Deadly Feasts

There are now a number of books about prions, mad cows and the whole BSE/vCJD issue. One I would recommend is 'Deadly Feasts: the "prion" controversy and the public's health' by Richard Rhodes. It covers all the known prion diseases and tells the story of their discovery and investigation. Richard Rhodes is not a scientist but a journalist and historian (he won the Pulitzer prize for 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb') and I think this gives him a bit more perspective on the issue and an impressive ability to explain scientfific issues to the general public.

Infected: a novel

Yesterday I was in Borders looking at their buy one get one 1/2 off table and found this book: Infected: a novel. It looked kind of interesting so I read the back:

A mysterious disease is turning thousands of ordinary Americans into raving, paranoid, murderers who inflict brutal horros on strangers, their own families, and even themselves. And one morning, ex-football star Perry Dawsey awakens to find mysterious welts growing all over his body. Soon Perry finds himself acting and thinking strangely, hearing voices, fighting uncontrollable rage...he is infected. Worse, the disease wants something from him, something that could alter the fate of the human race.

Sounds like a kind of zombie book to me. So I read a couple chapters and ended up buying it. So far the writing isn't that great, but the premise of the book is really interesting. I'm wondering if it will bring up SIR models, how many individuals need to be vaccinated (if there is a vaccine) to protect the community, and issues about quarantines.

Book Review: The Demon in the Freezer

Several people have recommended books to me, all of which sound good and I hope to get to in time. Let's see, so far there':

• World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
• The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
• Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World by Jessica Snyder Sachs

Inspired by your literary enthusiasm I thought I'd add the occasional brief book recommendation of my own to the blog.

Richard Preston wrote a bestselling 'The Hot Zone' which consists of a gripping account of an outbreak of a strain of the Ebola virus among monkeys in a Virginia laboratory. He followed this up with a book of fiction 'The Cobra Event', that apparently scared then President Clinton into taking bioterrorism more seriously. A third book, The Demon in the Freezer, is a return to non-fiction and combines two stories in one, since real life events obviously took a turn for the unexpected during the books writing. Much of the book is concerned with the elimination, and then subsequent weaponisation, of smallpox. But this is interwoven with the story of the 2001 anthrax attacks in the US. As usual Preston is at his best explaining what scientists actually do.

In chapter 4 he describes the Soviet bioweapons program at the Biopreparat facility and how this came to the attention of the UK and the US in the late 1980's via a couple of high profile defectors. First Vladimir Pasechnik and later Ken Alibek. Ken Alibek is a whole other story.

In these days of gene splicing, genetic engineering and cloning it is easy to overlook the simple power of selection.The relevant bit here is the description of how the Soviet Union created antibiotic resistant strains of bubonic plague:

One of the principal weapons was genetically modified (GM) plague that was resistant to antibiotics. The Soviet microbiologists had created this GM plague with brute-force methods: they had taken natural plague and had exposed it again and again to powerful antibiotics, and in this way they forced the evolution of drug-resistant strains.

I like the way he gets a quote from Stephen King on the back of the jacket - 'One of the most horrifying things I've ever read in my whole life.' It's like the official stamp of scary.