Microbe: Are We Ready For The Next Plague?

From an evolutionary point of view, homo sapiens sapiens is becoming increasingly vulnerable to the intelligence that lies within growth. You watch your own child (or self, for that matter)learn, adapt, reach out beyond your boundaries, comprehend, and find your way through thousands of obstacles and lessons everyday. Why would the microscopic world be different? Michael Bellomo looks through a microscope to discribe for us the various dramas that are unfolding during the lifetimes of the germs that he choosees to speak of. See, your child has 18 years to grow up (28 in the case of my brother...); however, a microbe can grow, mutate, and adapt to your bodily defenses within years given the right conditions. Scarier than Freddie or Jason. So what can we do? The authors here leave us with the most up-to-date information that they have available in order to get us started in thinking of our world as vulnerable. It's not to scare you into inaction; rather, it asks you to question what part we can play in creating a balance with our natural world, or else it will create a balance that favours itself. And the more educated we are, the more we will be able to protect our children, our selves, and our communities. "Microbe" is a good place to start.

Alan Zelicoff and Michael Bellomo have written an excellent book, one that should be easily understood by laymen, on microbes and their effect on our world. The information includes, but is not limited to, information on smallpox to avian influenza and anthrax and the importance of surveillance tracking of unusual disease occurances in the world (but most specifically the United States). I did not find the book sensationalist at all. The chapters were broken up logically, building upon the ones before it so that at the end of the book you understood the science of epidemiology, as well as the obstacles that MUST be overcome prior to the next pandemic. Personally, the most surprising and informative section to me was on Mad Cow Disease, which explored the discovery of the role that prions have in the disease - and the contamination that is so difficult to eradicate. Imagine this - an autoclave cannot sterilize a scalpel used on a Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease patient! It was absolutely chilling. I urge that you, as well as (most emphatically) every Public Health Official, school nurse, physician, veterinarian, pharmacist (essentially ALL health workers), read this book.

Are we ready for the next plague? It could come through variants of West Nile, SARS, or other modern diseases - or it could come from nowhere; and the U.S. public health system is vastly under-equipped to respond to a major plague. That's the message of Microbe: Are We Ready For The Next Plague? A physician/physicist and lawyer combine talents to expose conditions conducive to major biological crises, from gaps in communication and information chains to lack of containment plans. Promising models for networks and vaccines are also analyzed. A gripping assessment of the world's ability to withstand a major plague.

Microbe is a fascenating book that discusses the ways a disasterous disease outbreak could occur both as a result of human actions (such as terrorism) as well as from the many natural ways that diseases (often new diseases) end up infecting humans (as well as the disasterous effects of a public panic that could occur from real or imagined bio-terror attacks). The emphasis in the book is on the value of early detection that "something strange is going on", and on the important role doctors, nurses, and vets all play in disease monitoring (many diseases start as animal diseases before infecting humans). Sadly, the current public health situation results in very poor early detection of potentially serious diseases, and poor communication between all the different people involved in public health - problems that are easily rectified in the internet age. The authors provide a couple of realistic scenarios that could occur, and discuss what would happen under the present public health monitoring situation, and how things could be radically different with simple improvements in disease monitoring. The authors also provide a lot of interesting information on the different diseases, the wide variety of treatment tactics (often there is no treatment - you just have to prevent it from spreading), how vaccines are made, and a discription of some of the serious outbreaks that have occured over the last 30 or so years. This book is a highly recomended wake up call to get america to improve its public health infrastructure.

Microbe gives you a chilling journey which explores *multiple* stories; SARS, Hantavirus, West Nile...The chapter on the Soviet bioweapons program breeding even more lethal kinds of smallpox is worth the price of the book alone. This was'nt a dry science book but something with a strong story that propels the reader through each chapter. If you like The Hot Zone you'll like this as it's a surprisingly easy read.