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The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance By Laurie Garrett ( Penguin (Non-Classics) )
Release Date: 1995-10-01
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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. 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
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 This Should Be Required Reading HS Level
I first read this book shortly after it came out about 12 years ago. I was so angry and scared after realizing the real situation for global disease and treatments or lack thereof. I recently was sorting through books to sell and came across this again. I reread it and became even more angry and frustrated and scared. I think this should be a required text for high school history/science. I think the American public has become immune to any kind of "wake up call" as regards our environment and health issues. We are still living with the colossal failures and screw ups of the Reagan years, now compounded and magnified by the GWB years.
There is not room to detail the reasons one should read this book. We have already had plagues in this country, which have been basically hidden from the public. We allowed the CDC to be gutted by the Reagan administration and who knows were it currently stands. Ronald Reagan can take credit for millions of AID's related deaths because of his blissful and willful ignorance.
Reading this book is a necessity and will benefit you in many but scary ways.
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Inspiring
In nearly 700 well researched pages, Laurie Garrett has managed to turn a usually dry subject into a gripping tale of disease-warriors combating humanity's oldest enemies. This is only the tip of the iceberg for any respectable medical professional, but for the lay-reader this book contains a wealth of information that is readable and easily digestible.
By turning topics like the Ebola virus, Genetic Engineering and Toxic Shock Syndrome into an easy read, Laurie Garrett transforms complex medical topics into fascinating chunks of information like a true wizard. A must read for anyone with the slightest interest in medicine and science.
This non-fiction book inspired my debut Political Thriller - Patient Zero - about the next avian flu pandemic, which the world is truly bracing for.
Patient Zero - Official ABNA Entrant
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More riveting than The Hot Zone ( djmaschek )
If you liked The Hot Zone, you will love this book. The Hot Zone told the scary story of a variant of Ebola that turned out to be harmless to humans. The Coming Plague narrates the history of little-known but lethal diseases such as Machupo, Ebola, Four-Corners Hantavirus, Lassa Fever, Marburg and others. In each of these cases, the list of victims was relatively small, but the onset and progress of these illnesses were frightful. Garrett examines how "disease cowboys" worked backward to patient zero, followed the course of the illness, discovered its means of transmission and identified each disease. In a few cases, the original vector could not be found, despite a careful search. How even medical professionals react when they find out that they too, have the disease is a fascinating psychological study. Often they go into a state of denial, like the researcher in New York who came down with Lassa after studying some samples. At the other extreme was one doctor, who, fearing he was exposed to Ebola, hit the bottle hoping that alcohol would kill the virus. To his relief it turned out to be measles.
A large amount of this book is devoted to AIDS. Garrett details its emergence in the early 80s. She is critical of the government's slow response, which she says was partly due to the insistence of some in the Reagan administration that since it affected only homosexual men it was beneath concern. On the other hand, she suggests that the rampant promiscuity of some members of the gay community didn't help matters either. While there was enough blame to go around, the real heroes were a handful of careful physicians who noted some bizarre symptoms among their gay patients and brought this medical condition to the CDC and the world's attention. While this book presents an excellent history of the emergence of AIDS in both America and Africa, Garrett's information on AIDS is now unfortunately out-of-date.
The author presents more chapters on antibiotic-resistant TB, Legionnaire's Disease, the problem with overdosing farm animals with antibiotics and even Toxic Shock Syndrome. At one point, I bogged down with information overload. But during Garrett's chapters on hemorrhagic and other exotic fevers, this book is difficult to put down.
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 Fascinating and frightening ( ophiolite )
This book, when it came out, pointed out the coming problems in our medical system like antibiotic resistance, long before it became common knowledge. But it also suggests that as we continue to transform our environment, new plagues and diseases will continue to threaten our existence.
My only criticism of the book is that it was a difficult read, because it is very densely packed with information. This book requires patience to read, but it is well worth it.
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Extraordinary ( yellokat )
After finishing this book you will never read a newspaper the same way again. I am amazed, and a little scared, at how much of what Laurie Garrett wrote in 1995 has come to pass in 2007. Her story about the "disease cowboys" who track the causes of unexplained epidemics in the remote corners of the world is both absorbing and eye-opening. And it has helped me to see disturbing trends in current news stories that I would have missed had I not read The Coming Plague.
When it first appeared, I avoided this book because it seemed depressing and alarmist. In the years since I have had occasion to work on some international communications projects and in the process came to be interested in global public health. Once that happened, reading Garrett's book was essential. She is one of the most informed individuals writing on global public health in the US today.
Amazingly, although the material is sobering and sometimes truly scary, the book is not in the least depressing. It often reads like an adventure story. If you like detective puzzles, you'll be drawn into Garrett's tales of Ebola turning up in Reston, Virginia, and Marburg virus being unwittingly spread by do-gooder missionaries in the Congo.
Irony abounds. It turns out that much of the good we thought we were doing in the developing world was exactly the wrong thing. Garrett relates that many development projects and purported medical "advances" served to promote the evolution of drug resistant bacteria and viruses, while also raising wildly unrealistic expectations for the eradication of disease among the public and the medical establishment. The results are the return of diseases we thought were gone for good, such as TB and -- get this -- bubonic plague, and they are even harder to treat this time around because the microbes are resistent to many antibiotics and drug therapies.
Don't be daunted by the 700+ pages of this book. It is a great read and definitely worth the time you will invest in educating yourself about the the impact of human beings and our technological development on the ecology of microbial environments. I recommend The Coming Plague most highly.
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Addiction
