Overview

Unpurified drinking water. Improper use of antibiotics. Local warfare. Massive refugee migration. Changing social and environmental conditions around the world have fostered the spread of new and potentially devastating viruses and diseases - HIV, Lassa, Ebola, and others. Laurie Garrett takes you on a fifty-year journey through the world's battles with microbes and examines the worldwide conditions that have culminated in recurrent outbreaks of newly discovered diseases, epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas, and mutated old diseases that are no longer curable. She argues that it is not too late to take action to prevent the further onslaught of viruses and microbes, and offers possible solutions for a healthier future.

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9780140250916

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Reviews

A frightening vision of the future and a deeply unsettling one...a sober, scary book that not only limns the dangers posed by emerging diseases but also raises serious questions about two centuries worth of Enlightenment beliefs in science and technology and progress. --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Like her role model Rachel Carson, whose 1962 Silent Spring woke up society to environmental poisoning, Garrett aims to dispel social and political complacency about the threat of old, new, and yet-unknown microbial catastrophes in a golbal ecology that links Bujumbura, Bangkok, and Boston more closely than anyone appreciates. Richard A. Knox, The Boston Globe Garrett has done a brilliant job of putting scientific work into layman's language, and the scariness of medical melodramas is offset by the excitement of scientific detection. --The New Yorker The book is ambitious, but it succeeds...[its] scope is encyclopedic, its mass of detail startling. --The Economist Garrett brilliantly develops her theme that repidly increasing dangers are being ignored. Her investigations have taken over a decade to complete, and her findings are meticulously discussed and distilled. -- Richard Horton, The New York Review of Books Encyclopedic in detail, missionary in zeal, and disturbing in its message...The Coming Plague makes fascinating if troubling reading. It is an important contribution to our awareness of human ecology and the fragility of the relative biological well-being that many of us enjoy. Garrett has mastered an extraordinary amount of detail about the pathology, epidemiology, and human events surrounding dozens of complex diseases. She writes engagingly, carrying her themes as well as the reader's interest from outbreak to outbreak. --The Los Angeles Times Book Review Absorbing...the insights into the personalities and the stories behind new infectious diseases are fascinating. I have the greatest admiration for Laurie Garrett. --Abraham Verghese, M.D., author of In the Heartland: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS A masterpiece of reporting and writing, The Coming Plague is the best and most thorough book on the terrifying emergence of new plagues. The level of detail is amazing, with fascinating portraits of the so-called 'disease cowboys, ' the doctors and scientists who fight infectious diseases on the front lines. The Coming Plague is a must read for anyone interested in the biological fate of the human species. --Richard Preston, New York Times-bestselling author of The Hot Zone

Garrett, Newsday and former National Public Radio reporter, has written an excellent encyclopedic history - and jeremiad - of man versus microbe in the last decades of the century. California School Becomes Notorious for Epidemic of TB. In a Panic, Rwandans Die in Stampede. No book about to be launched in 1994 could ask for better confirmation of its somber thesis than the front-page headlines in a recent edition of the New York Times. Only a few years ago science was celebrating an end to plagues and an extended life span, but now it appears that we are losing the battle against infectious illness. Microbes mutate as fast as companies synthesize new drugs to combat them. Jet travel, the sexual revolution, and overpopulation are just a few of the whole-earth changes that favor the survival of old and new bugs. In chapter by chilling chapter, Garrett recounts the stories of deaths from Machupo, Lassa, and Ebola diseases - viral infections decimating small villages in South America and Africa. In the best tradition of Berton Roueche, each account is a dramatic narrative with heroes and heroines: the doctors and epidemiologists who round up the usual suspects (rats, mice, bugs) to come up with answers. Modernity brings ironic twists - reused syringes, recycled air conditioning - to amplify infection. But the ultimate compounding factor is a Thirdworldization, an ugly coinage to describe an ugly situation in which the inhabitants of poor nations are malnourished, displaced, terrorized, demoralized, e.g., Rwanda. Garrett chronicles AIDS, the spread of anti-biotic-resistant TB and malaria, Legionnaire's disease, last year's reemergence of Hanta viruses among the Navajo, along with chapters on microbial genetics and resistance. Prejudice and politics are given their due from clearly liberal Garrett, and a glimmer of a solution comes in the form of eternal vigilance and surveillance. One does not like to apply the phrase too often in a book review, but here is a volume that should be required reading for policy makers and health professionals. (Kirkus Reviews)

The miracle of antibiotics may appear to have defeated the threat to humans from infectious diseases but, argues Garrett, they are set for an exciting comeback. New and lethal viruses such as HIV have emerged while the more traditional pathogens have devised ways to become resistant to the assault of modern medicine. This is gripping - and chilling - material. Garrett's account of the sudden appearance of the Ebola virus in central Africa in the mid-1970s could have come straight from the pages of a novel by Joseph Conrad. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Laurie Garrett is a former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1996 for a series of works published in Newsday, and has also been awarded the Polk and Peabody Prizes. She is the author of The Coming Plague, Betrayal of Trust, and Ebola: Story of an Outbreak.

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