The coming plague
This is an amazing book that Laura Garrett wrote back in the 90's. For anyone that has read the more popular book by Richard Preston "The Hot Zone" this is a must read. It is a much tighter more informative book. She takes us through the history of viruses in a journalistic/story approach. She breaks down the emergence of Ebola and the other emerging viruses and what it could mean in a brilliantly entertaining way. Each new disease/chapter starts with a journalistic story and ends with an educated informative narrative. With the Ebola outbreak going on now in Western Africa I had to come and revisit this classic. She warned us and nailed it. Unpurified drinking water, improper use of antibiotics, local warfare, massive refugee migration have contributed to changing social and environmental conditions around the world. These have fostered the spread of new and potentially devastating viruses and diseases: HIV, Lassa, Ebola, and others. The author takes the reader on a fifty-year journey through the world's battles with microbes and examines the worldwide conditions that have culminated in recurrent outbreaks of newly discovered diseases, epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas, and mutated old diseases that are no longer curable.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
32mentions
22people
2010–2026years
41% recommend56% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Footnotes make scientific work more accessible and enrich the conversation. In Laurie Garrett’s “The Coming Plague”, the footnotes alone are worth the price. Even in monographs, when reviewing literature in an area where I’m not a specialist, I find footnotes valuable.
- > The fact that most research participants and their families are unaware that they are part of a vaccine trial, leaves no room for justice or compensation.
What an absolute load of tripe.
Straight from disease surveillance being a bad thing (it isn't) to this drivel /eyeroll.
Disease surveillance helps stop potential pandemics before the cost of addressing them and the damage the can cause, including loss of life, reaches colossal proportions. Recommended reading: The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett.
I note how the conspiratorial assertion of Africans being used, in effect, as guinea pigs is entirely unsupported by any evidence whatever. Vaccine trials happen everywhere, not just in Africa, and no national healthcare system in Africa blindly accepts vaccines as if people were experimental animals.
Did you give informed consent yourself for the childhood vaccinations you received?
- I was tidying out some books the other day and I found an excellent book that I had read ~1995: "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garret:
https://www.lauriegarrett.com/the-coming-plague
I'm slowly re-reading it again and it is quite surreal - the first chapter describes a team from the US investigating a nasty disease in South America in the 1950s and literally one of the complaints their senior's have about the project is that it is "no worse than flu" when it was actually a highly dangerous disease.
The basic message of this book is: it's not if but when this happens.
- Right now I enjoy reading The Coming Plague https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan... Written 1995, but incredibly actual. Shows that most of epidemics are function of political will and economy and vice versa.
- "The Coming Plague" is a book from 1994 that gave him plenty of credit. I read it a long time ago, but definitely remember it talking about him. It focuses on "virus hunters" from the CDC/WHO that tracked down a lot of these emerging diseases in the field. I highly recommend it.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1995/08/ebola-africa-outbrea...
https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan...
- I think we do forget it. More specifically, we forget the responses to disease which work, and as a result have dismantled our ability to respond. I read Laurie Garret's book "The Coming Plague" where she described the many things which were done to control the spread of disease. None of those things exist anymore, and would take a lot of time to re-create. No consideration is given to them in a "profit oriented" society, where return on investment is more important than people's lives.
