Ponder.. How *does* Donald Burke know so much, (FOIA the McWeenie)
Kathleen
Cook the primordial soup.
'Global Warming, pollution, increased hydrocarbons and all
interactions, together, is the product of ENTROPY, and how
we are creating them is simply EMTROPY. "Organic Chemistry
is the Study of Carbon Compounds, Biochemistry is the Study
of Carbon Compounds that Crawl" is the best way of saying it.
Really little is due to BioGoofUps RESULTS, Instead the
BioGoofUps Engineering EFFORT in the first place, is the
"cause".
But the Japanese found that out already, in the 1930's
in Manchuria (Unit 731). We never learn because we have
paranoid-psychos making decisions, who *LEFT* SA...@Navy.Medical.gov,
and later went to McSw...@NIH.ALDF.SMITHKLINE.HMO.duh
Now how much did McSweegan cost us. Hmmm. That can't
be too hard to figure out. Did everyone FOIA all his data
yet?
====================================================
Book Review
Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them
By Mark Jerome Walters
Washington, DC:Island Press, 2003. 206 pp. ISBN: 1-55963-992-X, $22
cloth.
Epidemics are regular fare on the nightly news. First AIDS, then Lyme
disease, mad cow disease, West Nile, and most recently SARS have
rightfully captured widespread public attention, albeit usually
through 15-second sound bite reporting. In Six Modern Plagues, Mark
Jerome Walters writes about these and other new epidemic disease
emergences and attempts to uncover underlying common themes. His main
thesis, lest it be missed, is the subtitle of the book: And How We Are
Causing Them. He argues that the origins of all these epidemics can be
traced back to changes that humans have wrought in the natural
environment. This is an important topic, and Walters writes in a
clear, nontechnical style that should be easily accessible to the
general reading public.
image credit: Arnold Greenwell/EHP
All six of the very brief chapters--vignettes, actually--although very
short, are well done. The first four full chapters are especially
readable. In these, the author has traveled to the site of the
epidemic outbreak and interviewed in person the common folk who were
there at the beginning. For example, the musings of West Sussex farmer
Peter Stent on his first encounter with mad cow, "Spooky behavior for
these kindly animals," adds a welcome human dimension to early days of
mad cow disease. Likewise, the personal tale of Burlington, Vermont,
farmer Cynthia Hawley's near fatal infection with the
antibiotic-resistant DT104 Salmonella strain is riveting, and her
bitter grumbling during convalescence that the word "'farm' is
becoming a misnomer. It's pretty much an industry now" trenchantly
illustrates how she was swept up in macroeconomic events beyond her
control. It is in this in-person "reportage" style that Walters is at
his best.
While this book should appeal to popular audiences, from a scientific
perspective it is nonetheless solid. The factual material is usually
correct, but there are some minor misstatements: Mad cow was not
"first isolated in ... 1986" (p. 15); simian immunodeficiency viruses
were not "known for some time" before the late 1980s (p. 53); and an
infected arriving human could not have been the origin of the West
Nile epidemic in Queens, New York (p. 141). But these are minor
inaccuracies in otherwise solid scientific stories. Walters' single
foray into theory, in the introduction, on how our microbial pathogens
are "r-selected" but we humans are "K-selected," seems
well-intentioned but distracting from his main thesis that ecologic
disturbances lead to epidemics.
The important question is, of course, does the author provide adequate
support for his main thesis that human disturbances of the environment
are responsible for these newly emerged epidemics? Or are these just a
collection of pretty "just-so" stories? Faced with bona fide threats
from genetically modified microbes and synthetic viruses, and the
spectrum of epidemics from biowarfare, bioterrorism, and biobungling
(accidental pathogen creation and/or escape), how important is
ecologic disturbance in the generation of new threats?
A tall order, to be sure, but my own assessment is that--through no
fault of his own--Walters fails to tie the knot in each story. The
exact actual mechanisms of how microbes move from natural reservoirs
into humans is simply not known for most of the examples he relates.
Although it makes good sense that viruses in chimpanzees may have been
important in the genesis of the AIDS pandemic, the linkage to
bush-meat hunting is still speculative. Or in the case of antibiotic
resistant Salmonella, yes, plasmids may been spawned in fish farms in
Thailand, but the case is hardly ironclad. Although I am inclined to
believe these mechanisms of epidemic emergence may be true, as a
scientist I think the evidence falls short of the indictment in the
subtitle "and how we are causing them."
At 156 pages of text and a size of 5 8 inches, this is a tiny--too
tiny--book, and therefore at a list price of $22 it is no bargain.
Indeed, it is a shame that both the physical length and intellectual
depth of the book are not greater.
Donald S. Burke
Donald S. Burke, M.D., is professor of international health and
epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in
Baltimore, Maryland.
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Ian Lewis, eds.
New York:Oxford University Press, 2003. 464 pp. ISBN:
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London:Taylor & Francis, 2004. 512 pp. ISBN: 0-7484-0918-1, $110
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New York:Marcel Dekker, 2003. 700 pp. ISBN: 0-8247-0991-8, $195
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[Table of Contents]
Last Updated: December 18, 2003