masterpiece.”  —

Paul Offit, M.D., author of You Bet Your Life and other books on public health, calls it “A dramatic, page-turning account of the grim, never-ending war waged by infections on humankind.”

Pre-ordering sends a big message of reader support to bookstores & marketing folks. Please also spread the word with your friends, social media contacts, and your local bookstore. It can make or break this book.

You can read more about the book from the publisher MIT Press: “Ending Epidemics tells the story behind “the mortality revolution,” the dramatic transformation not just in our longevity, but in the character of childhood, family life, and human society. Richard Conniff recounts the moments of inspiration and innovation, decades of dogged persistence, and, of course, periods of terrible suffering that stir individuals, institutions, and governments to act in the name of public health.”

You can also read a sample chapter here, about two forgotten women whose work saves tens of thousands of small children every year from death by whooping cough.

Endangered Species Now Need Vaccines, Too

(Photo: Julie Larsen Maher ©WCS)

One reason some modern parents persist in their delusional fear of vaccines is that they’ve forgotten the appalling reality of measles and other childhood diseases. But I remember, because measles was the closest I came to dying as a child, in the last gasp of the disease before widespread availability of a vaccine. It has left me with a feverish memory of feeling as if a suffocating pink graft of skin had been stretched across my face (probably because I couldn’t open my eyes) and of being unable to do much more than lie on my back struggling to breathe. Measles killed about 500 American children a year then. I got away cheap.

But this is a column about wildlife, and about a different virus—essentially measles for carnivores—that is causing an equally miserable sickness, often leading to death, in some of the world’s rarest species. Scientists are now proposing to use vaccines to save these animals from the brink of extinction. But figuring out how to vaccinate a scarce, shy, wide-ranging predator can be even more frustrating than trying to talk sense into recklessly misinformed human parents.

As the name suggests, canine distemper virus generally spreads among domestic dogs. In the United States, anybody who takes little Maggie or Jack to the vet for mandatory rabies shots typically gets the canine distemper vaccine too. But in parts of the world with feral dog problems or poor vaccine coverage of domestic dogs, the virus can readily jump to wildlife, and the victims aren’t just members of the canine family. In the mid-1990s, for example, canine distemper roared through the