Abstract
This chapter describes and analyzes impacts of infectious disease that do not rise to the level of death. Earth exists in a landscape filled with infectious disease, and anyone who has ever had the common cold, or the flu, has experienced a fragment of the larger narrative presented in so many ways earlier in the book, but it is easy enough for so many who get sick to escape relatively unscathed, or at least alive, that the context of nonlethal experiences may seem very much removed from the context of those who lose their lives. Four themes are emphasized: environment, illness, pathogen, and the immune.