Unseen Enemies: Man & Disease

Even with a classroom-filmstrip approach combining narration and stock images, this wide-ranging chronicle of human morbidity is chilling, as history's 11 top contagious diseases are counted down: the medieval plague (actually three variants, of which bubonic was the least fatal), malaria, yellow fever, tuberculosis, leprosy, typhus, typhoid fever, cholera, influenza (especially the mysterious "Spanish flu" that claimed millions of lives in 1918), smallpox, and HIV/AIDS. Filmmaker-narrator Tom Page puts human faces on the grim statistics with anecdotes about heroic smallpox fighter Edward Jenner and the notorious Mary Mallon (aka Typhoid Mary), while also noting the similarities between the persecution of Jews scapegoated for the plague, and the leper treatment of Haitians and hemophiliac children during the AIDS rampage. Many lessons of history are worth re-learning today, including the story of how Portuguese navigator Christopher Columbus and his followers brought alien European diseases to the Americas that wiped out indigenous populations in the worst public health disaster in human history. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (C. Cassady)