Infectious Disease Books - Page 2

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

Laurie Garrett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 68 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

More riveting than The Hot Zone 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

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history of the emergence of AIDS in both America and Africa, Garrett's information on AIDS is now unfortunately out-of-date.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.

Editorial Review:

As the global village becomes smaller, as destruction of the rainforests continues, and as bacteria increasingly develop resistance to overused antibiotics, the threat of new diseases, of which AIDS is potentially only the first, becomes ever greater. This book explores the world of new diseases - from AIDS to Toxic Shock Syndrome, Legionnaire's Disease, Ebola (the "Hot Zone" virus) and others - and the over-crowded world we have created that makes these diseases, and their spread, possible.

Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe

William Rosen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

`Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe' 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

It took me a while to get into the rhythm of Mr Rosen's writing, but once I did I couldn't put this book down. I was fascinated by the building of the Hagia Sophia, interested in the presentation of the life, times and achievements of the emperor Justinian during the 6th century and engrossed by the possible impact of the flea on the building of empires.

In this book, Mr Rosen provides a number of interpretations which can (and are) debated. People may argue about the role of Justinian, disagree about the relevance of the detail about the Hagia Sophia and prefer different theories about the birthplace of the bubonic plague. Some theories are contentious, and it is not always clear why certain aspects of the discussion are given a particular focus. However, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and for me the book was well worth reading. Mr Rosen provides plenty of notes for a reader who is seeking more information or who is trying to understand the conclusions Mr Rosen draws.

While it is both true and clever to state that: `Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence', I can understand why some readers find this book dissatisfying. The book is ambitious and may, as others have suggested, have benefitted from more ruthless editing. However, that depends on who Mr Rosen saw as his primary audience. This reader enjoyed the perambulations. If you are interested in this period of history, the life of Justinian, the growth and decline of empires and the relationship between man, rats, fleas and bacteria - you may wish to read this book.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Editorial Review:

The Emperor Justinian reunified Rome's fractured empire by defeating the Goths and Vandals who had separated Italy, Spain, and North Africa from imperial rule. At his capital in Constantinople, he built the world's most beautiful building, married its most powerful empress, and wrote its most enduring legal code, seemingly restoring Rome's fortunes for the next five hundred years. Then, in the summer of 542, he encountered a flea. The ensuing outbreak of bubonic plague killed five thousand people a day in Constantinople and nearly killed Justinian himself.

Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues

Paul Farmer

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor. This "peculiarly modern inequality" that permeates AIDS, TB, malaria, and typhoid in the modern world, and that feeds emerging (or re-emerging) infectious diseases such as Ebola and cholera, is laid bare in Farmer's harrowing stories of sickness and suffering.
Challenging the accepted methodologies of epidemiology and international health, he points out that most current explanatory strategies, from "cost-effectiveness" to patient "noncompliance," inevitably lead to blaming the victims. In reality, larger forces, global as well as local, determine why some people are sick and others are shielded from risk. Yet this moving account is far from a hopeless inventory of insoluble problems. Farmer writes of what can be done in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, by physicians determined to treat those in need. Infections and Inequalities weds meticulous scholarship with a passion for solutions--remedies for the plagues of the poor and the social maladies that have sustained them.

Medical Microbiology: with STUDENT CONSULT Online Access

Patrick R. Murray, Ken S. Rosenthal, Michael A. Pfaller

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Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The new edition of this popular text presents microbiology in a succinct, easy-to-use, and engaging manner. Clear discussions explain how microbes cause disease in humans, and review the updated vaccines and new antibiotics currently available to treat these diseases. Expert coverage of basic principles, the immune response, laboratory diagnosis, bacteriology, virology, mycology, and parasitology ensures that you'll understand all the facts vital to the practice of medicine today. A revised artwork program illustrates the appearance of disease, simplifying complex information, while text boxes and additional summary tables emphasize essential concepts and learning issues for more efficient exam review. Online access to Student Consult-where you'll find the complete contents of the book, fully searchable...Integration Links to bonus content in other Student Consult titles...updated features for both students and instructors...and much more-further enhances your study and exponentially boosts your reference power.

• Focuses on why the biologic properties of organisms are important to disease in humans, equipping you with a practical understanding of microbiology.
  
• Examines etiology, epidemiology, host defenses, identification, diagnosis, prevention, and control for each microbe in consistently organized chapters, enabling you to find the information you need fast.
  
• Features summary tables and text boxes that emphasize essential concepts and learning issues, enabling you to make your exam review more efficient.
  
• Correlates basic science with clinical practice through review questions at the end of each chapter to help you understand the clinical relevance of the organisms examined.
  
• Uses clinical cases from literature reports to illustrate the epidemiology, diagnosis, and treatment of infectious diseases.

• Features revised artwork-more than 635 brilliant images, nearly all in full color-that offers a more consistent and modern approach to the study of medical microbiology.
  
• Provides more clinical photographs throughout that help you better understand the clinical applications of microbiology.
  
• Offers expanded use of summary boxes for bacteria throughout all organism chapters to further enhance your review and learning.
  
• Includes enhanced Student Consult features including self-assessment questions, clinical cases, animations showing the actions of various important toxins, and a PowerPoint presentation with supplemental images of organisms and stains.

Your purchase entitles you to access the web site until the next edition is published, or until the current edition is no longer offered for sale by Elsevier, whichever occurs first. If the next edition is published less than one year after your purchase, you will be entitled to online access for one year from your date of purchase. Elsevier reserves the right to offer a suitable replacement product (such as a downloadable or CD-ROM-based electronic version) should access to the web site be discontinued.

Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World

Jessica Snyder Sachs

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Very Well-Written Science for the Average Reader 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I read the original 2007 hardcover. It is a gripping account of the relationship between bacteria and humans, from parasitic disease makers to necessary commensals. You will find in very clear and plain English much you need to know about the right balance of cleanliness, allergies and other autoimmune diseases, antibiotic treatment of livestock, resistance swapping of bacteria from the most different species and even cancer cure potentials via bacteria. (I do hope though, that this will not end in a I Am Legend (Widescreen Single-Disc Edition) scenario...)

This book by a freelance science writer is well-structured, starting with a shock introduction, giving a capturing ride on medical bacteria history, presenting the gloomy presence, then the potential solution on the horizon with various future perspectives. As some issues are pending till 2010, be sure to get the latest potential revision of this book.

Just two notes: By reading this book, one may get the impression that syphilis had been brought back to Europe via the "1492 discovery" of the Americas. This disease has been known well before in Europe, including evidence found in Pompeii. Also, if you hear or read about Florence Nightingale, please look up the original, but neglected Mary Seacole...

If you are interested in similar books, with little overlap, Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are is the most close addition. If you are interested in our symbiotic body roomies (commensals), largely restricted to bacteria and in a systematic text book presentation, read the rather dry Microbial Inhabitants of Humans: Their Ecology and Role in Health and Disease. About former parasites, today our energy source and DNA family tree provider, mitochondria, read Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. A more general biological approach of symbiosis is Liaisons of Life: From Hornworts to Hippos--How the Unassuming Microbe has Driven Evolution. A theoretic re-thinking, including reconstructing taxonomy and theories about gaia, read Symbiotic Planet: A New Look At Evolution. More, but not exclusively, on the yuk side is Parasite Rex : Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures with some disturbing pictures. An entire coffee-table book is Human Wildlife: The Life That Lives on Us, if you are not too squeamish...

Editorial Review:

Public sanitation and antibiotic drugs have brought about historic increases in the human life span; they have also unintentionally produced new health crises by disrupting the intimate, age-old balance between humans and the microorganisms that inhabit our bodies and our environment. As a result, antibiotic resistance now ranks among the gravest medical problems of modern times. Good Germs, Bad Germs tells the story of what went terribly wrong in our war on germs. It also offers a hopeful look into a future in which antibiotics will be designed and used more wisely, and beyond that to a day when we may replace antibacterial drugs and cleansers with bacterial ones.

The American Plague

Molly Caldwell Crosby

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Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this account, a journalist traces the course of yellow fever, stopping in 1878 Memphis to "vividly [evoke] the Faulkner-meets-'Dawn of the Dead' horrors,"*-and moving on to today's strain of the killer virus.

Over the course of history, yellow fever has paralyzed governments, halted commerce, quarantined cities, moved the U.S. capital, and altered the outcome of wars. During a single summer in Memphis alone, it cost more lives than the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, and the Johnstown flood combined.

In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country-and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism,"** it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (P.S.)

John Kelly

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 66 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Vivid, Brilliant, Alive 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The most extraordinary thing about John Kelly's book, The Great Mortality; an Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Times is how a book centered about Death can be so alive and vital. The multitude of compulsively readable, brilliantly written vignettes draw us into the lives of the people and we mourn their loss as we mourn those of people we know...my heart clenched when I read the concluding sentence of Agnolo of Turin's diary for 1348: "And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands" What makes it so hard to bear even after all these centuries, is some of his previous diary entries: "Some of the dead were...so ill covered that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city."

Vivid pictures fill all the senses and make even the cities and towns unforgettable. Swaggering Marseilles, "a medieval Big Easy" where the lower part of the town, inhabited by the whole panoply of lower class, middle-class, tradesmen and medieval town-dwellers, smelled like "a mermaid with loose bowels" contrasts vividly with the papal pomp and aristocratic artistic life of Petrarch's Avignon.

And here is Cheapside, London: "Imagine a shopping center where everyone shouts, no one washes, front teeth are uncommon, and the shopping music is provided by the slaughterhouse up the road, and you have Cheapside, the busiest, bawdiest, loudest patch of humanity in medieval England."

Books on the plague tend to be boring/horrific accounts of death in great numbers or scientific treatises on Y pestis; Kelly's well-researched book contains both the numbers and the science, but it, alone, of all the books I have read, makes the time itself live

Editorial Review:

La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death. The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that brilliantly illuminates humankind's darkest days when an old world ended and a new world was born.

Infectious Disease Epidemiology: Theory And Practice

Kenrad E., M.D. Nelson, Carolyn F. Masters, Ph.D. Williams

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An excellent, detailed overview for both experts and novices 5 out of 5 stars.
22 of 23 people found this review helpful.

This text is an excellent textbook for both infectious disease professionals and for students of infectious disease epidemiology. Nelson and colleagues cover a range of essential topics from a survey of important historical epidemics to study designs for infectious disease investigations. The first part of the text covers ID epidemiology background and methodology, whereas the second focuses on specific diseases as examples of different transmission modalities. TB, HIV and Influenza are among the pathogens discussed in great detail. Chapters are written by experts in their respective fields, making this textbook not only authoritative, but also up-to-date in scope and content. Many of the authors are affiliated with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health or the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. "Infectious Disease Epidemiology" is extremely readable, and serves as an excellent reference tool. I highly recommend it.

Editorial Review:

This comprehensive resource applies the fundamentals of epidemiology to the study of infectious diseases (ID). In the first section, readers will learn about basic epidemiologic methods for the study of ID plus be introduced to newer techniques like geographical information systems, mathematical modeling, and genetic laboratory tools. In the second section, the book covers major infectious diseases to illustrate both the range of techniques and issues vital to epidemiologists, and to highlight those diseases that have a major impact on health around the world. These include diseases of high mortality and morbidity such as malaria, HIV, STDs, diarrhea, and those with unique epidemiology such as parasitic diseases and Lyme disease.

The Yeast Connection Handbook

William G. Crook

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Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Necessary Handbook for the Yeast Sufferer! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I was lucky enough to find a physician to test me for Candidiasis after suffering from it for 15 years! However, he had no idea how to treat it so was open to my suggestions. I brought this book in with passages highlighted and he was willing to try the treatment exactly as outlined in your book! This was very recent so at this point in time, I am suffering from the initial die-off symptoms, but that gives me hope that it's actually working!

Editorial Review:

Most people don't realize how many health disorders can be caused by yeast. Fatigue, headache, depression, digestive problems, PMS, sexual dysfunction, asthma, ADHD, and autism can all be yeast-related. But once you recognize that yeast is the offender, what can you do to regain your health?

The Yeast Connection Handbook is a great resource for anyone who wants to learn about yeast-related problems. The book is comprehensive, not only discussing a wide range of health disorders, but also addressing a wide range of sufferers, including men, women, and children. Most important, this book provides a step-by-step program that effectively relieves health problems through dietary changes, nutritional supplements, medication, and simple lifestyle changes. If you've been looking for a solution to your yeast-related problem, The Yeast Connection Handbook provides the information you need to take charge of your health.

Plagues and Peoples

William H. McNeill

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Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact--political, demographic, ecological, and psychological--of disease on cultures. From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, the history of disease is the history of humankind. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, another chapter has been added to this chronicle of events, which William McNeill explores in his new introduction to this updated editon.

Thought-provoking, well-researched, and compulsively readable, Plagues and Peoples is that rare book that is as fascinating as it is scholarly, as intriguing as it is enlightening. "A brilliantly conceptualized and challenging achievement" (Kirkus Reviews), it is essential reading, offering a new perspective on human history.