Back Talk: Philip Alcabes

ADRIAN BELLESGUARD

In the fall of 2001, friends worried about anthrax started asking Philip Alcabes, an epidemiologist at Hunter College, if they should be ironing their mail. Alcabes was struck by how these New Yorkers seemed more alarmed by the anthrax panic, in which five people died, than they were by the World Trade Center attacks, which claimed 2,752 lives. Alcabes's new book, Dread (Public Affairs, $26.95), is about the complex relationship between epidemics and the fears, anxieties and misconceptions that surround them.   --Christine Smallwood

What links modern epidemics with cholera and the plague?

Some of the ideas people have about epidemics today are really just the latest chapter in a very long story. The fear of the stranger goes back at least to the plague of Athens, around 400 BC. Thucydides wrote that people said it came from Ethiopia, which was the Athenians' name for part of Africa. Already at that time people were talking about epidemics to verify anxieties they had.

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