THE COMING PLAGUE: NEWLY EMERGING DISEASES IN A WORLD OUT OF BALANCE
About the author
Laurie Garrett is a health and science writer for Newsday and New York Newsday. A contributing author to AIDS in the World, edited by Jonathan Mann, she was formerly a science correspondent for National Public Radio and has written for The Washington Post Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Omni, among many other publications. Garrett researched The Coming Plague as a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. Unpurified drinking water, improper use of antibiotics, local warfare, massive refugee migration, changing social and environmental conditions around the world have fostered the spread of new and potentially devastating viruses and diseases – HIV, Lassa, Ebola, and others. In The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, published in 1994, Laurie Garrett takes you on a fifty-year journey through the world’s battles with microbes and examines the worldwide conditions that have culminated in recurrent outbreaks of newly discovered diseases, epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas, and mutated old diseases that are no longer curable. She argues that it is not too late to take action to prevent the further onslaught of viruses and microbes, and offers possible solutions for a healthier future.
“Like her role model Rachel Carson, whose 1962 Silent Spring woke up society to environmental poisoning, Garrett aims to dispel social and political complacency about the threat of old, new, and yet-unknown microbial catastrophes in a global economy that links Bujumbura, Bangkok, and Boston more closely than almost anyone appreciates.”
Richard A. Knox, The Boston Globe
Preface by Jonathan M. Mann, Harvard AIDS Institute
We always want to believe that history happened only to ‘them’, ‘in the past,’ and that somehow we are outside history, rather than enmeshed within it. Many aspects of history are unanticipated and unforeseen, predictable only in retrospect: the fall of the Berlin Wall is a single recent example. Yet in one vital area, the emergence and spread of new infectious diseases, we can already predict the future – and it is threatening and dangerous to us all.
The history of our time will be marked by recurrent eruptions
The history of our time will be marked by recurrent eruptions of newly discovered diseases (most recently, hantavirus in the American West); epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas (for example, cholera in Latin America); diseases which become important through human technologies (as certain menstrual tampons favored shock syndrome and water cooling towers provided an opportunity for Legionnaires’ Disease); and diseases which spring from insects and animals to humans, through man-made disruptions in local habitats. What is new, however, is the increased potential that at least some of these diseases will generate large-scale, even worldwide epidemics. AIDS does not stand alone; it may well be just the first of the modern, large-scale epidemics of infectious disease.
A person harboring a life-threatening microbe can easily board a jet plane
The world has rapidly become much more vulnerable to the eruption and, most critically, to the widespread and even global spread of both new and old infectious diseases. This new and heightened vulnerability is not mysterious. The dramatic increases in worldwide movement of people, goods, and ideas is the driving force behind the globalization of diseases. A person harboring a life-threatening microbe can easily board a jet plane and be on another continent when the symptoms of illness strike.
A worldwide ‘early warning system’ is needed
AIDS is trying to teach us a lesson that a health problem in any part of the world can rapidly become a health threat to many or all. A worldwide ‘early warning system’ is needed to detect quickly the eruption of new diseases or the unusual spread of old diseases. Without such a system, operating at a truly global level, we are essentially defenseless, relying on good luck to protect us. Laurie Garrett has spelled it out clearly for us. Now we ignore it at our peril.