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From the archives

24 Sussex Dive

On some very late homework

City Limits

That shrinking feeling

The Grey Plateau

When the world stopped five years ago

David Waltner-Toews

David Waltner-Toews is a retired professor of epidemiology in the Department of Population Medicine at the Ontario Veterinary College in the University of Guelph, the founding president of Veterinarians without Bordersé Vétérinaires sans Frontiéres Canada and the Canadian Community of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health. He is a specialist in the epidemiology of diseases people get from animals (zoonoses) and the author of The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases that Jump from Animals to Humans (Greystone, 2007).

Articles by
David Waltner-Toews

A Very Modern Pandemic

Railways, colonial policy, the blood trade and their unintended consequences January–February 2012
What do you know about how AIDS got started? If you are neither a specialist nor one of the many Canadians directly affected by the disease, your answer will likely be couched in popular culture references: “Hmmm … Hit the headlines in the early 1980s as a rare disease in homosexuals in San Francisco. Had probably been around and started spreading a good deal earlier … Canadian flight attendant who picked it up somewhere in Africa on one of his flights—what was his…

Parsing Pandemics

The bacteriologists and the ecologists are stillat odds, but at least they’re talking October 2010
The first recorded plague pandemic— the Plague of Justinian—started in Egypt in about 541 CE, and over the next 200 years killed between a quarter and a half of Europe’s population. The second plague pandemic, sometimes called the Black Death, started in Asia in the 1300s, came in repeated epidemic waves across Europe and, over several hundred…