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Rating: 
Summary: Shocking! Informative! Powerful Book You Don't Want to Miss!
Review: I could not put this book down and found the information extremely valuable and frightening! Forget reading a Stephen King novel, pick up this book and you will be horrified at the number of killer viruses, bacteria, and even prions (the substance responsible for Mad Cow Disease.) The authors have done an excellent job of showing the path of the newest killer diseases! A prolific book on the subject of newly emerging diseases!
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing
Review: In this disturbing new book, authors Mark Fischetti and Dr. Elinor Levy look at the recent trends in the evolution of germs and demonstrate the threat that they represent to all of humanity. Beginning with the recent advent of SARS, the book examines a plethora of naturally occurring pathogens, and how they have changed since the post-World War 2 years, when antibiotics seemed to represent the ultimate victory of man over disease. Increasingly, doctors have found that familiar (and treatable) pathogens are returning in new forms that are more deadly than those seen before, and are increasingly immune to existing medical treatment.This is not a book for the complacent. In this book, the authors are sounding an alarm at recent trends, and are recommending quick action in the war between humans and germs. The book is crammed full of stories of the effects of the newer generations of diseases, and will shock and disturb anyone who doesn't take them seriously. But, the book is not primarily sensationalistic, but instead treats the topic as a serious subject that must be explained to the lay reader. Indeed, at times the authors are quite optimistic, informing the reader of new and developing fields of immunology that promise whole new fronts being opened up in the war against germs. So, if you are interested in the present trends in medicine and diseases, then I would highly recommend this book to you. Indeed, if you have heard tales of SARS and Mad Cow Disease, and want to know what's going on, then you must get this book!
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Summary: Lions, tigers and PRIONS, beware!
Review: This is not the sort of information that one should talk about at the next wedding reception; especially if there stands a food buffet complete with salad bar --- salad bars are the 'Typhoid Mary's' of our modern, super-infectious times.
Authors Elinor Levy and Mark Fischetti talk intelligently about 'super-spreaders."...No - not merely persons possessing big booties, but instead, people infected with nasty germs and viruses that pass it on to an inordinate number of unsuspecting saps. One day a person boards a bus, and by the next morning, they find themselves in isolation for treatment of SARS. Nurses and Doctors also become sickened by these 'superspreaders' and pretty soon, the World Health Organization declares an epidemic of one type of pneumonia that is tough to treat.
Well, the discussions about SARS,E Coli 0157, AIDS, Hepatitis C and over usage of antibiotics rage on throughout the 292 page labor of medical research.
Once again, the message to bring home is to WASH YOUR HANDS!
For God's sakes! Get up from this computer and knock those germie germs off su manos immediamente! Caramba!
On page 117 -- Chapter 4 -- Here come the PRIONS...oooh --- they're scary little non-living things...an entirely new class of pathogen that for years, scientists scoffed that they even existed. But PRIONS is what caused Mad Cow Disease in Britian, or the other fatal disease in humans referred to as Cueutzfeldt-Jakob disease. THe brain literally is eaten up by these cells that act wildly. Imagine a normal neuron is like a fold-up chair, and your brain is like a huge auditorium filled neatly with folding chairs lined up nice,orderly and neatly in rows. only Prions trigger your folding chairs to suddenly fold up wildly, like a metal folding chair that was hit by a car. Prions make your chairs mangled by their influence. Once the prions get a hold of your neurons, it passes on messages and in no time at all, your brain is a messed-up avalanche of a tangled mess of metal folding chairs, as if an 18 wheeler truck mistakenly drove through.
PRIONS our our newest microscopic foe, and doctors don't know how to kill them without also killing the victim.
The victim gets the prion infestation by eating infected meat, and for all we know, those cows in Britian had an outbreak and the heards were slaughtered in order to prevent them from infecting other cattle world-wide.
Sure hope it worked.
After scaring the bee-jezus outta the reader, the book finally winds down to what we can do about germ warfare, overuse of antibiotics and development of probiotics and other potential weapons against microbes that mutate and reconform their outer membranes to keep fooling man kind from killing them.
Hey - it's gonna be us or them.....somebody please pass the Ciprofloxacin!
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