ABSTRACT
Imagine a pair of ecotourists from New York who travel to Southeast Asia and, while visiting a live meat market, come into contact with chickens carrying a new strain of avian flu. The physician has seen at least a dozen cases of apparent seasonal flu that week and diagnosed and treated them for that. The 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, the first of two pandemics involving the H1N1 virus, infected 500 million people worldwide and killed between 50 and 100 million, or about three to five percent of the entire world's population. The use of statistical analyses to help determine the origin of disease goes back to the Soho cholera pandemic of 1839 to 1856 in England where Dr. John Snow, a London physician, mapped cases of cholera to support his theory that the disease was transmitted by contaminated water. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
