Description/Review
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
Amazon.com
Her picture is not entirely bleak. Epidemics
grow when a disease outbreak is amplified--by contaminated water supplies, by
shared needles, by recirculated air, by prostitution. And controlling the
amplifiers of disease is within our power; it's a matter of money, people, and
will. --Mary Ellen Curtin
Where's your next disease coming from? From anywhere in the
world--from overflowing sewage in Cairo, from a war zone in Rwanda, from an
energy-efficient office building in California, from a pig farm in China or
North Carolina "Preparedness demands understanding," writes
Pulitzer-winning journalist Laurie Garrett, and in this precursor to Betrayal
of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, she shows
a clear understanding of the patterns lying beneath the new diseases in the
headlines (AIDS, Lyme) and the old ones resurgent (tuberculosis, cholera). As
the human population explodes, ecologies collapse and simplify, and disease
organisms move into the gaps. As globalization continues, diseases can move from
one country to another as fast as an airplane can fly.
While the human race battles itself ... the
advantage moves to the microbes' court. They are our predators and they will
be victorious if we, Homo sapiens, do not learn how to live in a rational
global village that affords the microbes few opportunities.