Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 28 of 28
Today’s book, the last book of this campaign activity, is On Call by Anthony Fauci. Few people can say that they lived through and worked to mitigate numerous pandemics that occurred in the United States in the last ~45 years. Reading this book helped me connect the dots between the work of people like myself and my colleagues in the trenches of infectious diseases, and Dr. Fauci’s descriptions of each of the infection epidemics and pandemics, whether it is HIV, or zika, ebola, H1N1 or COVID-19.
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May 15, 5:13 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 27 of 28
Today’s book is Positive by Michael Saag. It is about the AIDS crisis in the deep South, which began at the same time Dr. Saag began his residency. In his deeply moving and inspiring book, he discusses the foundation of the 1917 clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, his career as an HIV researcher, clinician, and educator, and the dysfunctional US healthcare system.
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May 14, 5:56 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 26 of 28
Today’s book is Broken, Bankrupt, and Dying by Brad Spellberg. It is about the inefficiencies in our healthcare systems, the waste, the high costs, and patients having to choose between paying their bills and paying for their medications. The author is an accomplished infectious diseases physician and an antimicrobial steward.
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May 13, 5:47 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 25 of 28
Today’s book is The Great Influenza by James Barry. It is a nonfiction book published in 2004 about the 1918 H1N1 pandemic, which started among the army troops in Kansas and spread quickly across the world during the World War I. It is called the Spanish flu in popular parlance because Spain was the first country to report the disease. It is a must read for any one looking to understand the contexts in which pandemics spread, and the toll they take on the world.
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May 12, 5:52 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 24 of 28
Dear friends, Happy Mother’s Day! Today is Day 24 of 28 #RaceAgainstResistance and today’s book is Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. Set in Michigan during the summer of 2020 when everyone in the family had to stay home due to COVID-19 precautions in effect, the daughters of the main character learn that she had once dated a hot actor and want to know all about it. This is a beautiful heartwarming story, and if you listen to the audio version, you will additionally enjoy Meryl Streep’s voice.
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May 11, 7:54 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 23 of 28
Today's book is Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz. In this book, the author explores the world through the eyes of an artist and an activist and presents a chilling yet moving landscape of young men living with and dying of AIDS in the early 1980s in the United States.
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May 10, 12:15 pm EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 22 of 28
Today's book is Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson. This is recommended by twelve-year old Arya, daughter of Laila Castellino, who is reading this book now and feeling fortunate and grateful that her life in Dallas is not complicated by a yellow fever epidemic and that she has many more material comforts to enjoy as compared to the teenagers who lived in the 18th century, while feeling inspired by what her mom and her friends do in the field of infectious diseases. Of the books in this campaign, this is one book I have not yet read. The book is about 14-year old Matilda who is living in Philadelphia and helping with her mom’s coffeehouse in 1793 during a yellow fever epidemic.
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May 9, 6:13 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 21 of 28
Today's book is Complications by Atul Gawande. The book is about medical errors, particularly in surgery. It captures the complexity of modern medicine really well. Reading this book in light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic is sure to make you reflect on the elective surgeries that were postponed, emergency surgeries that got delayed, and more because of both pandemic precautions as well as overwhelmed capacity in our healthcare systems. Medical errors are a global problem and organizations like SHEA are working relentlessly to make healthcare safer for all.
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May 8, 4:07 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 20 of 28
Today's book is Polio - An American Story by David Oshinsky. I found this on my bookshelf yesterday as I was looking for something else and started rereading it. It’s an amazing book on how the United States mobilized action against the polio virus in the early 20th century and defeated it, leading to elimination in 1979. Until it resurfaced recently anyway. Does the polio experience have lessons for the current measles outbreaks in the US? You bet it does.
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May 7, 6:09 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 19 of 28
Today's book is Epidemic Leadership by Larry McEvoy. Books on leadership are aplenty, but the key takeaway from this book was that leaders need to ensure the stickiness and spreadability of their messages and that viruses, particularly those that cause epidemics and pandemics, offer several principles and analogies for leading people. I found the book a very interesting read. The author is an emergency medicine physician.
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May 6, 4:59 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 18 of 28
Today's book is The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. Set in the early 80s at the start of the HIV pandemic in Chicago and Paris, it is a gripping novel of the lives and relationships of individuals and their families affected by the infection. This was one of the books discussed in the Women in ID book club, and many infectious diseases physicians, particularly HIV physicians found themselves having even more empathy and appreciation for their patients after reading this book.
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May 5, 7:33 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 17 of 28
Today's book is Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. It is a biography of Paul Farmer, who dedicated his life to global health and social justice. Dr. Farmer’s life story is inspiring to say the least. Much of his life was dedicated to fighting tuberculosis in Haiti, Peru, and Russia. He died in 2022 but his foundation, Partners in Health continues to fulfill his mission. TB is as old as humanity itself. While we could say that TB is a global epidemic and not a pandemic, we are nowhere close to getting it under control. In the United States, TB outbreaks continue to occur in homeless shelters.
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May 4, 6:12 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 16 of 28
Today's book is Knife by Salman Rushdie. It is not just written during the COVID-19 pandemic. It narrates significant life events that happened to the author during the pandemic. He found love and got married, experienced attempted murder with a knife, and lost one eye permanently, among other things. The book is sure to make healthcare professionals, particularly safety and quality professionals to reflect on person-centered care. Salman Rushdie develops urinary tract infection during hospital stay which is complicated by prostatitis, and the resulting prostate nodule leads to additional diagnostic testing for prostate cancer (which he didn’t have). When presented a choice between permanently wearing the pirate patch and getting a lifelike glass eye, he chose the former. And life marched on for many as the pandemic raged across the globe and many others lost their lives.
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May 3, 5:40 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 15 of 28
Today's book is Together by Vivek Murthy. This book is a commentary on current society as well as a call to action about the rise of loneliness. Experts say that not having social connections is the equivalent of smoking one pack of cigarettes a day. The recent COVID-19 pandemic had the effect of both amplifying our loneliness as well as spurring us to reflect and act on it more. Reading this book is sure to make you pick up the phone and call a friend or two, or even go visit them.
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May 2, 5:52 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 14 of 28
Today's book is Gemma and the Great Flu, a middle grade graphic novel written by Julie Gilbert and illustrated by Dan Freitas. The book is about a group of teenagers adapting to, supporting each other, and calling out each other for practices that could harm the others, while living through the life disruptions at home and school during the great flu pandemic of 1918.
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May 1, 7:42 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 12 of 28
Today's book is The Patient and the Health Care System: Perspectives on High-Quality Care. It asks the big question - what does it mean to provide high-quality care with all its STEEEP components, safety, timeliness (access), equity, effectiveness, efficiency, and patient-centeredness) with the patient at the center? The pandemic reference is that it was published in 2020. As I reflect on it now, the big question that comes to me is - what does high-quality patient-centered care mean during a pandemic? We witnessed numerous examples of human kindness in healthcare but COVID-19 crushed our systems. How do we prepare ourselves and our systems for the next one?
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Apr 29, 4:40 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 11 of 28
Today’s book is my recent find - Rethinking Evidence in the time of Pandemics by Eivind Engebretsen and Mona Baker. The authors are Norwegian researchers in medical humanities. This book is available on Cambridge core open access where you can read it for free. The biggest takeaway for me was that there is such a thing called narrative rationality which is distinct from scientific rationality. Narrative rationality is behind decisions to not mask, not get vaccinated, etc. I found it helpful to understand this framework.
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Apr 28, 9:23 am EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 10 of 28
Today's book is The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Set in Florence, Italy, in the 1340s, this classic is about a group of ten who we might call a pandemic pod of ten in current society. They connect in church during the plague pandemic and escape to the woods to flee disease and death and engage in revelry and regale each other with ten stories each.
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Apr 27, 13:18 pm EST
Pranavi Sreeramoju
Pandemic in a Book Day 9 of 28
Today's book is The Orphan Collector by Ellen Marie Wiseman. Try reading this novel without shedding a tear. Set in the City of Brotherly Love in 1918, this gripping and heart wrenching story is about, well, you guessed it, the lives of orphans created by the H1N1 pandemic of the day. One way pandemics leave their mark on a society is by leaving a large number of children without even a single parent to care for them. Can you guess how many children became orphans during the COVID-19 pandemic all over the world? 10.5 million children as of May 2022. Thank you for your donation and support!
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Apr 26, 5:10 am EST
