The Future of Disease: Predictions [Paperback]

Matt Ridley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1999 | Series: Predictions

A series of predictions about diseases in the years to come.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Orion; 1st edition (February 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0297840657
• ISBN-13: 978-0297840657
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,295,660 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Matt Ridley's books have been shortlisted for six literary awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (for Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters). His most recent book, The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture, won the award for the best science book published in 2003 from the National Academies of Science. He has been a scientist, a journalist, and a national newspaper columnist, and is the chairman of the International Centre for Life, in Newcastle, England. Matt Ridley is also a visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Informative, balanced, June 28, 2000

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Future of Disease: Predictions (Paperback)

In this modest little book, Matt Ridley, the eloquent and incisive author of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (1993) not only predicts the future of human disease (it's not as bad as some would have us believe, but it's still scary) while focusing some light on the nature of pathogens and how they propagate. In the usual lively and insightful Ridley style, we learn how modern humans are more vulnerable than ever to aerosol diseases (spread through breathing, e.g., colds and flu) and sexually transmitted diseases, but less vulnerable to water spread diseases (dysentery, cholera, etc.) because of improved sanitation, or vector spread diseases (e.g., yellow fever, plague) because of vector control, drained swamps, and fewer people living under rat-invested thatched roofs. He also explores our vulnerability to newly mutated microbes and the propagation of disease in hospitals and other niches in the modern environment. He speculates on the next great plague and where it will come from and its nature. He talks about the AIDS epidemic and the Ebola scare and compares them to past scourges. He even mentions prion contagion.

Ridley is neither overly optimistic nor needlessly pessimistic. He warns on page four that "there is no end to the struggle with disease. Infection is never going to be entirely defeated." He adds that the human population is "too gigantic an ecological niche to be left vacant." On the up side he writes that "we are on the threshold of a new age of technology" that includes the promise of DNA vaccines and molecular-designed drugs to help us fight the parasites.