Disease

Abstract This chapter investigates disease during the Age of Interconnection. At the beginning of the period, infectious diseases were a major source of mortality, but the introduction of antimicrobials and large-scale vaccination campaigns dramatically reduced their effects. In the 1960s and 1970s, medical efforts increasingly focused on degenerative disease, with very mixed results. In the final two decades of the century, infectious diseases, including AIDS and drug-resistant tuberculosis made a comeback, while changes in nutrition and lifestyle were producing a global obesity epidemic, with important morbidity consequences.