New epidemics such as AIDS and "mad cow" disease have dramatized the need to explore the factors underlying rapid viral evolution and emerging viruses. This comprehensive volume is the first to describe this multifaceted new field. It places viral evolution and emergence in a historical context, describes the interaction of viruses with hosts, and details the advances in molecular biology and epidemiology that have provided the tools necessary to track developing viral epidemics and to detect new viruses far more successfully than could be done in the recent past. This unique book also lucidly details case histories and offers practical suggestions for the prevention of future epidemics. The contributors are leading authorities in their disciplines, and were selected both for their expert knowledge and for their ability to define and elucidate the fundamental issues. The book is highly accessible and has been written for a wide audience that includes virologists, public health authorities, medical anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, infectious disease specialists, and social scientists interested in medical and health issues.
Stephen S. Morse, Ph.D., is Professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, Director of PREDICT (a project to strengthen global capacity for identification, surveillance, and risk assessment of zoonotic pathogens of human pandemic disease potential) of USAID's Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) program, and Visiting Professor at the University of California, Davis.
His first book, "Emerging Viruses" (Oxford University Press) was selected by American Scientist magazine for its list of the "100 Top Science Books of the 20th Century".
Earlier, he was founding director of the Columbia University Center for Public Health Preparedness. In 1996-2000 (on loan from Columbia), he was Program Manager for Biodefense at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Before coming to Columbia, he was assistant professor of virology at The Rockefeller University in New York, where he remains an adjunct faculty member. He was Chair of the 1989 NIAID-NIH Conference on Emerging Viruses, for which he originated the term and concept of emerging viruses/infections. He was a member of the "Committee on Emerging Microbial Threats to Health" at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies of Sciences, chaired its Task Force on Viruses, and was an author of the resulting report "Emerging Infections" (1992). He was the founding chair of ProMED (the nonprofit international Program to Monitor Emerging Diseases), and an originator of ProMED-mail, an international network inaugurated by ProMED in 1994 for outbreak reporting and disease monitoring using the Internet. He was a founding Section Editor of the CDC journal "Emerging Infectious Diseases", and is currently a member of the IOM Forum on Microbial Threats (formerly the Forum on Emerging Infections). He is a Fellow of the AAAS, the New York Academy of Sciences (and a past chair of its Microbiology section), the American Academy of Microbiology, the American College of Epidemiology, and an elected life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Morse received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He and his wife live in New York City.
