Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health

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Oxford University Press, 2003 - Health & Fitness - 477 pages
This text takes readers around the world to reveal how a series of potential and present public health catastrophies mark the death of public health and taken together form a terrifying portrait of real global disaster in the making. Public health is a bond between a government and its people and if either side betrays that trust the system is likely to collapse like a house of cards. Garrett illustrates how this trust has frayed and our global public health system has been systematically destroyed. With globalization, no person is safe from anti-biotic resistant superbugs, epidemics or biowar. Garrett takes us to India, where an outbreak of bubonic plague created international hysteria and to Zaire, where the deadly Ebola virus broke out in a filthy and completely unequipped hospital.
 

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Contents

Filth and decay Pneumonic plague hits India and the world ill responds
13
Landalanda An Ebola virus epidemic in Zaire proves public health is imperilled by corruption
45
Bourgeois physiology The collapse of all semblances of public health in the former Soviet Socialist Republics
111
Preferring anarchy and class disparity The American public health infrastructure in an age of antigovernmentalism
245
Biowar Threatening biological terrorism and public health
328
Epilogue The changing face of public health and future global prophylaxis
388
Notes
426
Index
451
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About the author (2003)

Laurie Garrett, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has been a health and science writer for Newsday magazine since 1988, and a frequent contributor to such publications as The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. Her book The Coming Plague (1994) was named one of the best books of 1994 by The New York Times Book review. Garrett lives in New York City and can be reached via her web site: www.lauriegarrett.com

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