The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. - book reviews

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1995 by Wade Fox

The Coming Plague (Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance) Laurie Garrett. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994; 750 pp. ISBN 0-374-12646-1 $25 ($29.25 postpaid) from Putnam Publishing Group, Order Dept., PO Box 506, East Rutherford, NJ 07073; 800/788-6262

Not long ago, experts on infectious disease predicted that mankind would soon win its long bottle with microbes, eradicating disease-carrying bacteria and viruses from the earth. But this extensively researched book warms that AIDS is a wake-up call to many epidemics to come. In The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett shows how human factors, more often than not, have been responsible for the spread of new and dangerous diseases. Increased human population and mobility and human encroachment into formerly isolated ecosystems have created environments conducive to the quick spread of infectious diseases. The human destruction of ecosystems has caused imbalances that microbes have quickly filled, The improper use of antibiotics has induced mutant strains of viruses that are immune to our drugs.

Ebola in Zaire spread because poor hospitals reused syringes. DDT used to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes killed cats in Machupo, Bolivic, leading to an increase in the rodent population and the resulting spread of Bolivion hemorrhagic fever. Paw sewage dumped in India may have led to a cholera outbreak in Pero. Contamination of the blood supply helped spread the HIV virus.

This frightening book is important because it forces us to consider the interdependence of nations in our attempts to eradicate disease, and microecology and our effects on it, before it is too late.

* Ultimately, humanity will have to change its perspective on its place in Earth's ecology if the species hopes to stave off or survive the next plague. Rapid-globalization of human niches requires that human beings everywhere on the planet go beyond viewing their neighborhoods, provinces, countries or hemispheres as the sum total of their personal ecospheres. Microbes, and their vectors, recognize none of the artificial boundaries erected by human beings.

* The first cholera cases hit Lima hospitals on January 23; days later cholera broke out some 200 miles to the north in the port town of Chimbote.

As the El Nino water spread out along the Pacific coast of the continent, carrying with it bilged algae, cholera appeared in one Latin American port after another. Eleven months into the Western Hemisphere's pandemic, cholera had sickened at least 336,554 people, killing 3,538. Throughout those months the microbe's emergence was aided by obsolete or nonexistent public water purification systems, inadequate sewage, and airplane travel. Cases reported in the United States involved individuals who boarded flights from Latin America unaware that they were infected.