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ANYONE who has travelled through an airport has surely noticed the rather long list of items that are prohibited on board a plane. But along with the more understandably forbidden articles, such as guns, knives, grenades and canisters of petrol, there is often a list of seemingly innocuous cargo: fresh foodstuffs. In Australia, even muddy shoes are frowned upon. It may seem a bit excessive, but these prohibitions are the climax of a long historical trend and are motivated, as Mark Harrison reveals in Contagion, by a mixture of public-health, food-safety and protectionist trading policies.

Harrison鈥檚 erudite study of the impact of global commerce and travel on the spread of disease charts how the responses of governments and traders to outbreaks evolved, from the Black Death some 650 years ago, to the recent outbreaks of SARS and avian flu. As Australia鈥檚 muddy-shoe ban intimates, disease vectors are a serious concern. Viruses and bacteria that travel in soil or food can have a disastrous impact on crops and livestock, and the spread of human diseases such as yellow fever and malaria can be devastating for public health. A particularly deadly strain of malaria was exported from Africa to the rest of the world by the slave trade, for example.

It was as a consequence of the Black Death that 鈥渜uarantine鈥� came into vogue as the preferred means of disease control. Simultaneously it became a potent weapon of economic warfare. Harrison goes to great pains to point out that throughout history, governments have needed little encouragement to adopt quarantine and import bans as weapons of foreign policy and economic advantage, often with tragic consequences for the 鈥渧ictim鈥� states where the infections originated.

Contagion is a thorough, well-researched and thoughtful tome, and Harrison includes some interesting asides about the history of medicine. But be warned, his writing style is academic in nature and dry in tone. Not as infectious as one might have hoped.