Customer Reviews

The Future of Disease: Predictions

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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.