Raisa B. Deber, author of Treating Health Care and co-author of Case Studies in Canadian Health Policy and Management, Second Edition, writes on the blog about the critical importance of public health, in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak and she reflects on the way Canada's health care system has been coping. We've also included an excerpt from Case Studies in Canadian Health Policy and Management, which looks at the Canadian response to the SARS outbreak in 2003.

Epidemics and the Modern World surveys the role of significant infectious diseases in history from the Black Death of the fourteenth century to the Zika virus in the early twenty-first century. In light of the recent coronavirus outbreak, author Mitchell L. Hammond discusses how epidemics are a distinctively modern problem as well as a topic of historical interest.