(ignore the fact that this website is about “fitness”, please and thank you)
The Ghost is written by Steven Johnson. This book was quite complex. Viruses can be caused by the smallest little, insignificant thing. Something just as simple as a infant getting sick and the mother disposing of the soiled fabrics an cause a world of terror. This book just does not focus on just a community becoming sick, but the “savage attack” of an epidemic that caused a society to change and one man’s journey to get to the bottom of the disease and fix it. Just think about how things and events spread and how it affects a group of people, be it viruses or just information, like rumors. John Snow could not figure out what caused the epidemic, and decided to “painstakingly reconstruct” peoples view of the pump and the directions they look to get water or figure out how the epidemic got started.
Books like The Ghost Map have helped end killer diseases, according to Steven Johnson. Books like this help people to understand how dieses can easily be transmitted through animals and feces, that are just laying around and infecting everyone, but the idea to help clean up the cities and lead all the cesspools into the river, where the community gets their drinking water from, causes dieses like cholera to grow worse.
With Snow adventuring out and tying to figuring out what caused the epidemics and how to stop the plague, it caused him to figure out how people where getting sick and how to potentially stop it with a map. The map showed the activity in the neighborhood, representing the death with the address linked to water pumps, that lead to figure out what pump was causing all the deaths.
The map showed that people are capable of figuring out what causes plagues and stopping them. This causes deaths to become less and less frequent in large cities.
If we end up listening to the people around us, who know what is going on, people can realize how to make large societies livable with large populations. Without viruses, we would have not found out and discovered many of the things we know and use today.
Fitness 
I like that the book not only mentioned how the disease spread, but also emphasized how hard it is for people to shake it off. In the middle of it all, it almost looks impossible, like nothing can make you immune to such an aggressive disease.Thus, the natural need for epidemiology. So that history doesn’t have to repeat itself, and if it does, how we can stop it in its tracks.
As an EMAC major, we are more interested in how we can get something, digitally speaking, viral. But when something goes wrong, or we want to stop something, it is also important to know how to clean that up.
The one thing about this whole book that was interesting to me was how it shifted a common belief in science and society that diseases were airborne. Research is a powerful tool and the idea that just plotting out deaths led to an understanding of the root causes. The science epidemiology has evolved so much but sometimes I feel we haven’t as a society. Anti-vaxxers and links to Autism are touted based on false evidence and hearsay. To be fair, a lot of famous people with loud voices agree with the movement and one research article came out supporting it which turned out to be discredited. The damage that did was incredible. All the years of safety and science and research undone in a weekend with a paper, one paper, published by one scientist, who is now no longer a card carrying member of the scientist community. Or rather, he wouldn’t be if they carried cards.
Cristelle, Setting aside your particular post for the moment, I’d encourage you to rethink this wordpress theme. For anyone with low vision, this design and font present serious readability issues. Now, onto your post… It’s clear from your post that you’ve read the book. As a reader, I had hoped to read more of your analysis of the reading. I encourage you to review the Blogging assignment sheet, which states that excellent blog writing is “thought-provoking and engaging.” On your future posts, focus on using “specific examples to analyze readings, relate it to outside material, or address the wider implications (the “so what”) of the material.”