Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections

Description

As timely as it is urgent, this well-researched book from veteran science journalist Madeline Drexler delivers a compelling report on today s most ominous infectious disease threats. She focuses on a different danger in each chapter-from the looming risk of lethal influenza to in-depth information on the public health perils posed by bioterrorism. With a novelist s descriptive eye and a thriller writer s sense of tension, she warns us that the most ceaselessly creative bioterrorist is still Mother Nature, whose microbial operatives are all around us, ready to pounce when conditions are right.The world s worst bioterrorist isn t the murderer who put anthrax spores into mail in the fall of 2001; it s Mother Nature, writes Madeline Drexler in this survey of infectious diseases. They re all here, described in detail from historical, scientific, and public-health perspectives: AIDS, influenza, the West Nile virus, and so on. Secret Agents is a good primer on each. The best chapter--and the scariest--may be the last one, which covers bioterrorism of the human variety (i.e., not Mother Nature). "If bioterrorists released smallpox virus, it would ... become a global calamity within six weeks," she writes. That s not even the scariest possibility: "Researchers estimate that as little as one gram of aerosolized botox could kill more than 1.5 million people." And there are no easy preventive measures. "Of the 50 top bioweapon pathogens, only 13 have vaccines or treatments." Because of this, Drexler calls for a massive increase in public-health funding. Without that, our doctors and hospitals will be unprepared for a disaster they may be able to anticipate right now. --John Miller