April 21, 2009
BOOK REVIEW: Fear and Fantasy Fuel Many of Today's 'Epidemics,' Author Says in 'Dread'
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
If it seems that not a day passes that another deadly "epidemic" is threatening our very lives and civilization, it's not all in your mind, suggests Philip Alcabes in "Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu" (PublicAffairs, 336 pages, index, bibliography, notes,
$26.95).
The average person is far more likely to die in a car accident than from a communicable disease, yet -- thanks in part to 24/7 news coverage and a scientific establishment that needs fear to fund their research ---we are still more fearful of the epidemic rather than the highway crash, he writes.
In a lively, comprehensive and very readable look at real epidemics and false ones like obesity and autism, Alcabes notes that our anxieties about epidemics are the result not so much of the germ or microbe or virus in question but by the unknown, the undesirable and the misunderstood.
In the Dark Ages, Jews -- always a convenient scapegoat -- were slaughtered by the thousands in Europe by devoutly ignorant people who accused the Jews among them of poisoning wells, he says. Even though Jews themselves suffered from the bubonic plague, their Christian neighbors suspended belief to take it out on Jews.
Fast forward to 1832, when cholera came to America, Irish immigrants were the scapegoats, blamed for a disease that is caused when a person ingests water or food that is contaminated with human feces containing the Vibrio cholerae bacteria, writes Alcabes, an associate professor of Urban Public Health at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
Cholera had probably circulated "continuously on the Indian subcontinent for many centuries, but was unknown in Europe or the Americas before the 1800s," Alcabes says. Around 1817 the first widespread outbreak of cholera -- presaging the epidemics of 1832 and the 1850s in the U.S. -- became widespread in the subcontinent.
In the U.S. fear and hatred of immigrants, at first Irish Catholics and later Jews from Eastern Europe who were accused of spreading tuberculosis, "cloaked itself in cholera fears," the author notes. Rather than seek out the root causes of cholera and other diseases, ancient theories of miasmic air were resurrected, combined with a nativist hatred of the teeming cities where the immigrants most often settled.
New so-called epidemics like obesity focus on the alleged decline in sensible behavior and obesity "provides policy makers and profit makers with a justification for managing people's lives and wallets," says Alcabes in his chapter titled "Managing the Imagined Epidemic." He attacks the widespread use of the body-mass index (BMI), which he says has little or no scientific basis. In fact, a person with a really low BMI -- a marathon runner or a supermodel -- is more likely to die sooner than a person with a BMI of around 30: "underweight is the most dangerous body condition of all," Alcabes says.
This is obviously a very controversial argument that flies in the face of the constant scientific and general media bombardment about the connection of obesity and diabetes, for instance, but Alcabes goes further and says that there's more than a little element of scapegoating in the fight against obesity since blacks are more likely to be in the range of the overweight or obese than whites. The obese -- or those perceived to be obese -- are even tagged as the Typhoid Marys of our time...if you're around fat people, you'll catch their "disease," the author writes in reference to a recent "study."
Alcabes: "In a way, obesity is an epidemic of risk more than it is an epidemic of disease (which it isn't) or death. The risk in question is a tragedy of proportions, literally. Whereas we coded AIDS as a tragedy of excessive appetite in the form of immoderate sexual desire, we regarded obesity as a tragedy of appetite for food. The obesity epidemic validates the fearful suspicion that we have let ourselves be seduced by modernity's conucopia. We eat too much or we eat wrong."
Just as the late author Michael Crichton's techno-novel "State of Fear" (2004) drew fire from critics who claimed he was denying the existence of global warming -- or climate change, as it's called now -- so do I expect that "Dread" will be savaged by followers of conventional scientific wisdom who will accuse Alcabes of denying the obvious. In any case, it's a book worth reading and re-reading by those who approach everything with a heightened degree of skepticism.
Publisher's web site: www.publicaffairsbooks.com
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BOOK REVIEW: Fear and Fantasy Fuel Many of Today's 'Epidemics,' Author Says in 'Dread'
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
If it seems that not a day passes that another deadly "epidemic" is threatening our very lives and civilization, it's not all in your mind, suggests Philip Alcabes in "Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu" (PublicAffairs, 336 pages, index, bibliography, notes, $26.95).
The average person is far more likely to die in a car accident than from a communicable disease, yet -- thanks in part to 24/7 news coverage and a scientific establishment that needs fear to fund their research ---we are still more fearful of the epidemic rather than the highway crash, he writes.
In a lively, comprehensive and very readable look at real epidemics and false ones like obesity and autism, Alcabes notes that our anxieties about epidemics are the result not so much of the germ or microbe or virus in question but by the unknown, the undesirable and the misunderstood.
In the Dark Ages, Jews -- always a convenient scapegoat -- were slaughtered by the thousands in Europe by devoutly ignorant people who accused the Jews among them of poisoning wells, he says. Even though Jews themselves suffered from the bubonic plague, their Christian neighbors suspended belief to take it out on Jews.
Fast forward to 1832, when cholera came to America, Irish immigrants were the scapegoats, blamed for a disease that is caused when a person ingests water or food that is contaminated with human feces containing the Vibrio cholerae bacteria, writes Alcabes, an associate professor of Urban Public Health at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
Cholera had probably circulated "continuously on the Indian subcontinent for many centuries, but was unknown in Europe or the Americas before the 1800s," Alcabes says. Around 1817 the first widespread outbreak of cholera -- presaging the epidemics of 1832 and the 1850s in the U.S. -- became widespread in the subcontinent.
In the U.S. fear and hatred of immigrants, at first Irish Catholics and later Jews from Eastern Europe who were accused of spreading tuberculosis, "cloaked itself in cholera fears," the author notes. Rather than seek out the root causes of cholera and other diseases, ancient theories of miasmic air were resurrected, combined with a nativist hatred of the teeming cities where the immigrants most often settled.
New so-called epidemics like obesity focus on the alleged decline in sensible behavior and obesity "provides policy makers and profit makers with a justification for managing people's lives and wallets," says Alcabes in his chapter titled "Managing the Imagined Epidemic." He attacks the widespread use of the body-mass index (BMI), which he says has little or no scientific basis. In fact, a person with a really low BMI -- a marathon runner or a supermodel -- is more likely to die sooner than a person with a BMI of around 30: "underweight is the most dangerous body condition of all," Alcabes says.
This is obviously a very controversial argument that flies in the face of the constant scientific and general media bombardment about the connection of obesity and diabetes, for instance, but Alcabes goes further and says that there's more than a little element of scapegoating in the fight against obesity since blacks are more likely to be in the range of the overweight or obese than whites. The obese -- or those perceived to be obese -- are even tagged as the Typhoid Marys of our time...if you're around fat people, you'll catch their "disease," the author writes in reference to a recent "study."
Alcabes: "In a way, obesity is an epidemic of risk more than it is an epidemic of disease (which it isn't) or death. The risk in question is a tragedy of proportions, literally. Whereas we coded AIDS as a tragedy of excessive appetite in the form of immoderate sexual desire, we regarded obesity as a tragedy of appetite for food. The obesity epidemic validates the fearful suspicion that we have let ourselves be seduced by modernity's conucopia. We eat too much or we eat wrong."
Just as the late author Michael Crichton's techno-novel "State of Fear" (2004) drew fire from critics who claimed he was denying the existence of global warming -- or climate change, as it's called now -- so do I expect that "Dread" will be savaged by followers of conventional scientific wisdom who will accuse Alcabes of denying the obvious. In any case, it's a book worth reading and re-reading by those who approach everything with a heightened degree of skepticism.
Publisher's web site: www.publicaffairsbooks.com
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