ABOUT BOOK

It is almost impossible to find a plague-related ~news item today that is not ~accompanied by an image of a rat. The best-known ~carriers of zoonotic ~diseases, rats are so closely identified with plague that research articles about ~the role of other mammals in the spread or maintenance of the disease are ~met with enthusiasm in the media—and ~in some cases mistakenly hailed as ~exonerating rats from the spread of plague. This tautology between rat and ~plague is articulated in a context of framing an expanding range of nonhuman ~animals as hosts or vectors of infectious diseases such as influenza, ~Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and COVID-19