Outbreak! Pandemic (Global Prospectives) by Robert Green

Sadka Srichaphan lookd proudly over his city of Bankok. He was proud because he was playing host to students from all over the globe for the International Global Issues Summit.

"It's wonderful," said Asgar Knudsen. "I can't believe how easy it was to get here. I flew directly from Copenhagen. It's amazing how air travel has made the world so small!"

"Do you know," said Sadka, "there's a global traveler even more suited to international travel? This traveler knows no boundaries," he said. "He can travel on a plane without anyone knowing, and he is very hard to stop!"

"He is disease." sad Sadka.

A global conference which brings people from everywhere together is the perfect place to encounter the subject of pandemic, the cosmopolitan phantom at the feast of globalization.

Sadka Srichaphan goes on to describe such a disease. It must be novel, one for which humans have not acquired immunity, and it has to be virulently contagious, spreading quickly and easily through any contact. Epidemics, nationwide diseases, and pandemics, worldwide diseases, he explains, are not new to humans, but common throughout history. Sadka goes on to tell his young scientists to describe several major pandemics of the past century, the 1918 Influenza, incorrectly called "Spanish" Flu (which actually began at a U.S. Army base in Kansas near the end of World War I), spreading to Europe when the troops arrived, some already exposed in the crowded conditions of the troop ship, and finally occurring throughout the world, even Arctic villages, killing 50 million worldwide.

The students also learn about the "Avian Influenza," which initially spread from birds to humans, and then from human to human. The "Bird Flu" luckily proved not to be contagious enough to spread worldwide and was stopped by isolating human victims and destroying infected birds. But another "novel" Corona disease, called SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, soon appeared in Asia and spread to Canada and Europe. It was very nearly a pandemic but the use of masks and isolation eventually stopped its spread.

"It was a very close call," Sadka Srichaphan told his young listeners.

But now another "novel" SARS-type Corona virus, named COVID-19, has come a pandemic. Robert Green's Pandemics (Global Perspectives (Cherry Lake)) (Cherry Lake Publishing) offers readers in the middle grades a brief survey of the history of pandemics and some understanding of the new problems of easy spread and of control of such diseases. Green's account, aimed at preteens and young teens, will involve students in understanding the nature and necessity of worldwide disease control and offers an appendix with glossary, bibliography, maps, and index.

Science Sleuths! Tracking an Epidemic (Science Explorers-Follow the Clues) by Tamra B. Orr

Abigail grabbed a tissue just in time before sneezing--again! Abby had the flu, like her father and brother and almost everyone else Abby knew in town.

Abby's mom said the city had a flu epidemic. Abby's mom worked as an epidemiologist. Abby called her a disease detective. She watched for clues to find out what was causing an illness.

Abby has a question for her. "Where did this disease come from?"

Abby knows that what she has is called the flu, or influenza. Her mother tells her that it's caused by virus, a very small microbe, mostly carried by droplets from sneezing or coughing. But how did it get to her city? Who had it first?

Ah, her mom responds. That's what we epidemiologists call Patient Zero, she says, the first victim in a group or place. Over cups of hot tea, her mom explains how epidemiologists chart the spread of a disease among a known group of sufferers.

Abby says everyone in her school seems to have caught the flu almost at the same time, and her mother starts to prepare a chart with names, the date of first symptoms for each person, and whether or not they had traveled up to five days before the flu outbreak began. While Abby takes a needed nap, her mom calls all the flu victims they have come up with, and finds that only two had been out of town in that period. One is a kid Abby knows named Neil, who had returned from a trip on October 16, and a teacher, Ms. Jackson, who had been away until October 26. Abby mulls over the clues and concludes that Ms. Jackson has to be Patient Zero for her school. No one became sick until Ms. Jackson returned from her trip, and five kids in her class got sick on the same day a few days later.

The mystery of who brought the flu to town is solved.

Case Closed?

But, of course, Ms. Jackson caught her flu from someone else while she was away. There is plenty more to know about epidemic detecting in Tamra B. Orr's Tracking an Epidemic (Science Explorer) (Cherry Lake Publishing). Orr provides background information in a series of sidebar fact boxes, each with a magnifying glass symbol, including one on the epic so-called "Spanish Flu" pandemic in 1918-1919, which killed from 25 to 50 million people all over the world. But to solve the problem of a local outbreak or a nationwide epidemic, the trail has to go back to the source of the first case and which virus or bacterium is responsible and how it travels from victim to victim--a worldwide whodunnit that can be as exciting as any mystery thriller.

As an introduction to epidemics, pandemics, and epidemiology, this medical mystery hooks middle readers into following the scientific method to document and analyze data and formulate a way to prove or disprove their hypothesis. This book is a short (32 pages), but thoroughly engaging book for middle graders which links current events with the science curriculum in certainly a timely manner.

Current Event! Examining Pandemics (Examining Disasters) by Nina Rolfes

Shelter-in-place orders, On-line School, Social Distancing--terms that are new to student these days--are the order of the day in this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, but pandemics are not unfamiliar to adults and certainly not new to the the human race, as young middle readers learn in Nina Rolfes' Examining Pandemics (Examining Disasters) (Clara House).

Rolfes begins by defining the term, explaining that an epidemic is a disease which spreads over a distinct area within a country and that a pandemic is a disease which is widespread over two countries or more.

She describes how a pandemic is spread from close contact with an animal or from a person who has the bacteria or virus causing the disease, or from contact with a surface touched by an infected animal or person, usually within 48 hours. Terms such as vectors, zoonotic diseases and transmission, hosts, and contagion are defined and described. Rolfes points out that humans are often a disease's best vectors because they are numerous, live in close social groups from a single family to a mega-city, and travel freely and often between widely different habitats, making spread by humans hard to control and requiring quarantines with strict rules, protective face masks and clothing, and rules for distancing from others.

Author Rolfes brings young readers up to speed on pandemics in human history, from the Black, or Bubonic, Plague, the "Black Death" which raged through Eurasia from 1330 on, killing up to half the population in a given area. She also recounts pandemics of smallpox that spread rapidly through Europe and then the Americas until an Englishman, Edward Jenner, discovered that he could prevent smallpox by "vaccinating" people with material from the lesions caused by cowpox, a harmless but common disease, and smallpox was at last declared officially worldwide extinct in the last century.

Rolfes also describes more recent pandemics from the 1918 influenza which killed 50 million people worldwide to measles and other widespread twentieth century diseases such as polio and AIDS, all of which sickened and killed millions, and those of the twenty-first century--SARS, H1N1 influenza, and Ebola, and how they were controlled.

With striking graphics, black-and-white photos of the 1918 flu scenes and polio wards and color photos of more recent events provide a backward look into past pandemics, Examining Pandemics (Examining Disasters) gives middle graders a wider understanding of pandemics and of the current COVID-19 now being experienced through almost the entire world. A pandemic on this global scale is an epic event, one perhaps familiar to those who know history but unfamiliar to children who are living through such a disaster in their own time, and in her straightforward, just-the-facts text, she describes methods to constrain disease while helping to put this current pandemic in its place in history. Rolfes also appends a glossary, a bibliograpy of books and web sites, and a useful index to help with science reports and projects.