A Field Guide to Germs: Revised and Updated

Front Cover
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Nov 14, 2012 - Science - 240 pages
From the ravages of the Ebola virus in Zaire to outbreaks of pneumonic plague in India and drug-resistant TB in New York City, contagious diseases are fighting back against once-unconquerable modern medicine. Public concern about infectious disease is on the rise as newspapers trumpet the arrivals of new germs and the reemergence of old ones.

In A Field Guide to Germs, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Wayne Biddle brings readers face to face with nearly one hundred of the best-known (in terms of prevalence, power, historical importance, or even literary interest) of the myriad pathogens that live in and around the human population. Along with physical descriptions of the organisms and the afflictions they cause, the author provides folklore, philosophy, history, and such illustrations as nineteenth century drawings of plague-induced panic, microscopic photographs of HIV and Ebola, and wartime posters warning servicemen against syphilis and gonorrhea.

From cholera to chlamydia, TB to HIV, bubonic plague to Lyme disease, rabies to Congo-Crimean encephalitis, anthrax to Zika fever, and back to good old rhinitis (the common cold), A Field Guide to Germs is both a handy reference work to better understand today's headlines and a fascinating look at the astonishing impact of micro-organisms on social and political history.
 

Contents

List of Illustrations XV
17
Borrelia burgdorferi Lyme disease
30
cholera Vibrio cholerae
41
coronaviruses
55
dysentery
63
EpsteinBarr virus
71
Helicobacter pylori
77
HIV human immunodeficiency virus
83
papillomaviruses
116
pneumococcus
124
rabies
130
Rocky Mountain spotted fever
136
Staphylococcus
150
syphilis Treponema pallidum
157
Trichinella
163
typhoid Salmonella typhi
170

influenza flu
90
Listeria monocytogenes
98
measles
103
mycobacteria
110
typhus
172
Zika fever
191
Acknowledgments
217
Copyright

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About the author (2012)

Wayne Biddle won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the “Star Wars” antimissile project. He is the author of six books, including A Field Guide to Germs, winner of the American Medical Writers Association’s Walter C. Alvarez Honor Award, and Dark Side of the Moon, which was selected as a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

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