Customer Reviews

The Lassa Ward: One Man's Fight Against One of the World's Deadliest Diseases

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This book was absolutely wonderful. I have read many medical narratives and many books on infectious disease and global health. I read this book in a day and could not put it down. It is exciting and interesting. I highly recommend anyone interested in tropical medicine/infectious disease/global health care to read this book.

From page one, The Lassa Ward was a compelling story that I couldn't put down. It was so captivating! A well written and thought provoking memoir, I couldn't stop thinking about the various people that Dr. Donaldson met, long after I finished reading. I wish there was a sequel to find out what happened with everyone. I highly recommend this book!

This book is thoughtful and thought provoking. It lingers with you long after you finish it. I learned a lot of valuable information about war, Africa and disease.

This book is a compelling narrative of one doctor's eyewitness account of Lassa fever in Sierra Leone. At times I found it horrific and unbelievable that the government of Sierra Leone would allow a US medical student to be accountable to an entire ward of sick patients infected with the Lassa virus.

I enjoyed this as a good quick read. Not as detailed about the medical story as I prefer, but on it's own terms, it's a very interesting story about treating a difficult disease in a remote clinic with very few resources.

This book is filled with great emotion. I found this book very moving and a definite must read.
Even if you aren't a physician, this is a book everyone should read. // Rick Bowles, D.O.

Lassa fever, though not well known, combines the worst of many plagues. It has a high mortality rate: among those hospitalized, at least one in six die. As with Ebola, death comes from massive, horrific hemorrhaging out of every body orifice, something that Preston called "meltdown" in The Hot Zone, unless bleeding into the lungs suffocates the victim first. Only discovered in 1969, the disease is not well known outside its endemic areas, some of the poorest and most war-ravaged in all of Africa. And, in a twist that seems almost vicious, Lassa is most deadly to pregnant mothers and especially to their unborn and newborn.

Donaldson, as a medical student, volunteered to study Lassa and its treatment. He traveled to Sierra Leone to see for himself just how this disease affects the individuals and economies of the affected areas. That begins the book's real story. A virus is a mindless, barely-living particle; real drama lies in Lassa's consequences for its victims and for those brave doctors, nurses, and families who stand on the front lines of its treatment.

In the United States, Lassa virus is studied only in a few national labs, the kind with the highest technological level of containment and safety precautions. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, clinics operate with ordinary gloves and masks, knowing that a false move or finger-stick is a death sentence. The Lassa ward, a bush hospital, operates without modern equipment, training, or drugs. What medicines exist are often bought by the doctors out of their own pockets, on the black market - and are often drugs that had been stolen from that same clinic in the first place. Crushing poverty not only starves the population until their weakened systems can no longer resist infection, it saps the bodily reserves that might have carried a patient through Lassa's crisis. Gunfire, though rarely heard, is never far from the Lassa ward, and one of its greatest benefactors turns out to be a smuggler who deals in `blood diamonds.'

For me, that carries this book's profoundest lesson: in the face of true poverty, morality becomes both a luxury and the only hope. It's a luxury when dollars, no matter where they come from, can save the life of the child in your arms. It's a necessity when some unshakable bedrock of bravery and faith holds a doctor or nurse in one of the deadliest spots on earth, the ward where all other hospitals dump the patients too terrifying to treat.

We have pestilence of our own hanging over our heads, at the time of this writing: the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus. The final form it takes can not be known yet, despite dire predictions in the least trustworthy press. Two things seem certain, however. First, improvised quarantines, like college gyms converted to flu wards, will be used to help slow the contagion. Second, conditions in those wards will, somewhere, be called "third world." That hyperbolic description is ignorant at best, and possibly evil. At minimum, it insults the training, technology, resources, and social structure that wealthy countries can mobilize in the face of a fast-moving public health hazard. At worst, the epithet willfully denies the truly desperate conditions under which the Lassa ward and others like it operate. It somehow equates the crushing poverty of undeveloped nations with inadequate WiFi in an improvised ward, or chronic starvation with substandard catering.

I don't mean to minimize H1N1's threat. Despite a mortality rate below 1%, it seems sure to kill more people than Lassa does this year, because of the absolute numbers of people involved. Instead, I hope readers come away from this book with a sense of proportion, that not all plagues represent the same threat to individuals and societies. If we ring every alarm bell at the first mention of something like H1N1, we desensitize ourselves to real threats of greater magnitude. Lassa, Ebola, and HIV are just a few of the viruses released as people encroach on lands that had not previously been settled. We can expect more, and quite possibly worse ones in the future. Ideally, we will learn from the wide spread of H1N1 and from improbable success of the Lassa ward. I hope we can combine those lessons so that, if and when some truly dire plague breaks out, we can face that disease with first-world resources and the third-world bravery that Donaldson so clearly describes.

-- wiredweird, reviewing a complimentary copy

"The Lassa Ward" is the best humanitarian aid/medical book available. Donaldson tells a fascinating story of his work in Sierra Leone and his time spent treating Lassa Fever as a medical student. This book transports you from the comfort of your living room to a small west African country where Donaldson struggles run a Lassa Fever ward for a summer by himself, without the support of a licensed physician and with his limited knowledge and unlimited courage.

Unlike other similar memoirs, this one is very well-written.

I've seen the author several times on national television news and heard him on NPR. Very well spoken and intelligent, Donaldson continues his work in humanitarian aid. I hope he is writing a second novel as I loved this one.

Why isn't this on the best sellers list yet? Highly recommended!

I read a chapter a night before going to bed and it reminded me of watching the made for TV miniseries (Roots, Shogun) that I watched every night for weeks in my youth. At the end of the story I felt as though I knew Ross. The book reads less like a journal and more like a novel, and beautifully so. I LOVED it!