![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett.
I gave it a four star rating, but only because it's a bit long. It is also, alas, a bit dated, and I rilly wish there was a revised edition. It was published in 1995, and one thing that changed the landscape a lot around then were protease inhibitors, which pretty much changed the outlook on HIV/AIDS.
It's an account of outbreaks, and the things CDC did right -many- and the ones they did wrong -with dire consequences-, and also an account of how human's relationship to the natural world puts us in conflict with microbes, how our political decisions to not help with, say, homelessness and urban poverty puts everyone in danger.
Some of this stuff I was aware of (for example, how HIV/AIDS emerged, as well as histories of other outbreaks), but much of it was new to me: I'd never read, for example, about malaria and its path during the 20th century, with treatments failing and resistant strains popping up in anywhere near this level of detail. And there are lots of details. That's the one fault I have with the book, which I read on my Kindle: it was very long, and there were lots of statistics, and tables and graphs would have been helpful, for quick visualization. This is only important because the book is seriously long.
She's very clear, and cite experts that, even as of 1995, most of them knew that the plague was coming and that it would be global. This would not be an outbreak of Ebola in a few small villages. It would be a diseases that spanned nations and continents.
She knew where we were heading, a quarter of a century ago. Nobody listened. We're there. The plague is no longer coming. It's here.
I gave it a four star rating, but only because it's a bit long. It is also, alas, a bit dated, and I rilly wish there was a revised edition. It was published in 1995, and one thing that changed the landscape a lot around then were protease inhibitors, which pretty much changed the outlook on HIV/AIDS.
It's an account of outbreaks, and the things CDC did right -many- and the ones they did wrong -with dire consequences-, and also an account of how human's relationship to the natural world puts us in conflict with microbes, how our political decisions to not help with, say, homelessness and urban poverty puts everyone in danger.
Some of this stuff I was aware of (for example, how HIV/AIDS emerged, as well as histories of other outbreaks), but much of it was new to me: I'd never read, for example, about malaria and its path during the 20th century, with treatments failing and resistant strains popping up in anywhere near this level of detail. And there are lots of details. That's the one fault I have with the book, which I read on my Kindle: it was very long, and there were lots of statistics, and tables and graphs would have been helpful, for quick visualization. This is only important because the book is seriously long.
She's very clear, and cite experts that, even as of 1995, most of them knew that the plague was coming and that it would be global. This would not be an outbreak of Ebola in a few small villages. It would be a diseases that spanned nations and continents.
She knew where we were heading, a quarter of a century ago. Nobody listened. We're there. The plague is no longer coming. It's here.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}