mass hysteria

Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion. The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
tags: faith-based birding, mass hysteria, endangered species, extinct species, conservation, politics, Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Campephilus principalis, IBWO, ornithology, birds, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has posted a reward of $50,000 to be given to anyone who can provide "video, photographic, or other compelling information and lead a project scientist to a living wild Ivory-billed Woodpecker." Mass hysteria is that strange psychological phenomenon where a group of people experience the same hallucination at the same…