Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections

Rating:
Summary: Easy to read and interesting.
Review: After hearing Madeline Drexler speak at my university, I had to read this book. It is clear that Ms. Drexler has put forth a lot of effort toward producing a well-researched and well-written book. There are many quotes from professionals on the front lines of infection control, and there are many examples of normal people suffering from frightening and strange emerging infections.

Drexler's book offers a warning that we must focus on public health issues if we hope to avoid the tragedy that an agent such as a pandemic flu could cause. The book is filled with warnings about the overuse of antibiotics and the inefficiency of public health beauracracy and lack of funding. I hope that more professionals and lay people read this book and heed its message.

Rating:
Summary: Easy to read and interesting.
Review: After hearing Madeline Drexler speak at my university, I had to read this book. It is clear that Ms. Drexler has put forth a lot of effort toward producing a well-researched and well-written book. There are many quotes from professionals on the front lines of infection control, and there are many examples of normal people suffering from frightening and strange emerging infections.

Drexler's book offers a warning that we must focus on public health issues if we hope to avoid the tragedy that an agent such as a pandemic flu could cause. The book is filled with warnings about the overuse of antibiotics and the inefficiency of public health beauracracy and lack of funding. I hope that more professionals and lay people read this book and heed its message.

Rating:
Summary: A book everyone should read!
Review: In "Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections", Madeline Drexler describes the biologic threats we will face in the next couple of decades due to both our actions and the potential actions from bio-terrorists. She covers the spread of disease including examples such as the West Nile virus due largely to modern rapid transportation, bacterial infections that are virulent and resistant-or immune-to antibiotics caused largely by the overuse of antibiotics by the food industry and the medical profession, the increase in food contamination partially due to the increasing consolidation of food processing, the increasing rate for diseases in animals like birds, pigs and primates to make the leap to humans and the emerging picture that infectious diseases play a much larger role in cancer, mental health and other health problems than previously thought. She then sets these in perspective with the potential threats of bioterrorism.

The book is very readable. Each section usually starts with an often dramatic description of a real case. For the West Nile virus for instance, she related the detective story of how the West Nile Virus was identified as the cause of a recent rash of infections in New York and other parts of the US.

I recommend the book strongly to everyone. Everyone today needs to understand the issues that affect our health and the health of families.

Secret Agents is published by the Joseph Henry Press, a division of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences devoted to increasing public awareness of scientific issues that affect our lives. The implicit endorsement by the National Academy of Sciences establishes the scientific credibility of the author and the material in the book.

Rating:
Summary: Bugs at Work
Review: In "Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections," author Madeline Drexler takes us deep into the world of fast-moving microorganisms that can sicken people and end lives before doctors, hospitals or health agencies know what hit. Drexler shows "the bugs" at work in a well-chosen group of past and potential public health crises, including the West Nile virus's surprise hop across the Atlantic and the inevitable next influenza pandemic. With clarity and style, Drexler depicts in detail the characters in each drama: the amazingly adaptable bugs and the scientists and agency officials who must face them down. Meticulously researched, "Secret Agents" presents not only the scientific, but also the historic, political and economic contexts of approaching the seemingly intractable public health issues raised by the bugs. In the end, Drexler writes, such problems can only be addressed in a global context, in the interests of both rich and poor countries and the people who inhabit them. A fascinating read.

Rating:
Summary: The Menace of Everything
Review: Madeline Drexler's book is as frightening as she wants it to be. Secret Agents is a gripping, well-written fast read that should deeply frighten everyone on first glance. The subtitle is the menace of emerging infections but it could almost be changed to the menace of everything. There seems little escape from the possible scenarios she clearly presents (and this clarity is definately one of the book's strengths as she makes bio-science quite understandable for the layperson.) The chapter on the West Nile Virus that begins the book is particularly exciting and will the hook the reader immediately. If one pauses to look at the actual numbers, the book is somewhat less frightening as the numbers of deaths are always substantially below many of the doom-sayers' predictions, although she will repeatedly tell the reader this may not always be so. A fascinating book for our times.

Rating:
Summary: The Menace of Everything
Review: Madeline Drexler's book is as frightening as she wants it to be. Secret Agents is a gripping, well-written fast read that should deeply frighten everyone on first glance. The subtitle is the menace of emerging infections but it could almost be changed to the menace of everything. There seems little escape from the possible scenarios she clearly presents (and this clarity is definately one of the book's strengths as she makes bio-science quite understandable for the layperson.) The chapter on the West Nile Virus that begins the book is particularly exciting and will the hook the reader immediately. If one pauses to look at the actual numbers, the book is somewhat less frightening as the numbers of deaths are always substantially below many of the doom-sayers' predictions, although she will repeatedly tell the reader this may not always be so. A fascinating book for our times.

Rating:
Summary: A War Humans Are Losing
Review: The battle between humans and disease-causing microorganisms is not a fair fight. Bacteria, for instance, have been around for a billion or so years more than we have. They are intricately involved in every part of our outer world and our innards. No one has come close to listing all the microbes we carry around inside us even when we are healthy, but medical journalist Madeline Drexler, in _Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections_ (Joseph Henry Press) reports that we are "walking petri dishes" to keep our bacteria and viruses going. She begins her detailed and frightening book: "Infection is an inescapable part of life. All creatures feast on other creatures and in turn are feasted upon, in a kind of Escheresque food chain. When humans are the meal, we call it infectious disease." Infections have always been our lot, but there are, in the twenty-first century, new ways for them to be particularly worrisome, and Drexler's fine book ought to be required reading for citizens and public leaders the world over.

The examples Drexler gives of disasters and near-disasters are chilling. Microbes never had it so good. They profit, for example, by the way the world can now share its food supply, enabling bizarre accidents to happen. A vandal shoots up the water chlorination system of his Mexican village, and causes (via parsley) food poisoning in hundreds of Minnesotans. Alfalfa sprouts, beloved by vegetarians, are grown in heat and moisture just right for salmonella from the Netherlands. You no longer have to travel to get traveler's diarrhea; it will visit you at home, and maybe it will be fatal. Not only are microbes jetting around the world (and not just on food, of course, but also in infected humans), but they are simply outsmarting our ability to kill them. Microorganisms are beating our antibiotics by the simple mechanisms of evolution. More patients are dying from infections that were easily curable thirty years ago. The next world flu is overdue, and because of speed of modern travel and older populations, it will have advantages that no others have ever had. Legionnaire's disease, tuberculosis, West Nile virus, bubonic plague, AIDS, and more all get their pages here. Then there is bioterrorism. There is reason for a good deal of pessimism.

It would be wrong to assume that there is nothing but pessimism, though. Governments are going to have to have to stop putting their own citizens first and start thinking about doing the right thing for the world's humans. Drexler makes a clear case that the Bush administration's rejection of the Biological Weapons Convention (when all other nations had accepted it), because it threatened national security or the commercial secrets of the drug companies, encourages rogue states to work on their deadly brews. Bioterrorism aside, at least some nations and epidemiologists are recognizing that any nation's infection is the world's infection. Health authorities have, in the past, been able to spot unusual clusters of disease and intervene; nowadays, this is going to take swift identification of the germ (there are exciting new gadgets that might do this without the days required to culture the organism) and rapid communication about the threat. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is changing international health measures by pouring billions of dollars into the effort. It will take money in all nations; even the US federal, state, and local health departments (for instance) are underfunded and ill-equipped. It may be that the bioterror threat is going to do some good as we enter an age of increased threat from natural disease as well; boosted national systems that are keyed for man-made infection emergencies could help protect us as more powerful infections visit us from all over. Even if the terrorists stop bothering us, the microbes won't; we might take the heroic measures needed to protect the world, or we might continue the status quo.

Rating:
Summary: Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections
Review: This book rocks!! Not often do you find a book *actually* worth buying! If you liked "The Hot Zone" you will love "Secret Agents".

Rating:
Summary: Secret Agents: the menace of emerging infections
Review: This is a most compelling work, and the book of it's times. It has yet to receive the acclaim it is worthy of. 40 years ago Rachel Carson wrote a contrary work that changed the world. Now Drexler should bring us back. Others talk of guarding our boarders against aliens, but what they bring in are the "Secret Agents".
A great book that need more exposure.