Killer Flu: Get a Shot to Save Your Life and Others

After a devastating flu season in 2017-18 where 80,000 people died, government health officials are urging the public to get vaccinated ("Return of U.S. Flu Season Brings Worries About a Virulent Replay," Bloomberg/Quint, September 27, 2018). Of the children who died from the flu, around 80 percent did not get the shot. Learn about the historic epidemic of 1918 and how public health officials are trying to prevent deaths one hundred years later.

Review selected hard copy/online library books related to the flu at LSC-CyFair Branch Library. Click the title of a listed item, select the "Place Hold" button in the listing, and enter your library card number and PIN for each title you want to request for pick up at the library.

Use these subject words and phrases to find more information in the library catalog:

• communicable diseases
• epidemics
• influenza

Pandemics, Pills, and Politics: Governing Global Health Security by Stefan Elbe
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018
call number: 362.1 Elb

"Taken by millions of people around the planet in the fight against pandemic flu, Tamiflu has provoked suspicions about undue commercial influence in government decision-making about stockpiles. It even found itself at the center of a prolonged political battle over who should have access to the data about the safety and effectiveness of medicines." - publisher's summary excerpt

More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War by Kenneth C. Davis
Henry Holt, 2018
call number: 614.518 Dav

"This book explores how this vast, global epidemic was intertwined with the horrors of World War I and how it could happen again. Complete with photographs, period documents, modern research, and firsthand reports by medical professionals and survivors, this book provides captivating insight into a catastrophe that transformed America in the early twentieth century." - publisher's summary excerpt

Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History by Catharine Arnold
St. Martin's Press, 2018
call number: 614.518 Arn

"In January 1918, as World War I raged on, a new and terrifying virus began to spread across the globe. In three successive waves, from 1918 to 1919, influenza killed more than 50 million people...Nowhere on earth escaped: the United States recorded 550,000 deaths (five times its total military fatalities in the war) while European deaths totaled over two million...Through primary and archival sources, historian Catharine Arnold gives readers the first truly global account of the terrible epidemic." - publisher's summary excerpt