Seven Modern Plagues and How We are Causing Them, by the journalist, academic and veterinarian Mark Jerome Walters, is the updated version of his famous and well-regarded Six Modern Plagues and How We are Causing Them, published in 2004.
To the frightening list already present in the previous version, which includes Mad Cow Disease, HIV/AIDS, Salmonella DT104, Lyme Disease and West-Nile Virus, the author added the gruesome strands of Hantavirus (Ebola & Co.), whilst the original entry SARS is now included under “new kind of flu”, covering bird flu, swine flu and anything you can think of.
It is an interesting and well documented reading, with a clear thesis: whilst viruses and bacteria are not manmade, the rapidly changing interaction of men with natural habitats is producing new kind of diseases (that he calls ecodemics) or changing the nature of old ones. The results are under everybody’s eyes – the panic caused by SARS pandemic in 2003 is a recent memory, and a scary one.
You can learn more about the ecodemics he describes by listening to him in this video:
Like in its original version, Walter explores the origins of diseases through some enlightening cases and succeeds in making it a lively book, appealing to the non-specialists. If you have loved Richard Preston and his The Hot Zone, you can’t miss this one.
(Note: I received this book as an ARC from Island Press, through Netgalley.)