Nicola Twilley

Much like Twilley's podcast, this book is wide ranging and always interesting. The last couple chapters were the weakest. I'm not sure what nuclear waste storage has to do with quarantine—it is still fun to read about, but not really on topic. The discussion of digital surveillance, contact tracing and quarantine is also very weak—mostly speculative and not based on actual reporting. The book would have benefitted if the authors had reported from South Korea, China, or possibly the US developers of contract-tracing apps.

> Later, the practice of slashing mail with chisels and awls, which often left it in shreds, was made obsolete by a device called a rastel (from the Latin rastellus, or “rake”), which resembles the love child of a waffle iron and a medieval torture device. Letters were placed between hinged, spiked plates and punctured pre-fumigation

> for a century, from 1770, Austro-Hungarian authorities maintained a thousand-mile quarantine corridor along their imperial frontier, all the way from the shores of the Adriatic to the Transylvanian mountains. This epidemiological boundary was not simply a line but a buffer zone, thirty miles wide in many places, cutting a broad swath through modern-day Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Inside this belt, every peasant was also a soldier, responsible for manning the sanitary cordon for at least one week in every eight, and more during an outbreak—up to a total of six months’ active service each year. A chain of two thousand lookout posts was constructed, each no more than a musket-shot’s distance from the next, and soldiers were instructed to fire on any unauthorized traffic. Nineteen crossing posts offered disinfection services, open-air parlatorios for distanced conversation across the divide, and supervised quarantine for travelers—twenty-one days when no outbreak was suspected, and forty-eight when the presence of plague was confirmed in the region

> When Napoleon sent sixty thousand French soldiers to Haiti to quash a slave rebellion in 1801, 80 percent of them died within two years, jaundiced, feverish, and vomiting a noxious substance that resembled spent coffee grounds. Defeated, Napoleon sold off the rest of his North American possessions to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Meanwhile, what was left of the imperial fleet sailed back to French and Italian ports in 1804, bringing yellow fever with them

> The use of these kinds of canaries in the coal mine of public health is expensive but effective. In Australia, which is the only continent free of the Varroa mite, sentinel beehives are stationed near ports, to alert biosecurity officials to any accidental introduction. In California, 139 flocks of sentinel chickens stand guard in chicken coops around the state; if the white leghorns are bitten by mosquitoes infected by West Nile or St. Louis encephalitis, they will develop antibodies that alert local public health agencies to the presence of the disease.… (more)