Book Review: the New Killer Diseases -- Elinor Levy and Mark Fischetti

The New Killer Diseases: How the Alarming Evolution of Mutant Germs Threatens Us All -- Elinor Levy and Mark Fischetti (Crown Publishing Group, 2003)

Wanna read something scary? Wanna read something really scary? Try The New Killer Diseases on for scariness. It scared the hell out of me, like no horror novel or movie has ever done (but then my suspension of disbelief isn't very suspended when it comes to hack-and-slash killers or runaway flesh-eating zombies). No, this book scares because of its reality and its immediacy.

The authors, Elinor Levy and Mark Fischetti, have compiled a book of modern horrors that become even more horrible in the fact that they are unseen dangers, their presence known only after they have wrought their varying types of destruction. The book explores the virtual explosion of mutant viruses and bacteria throughout the world with the added emphasis that this is only the beginning trickle of the upcoming flood.

The book is cautionary, citing case studies of people who have died of some of these new mutant diseases. One is of a young English woman who died of Mad Cow Disease. Another chronicles a Tennessee woman's death by what is commonly referred to as "flesh-eating bacteria." Still another examines the tragic death of a three-year-old from E. Coli. In addition to the various stories, the authors caution the reading public about annual influenza concerns, the increasingly resistant strains of bacteria due to overuse of antibacterial soaps and cleaners, killer viruses mutating and becoming resistant to antibiotics, such as the resurfacing of old diseases long thought "extinct," like tuberculosis.

The authors end the book with suggestions on how the public and medical facilities and government agencies can begin to fight back against these unseen but extremely deadly pathogens. It isn't too late, they warn, but something must be done immediately to avert worldwide outbreaks of incurable or highly resistant diseases. A lot more research and development of curing and preventive medicines needs be done also - done before a pandemic hits the world like the Black Plague during the Middle Ages or the Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1917-18.

Or a pathogen mutates into something so deadly it wipes out the entire human race.