The Forgotten Plague : How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won - And Lost

Rating:
Summary: Terrifying and enlightening
Review: Tuberculosis killed one billion (yes, billion with a "b") in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alone. Ryan's masterful work describes the decades-long war against the terrifying disease - a conflict that continues even today. In a manner suitable for the layman and written at the pace of an action novel, he describes the staggering amount of work required to gain even the slightest advantage against the dreadful disease.

From his descriptions of tuberculosis itself ("...once established in the lungs, or the bowel, in the throat, in the kidneys, in the eye, or in the very marrow of the bones, [it] festered on and on, impervious to all efforts to cure it, seemingly indestructible. No antibiotic would ever kill such a germ, protected by its thick impenetrable waxy coat.") to his characterizations of the work of scientists such as Waksman, Schact, Lehmann, and Domagk - Ryan has created a work like no other.

Even these brilliant scientists, attacking the disease in every conceivable way, have only temprarily halted its advance against mankind. Its ability to mutate, resisting all known treatments -in combination with new diseases such as AIDS - have raised the terrifying spectre of a renewed disease capable of killing billions more. Nerve-wracking and enlightening, Ryan's work serves as a clarion call to renewed action against TB.