Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections
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| Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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So you think modern medicine has the whole virus game figured out? Think again. And it’s not even a question of “if” we’ll be hit by some new and deadly diseaseâ??it’s “when.”
The war on germs is being fought on many frontsâ??from the skirmishes with disease-carrying mosquitoes that cross oceans hidden away in airline wheel wells to the high-profile battle against terrorists wielding deadly bioweapons. Today’s bold headlines would have us believe that the biggest threat comes from bioterrorism. But don’t underestimate Mother Nature, perhaps the most savage bioterrorist of all. Assisted by the increasing ease with which peopleâ??and the germs they carryâ??move across international borders, she’s an effective force to be reckoned with, a key player on this battlefield. As author Madeline Drexler makes clear, we’d do best not to ignore her. Human beings and the pathogens that attack them are crossing paths more and more frequently, particularly as modern life grows increasingly complex. Whatever the infectious agent may be, whether it’s pandemic flu, foodborne illness, a debilitating disease carried far and wide by biting insects, or some new microbial horror we have yet to detect, keen surveillance and rapid response are really the only weapons in our arsenal. Secret Agents looks at today’s new and emerging infectionsâ??those that have increased in attack rate or geographic range, or threaten to do soâ??and tells the stories of scientists racing to catch up with invisible adversaries superior in both speed and guile. Each chapter focuses on a different threat: foodborne pathogens, antibiotic resistance, animals and insectborne diseases, pandemic influenza, infectious causes of chronic disease, and bioterrorism, including the latest information on the public health threats posed by anthrax and diseases such as smallpox. Based in part on material collected from the Forum on Emerging Infections hosted by the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., Secret Agents is ultimately as engaging as it is disturbing. Drexler’s thorough survey of the field of infectious disease, supplemented by extensive interviews with today’s top researchers, yields a compelling portrait of a world engaged in a clandestine war. Emerging infections are among the many secret ties that bind the world into an organic whole. We know that infectious disease is an inescapable part of life, but we need to begin thinking globally and acting locally if we are to avoid the menace of a catastrophic outbreak of some new plague. Secret Agents sounds a clear and compelling call to take up arms against the organic predators among us. |
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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
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| 06-09-08 | 3 | 2\4 |
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I enjoyed this book -- it gives a good overview of many of the viruses facing us, and the issues with our underfunded and ignored health system. I particularly found the chapters on viruses as the root cause of many chronic illnesses to be interesting, and the chapter on West Nile in New York was particularly interesting.
I found The Coming Plague to be more gripping, and Virus X to connect more emotionally, so I have to say I prefer those books to this one. At points this book seems a bit too much like a survey (which of course it is), and I found myself wanting to have either more scientific depth or more character depth. (Review Data Last Updated: 2009-11-12 06:59:56 EST)
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| 07-08-05 | 5 | 3\3 |
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As a neophyte in the understanding of bacteria and infectious desease I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Knowing how fine a line we walk in our symbiotic relationship with bacteria is as frightening as it is fascinating. I belive this book should be required reading in schools.
(Review Data Last Updated: 2006-01-17 10:06:00 EST)
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| 04-21-05 | 3 | 2\4 |
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When reading this expose I had to remember that Ms. Drexler is a medical reporter researcher, and as such there are areas of her research that may not have been done in depth...otherwise the book is easy reading... The author has much to say regarding new and emerging viruses and bacteria and their ability to penetrate the animal-human barrier. Doctors and researchers are baffled in their attempts to locate the culprits which were in some examples birds spreading germs that jumped to humans. The flaw was Ms Drexler's misses the mark on the origins of the aids virus, choosing instead the old dry tail of the natives ate the green monkey story - ergo, they got the virus. This did not take much work!!! As current evidence shows the problem runs much deeper.
(Review Data Last Updated: 2006-01-17 10:06:00 EST)
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| 03-12-03 | 4 | 6\6 |
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Madeline Drexler's book is as frightening as she wants it to be. Secret Agents is a gripping, well-written fast read that should deeply frighten everyone on first glance. The subtitle is the menace of emerging infections but it could almost be changed to the menace of everything. There seems little escape from the possible scenarios she clearly presents (and this clarity is definately one of the book's strengths as she makes bio-science quite understandable for the layperson.) The chapter on the West Nile Virus that begins the book is particularly exciting and will the hook the reader immediately. If one pauses to look at the actual numbers, the book is somewhat less frightening as the numbers of deaths are always substantially below many of the doom-sayers' predictions, although she will repeatedly tell the reader this may not always be so. A fascinating book for our times.
(Review Data Last Updated: 2006-01-17 10:06:00 EST)
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| 01-02-03 | 4 | 4\4 |
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In "Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections", Madeline Drexler describes the biologic threats we will face in the next couple of decades due to both our actions and the potential actions from bio-terrorists. She covers the spread of disease including examples such as the West Nile virus due largely to modern rapid transportation, bacterial infections that are virulent and resistant-or immune-to antibiotics caused largely by the overuse of antibiotics by the food industry and the medical profession, the increase in food contamination partially due to the increasing consolidation of food processing, the increasing rate for diseases in animals like birds, pigs and primates to make the leap to humans and the emerging picture that infectious diseases play a much larger role in cancer, mental health and other health problems than previously thought. She then sets these in perspective with the potential threats of bioterrorism.
The book is very readable. Each section usually starts with an often dramatic description of a real case. For the West Nile virus for instance, she related the detective story of how the West Nile Virus was identified as the cause of a recent rash of infections in New York and other parts of the US. I recommend the book strongly to everyone. Everyone today needs to understand the issues that affect our health and the health of families. Secret Agents is published by the Joseph Henry Press, a division of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences devoted to increasing public awareness of scientific issues that affect our lives. The implicit endorsement by the National Academy of Sciences establishes the scientific credibility of the author and the material in the book. (Review Data Last Updated: 2006-01-17 10:06:00 EST)
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| 05-24-02 | 5 | 13\15 |
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The battle between humans and disease-causing microorganisms is not a fair fight. Bacteria, for instance, have been around for a billion or so years more than we have. They are intricately involved in every part of our outer world and our innards. No one has come close to listing all the microbes we carry around inside us even when we are healthy, but medical journalist Madeline Drexler, in _Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections_ (Joseph Henry Press) reports that we are "walking petri dishes" to keep our bacteria and viruses going. She begins her detailed and frightening book: "Infection is an inescapable part of life. All creatures feast on other creatures and in turn are feasted upon, in a kind of Escheresque food chain. When humans are the meal, we call it infectious disease." Infections have always been our lot, but there are, in the twenty-first century, new ways for them to be particularly worrisome, and Drexler's fine book ought to be required reading for citizens and public leaders the world over.
The examples Drexler gives of disasters and near-disasters are chilling. Microbes never had it so good. They profit, for example, by the way the world can now share its food supply, enabling bizarre accidents to happen. A vandal shoots up the water chlorination system of his Mexican village, and causes (via parsley) food poisoning in hundreds of Minnesotans. Alfalfa sprouts, beloved by vegetarians, are grown in heat and moisture just right for salmonella from the Netherlands. You no longer have to travel to get traveler's diarrhea; it will visit you at home, and maybe it will be fatal. Not only are microbes jetting around the world (and not just on food, of course, but also in infected humans), but they are simply outsmarting our ability to kill them. Microorganisms are beating our antibiotics by the simple mechanisms of evolution. More patients are dying from infections that were easily curable thirty years ago. The next world flu is overdue, and because of speed of modern travel and older populations, it will have advantages that no others have ever had. Legionnaire's disease, tuberculosis, West Nile virus, bubonic plague, AIDS, and more all get their pages here. Then there is bioterrorism. There is reason for a good deal of pessimism. It would be wrong to assume that there is nothing but pessimism, though. Governments are going to have to have to stop putting their own citizens first and start thinking about doing the right thing for the world's humans. Drexler makes a clear case that the Bush administration's rejection of the Biological Weapons Convention (when all other nations had accepted it), because it threatened national security or the commercial secrets of the drug companies, encourages rogue states to work on their deadly brews. Bioterrorism aside, at least some nations and epidemiologists are recognizing that any nation's infection is the world's infection. Health authorities have, in the past, been able to spot unusual clusters of disease and intervene; nowadays, this is going to take swift identification of the germ (there are exciting new gadgets that might do this without the days required to culture the organism) and rapid communication about the threat. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is changing international health measures by pouring billions of dollars into the effort. It will take money in all nations; even the US federal, state, and local health departments (for instance) are underfunded and ill-equipped. It may be that the bioterror threat is going to do some good as we enter an age of increased threat from natural disease as well; boosted national systems that are keyed for man-made infection emergencies could help protect us as more powerful infections visit us from all over. Even if the terrorists stop bothering us, the microbes won't; we might take the heroic measures needed to protect the world, or we might continue the status quo. (Review Data Last Updated: 2006-01-17 10:06:00 EST)
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