You have probably had your fill by now of swine flu, bird flu, flu of all descriptions; you have turned off your television, tossed the front section of this newspaper into the trash, and called for not one more word about the flu or any of the other dire infections breaking news around the globe.

Sad news: you are out of luck. There will unquestionably be more words  many more  and you will probably wind up reading them. An insatiable fascination with contagious illness is hard-wired into all of us, as two new books make clear.

From Philip Alcabes, an epidemiologist and a professor at Hunter College in New York, comes “Dread,” a sober analysis of why exactly this should be so. What is it that distinguishes epidemic infection from all other diseases, the ones that fail to generate breathless headlines and have failed to inspire the gigantic body of literature and commentary that trail behind history’s epidemics?

Image Credit... Greenwich Printing Office

The answer is logical enough: epidemics hit us right at the nexus of self-interest and altruism, that exquisitely uncomfortable spot where our brother’s misfortune nudges us just enough that we need to examine it and distance ourselves from it (and, in more highly evolved civilizations, take care of it before it takes care of us).