Federal Bodysnatchers and the New Guinea Virus: Tales of Parasites, People, and Politics

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Desowitz manages to make the basic principles of his subject immediately comprehensible to the general reader.


Los Angeles Times, Robert Lee Hotz, 20 April 2003
[Desowitz is] a knowledgeable and irascible veteran of the world's public health wars.


Booklist
[Desowitz's] stories...rank among the best current examples of medical detective prose.


New York Review of Books
Charmingly wry.


Book Description
Twenty years ago the world slept, confident that biomedical science would protect it from devastating plagues. Our wake-up call sounded at the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. Then came more unfamiliar pathogens in its wake, such as the West Nile virus. Meanwhile, the neglected diseases of the third world, including malaria and African sleeping sickness, festered—their victims salvageable only by unaffordable, patent-protected drugs. Robert S. Desowitz traces the histories of these diseases and the issues we must confront—the morality and legality of patent laws, the effect of global warming on epidemics, public support for the commercial biochemical industry, the growing dissociation of clinicians and public health professionals, and the terrifying shadow of bioterrorism.


About the Author
Robert S. Desowitz, a leading epidemiologist, is the author of New Guinea Tape Worms and Jewish Grandmothers and The Malaria Capers, among other books. He lives in Pinehurst, North Carolina.


Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices

About the Author:: Robert S. Desowitz, a leading epidemiologist, is the author of New Guinea Tape Worms and Jewish Grandmothers and The Malaria Capers, among other books. He lives in Pinehurst, North Carolina.


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices