Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them [Hardcover]

Mark Jerome Walters (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 155963992X | ISBN-13: 978-1559639927 | Publication Date: September 10, 2003 | Edition: 1

"In a clear, engaging style, Dr. Walters tells the tale of each disease like a detective story. He allows each mystery to unfold as it did in reality, often slowly, through the lives of the plants and animals involved, the first human victims, the government officials who tried to respond, and the scientists who ultimately explained what was happening." -NEW YORK TIMES

"...a fascinating work of ecological journalism, utterly convincing in its argument: that our health and the health of the environment are intimately linked, and we overlook that link at our peril." -MICHAEL POLLAN, AUTHOR OF SECOND NATURE AND THE BOTANY OF DESIRE

"Mark Jerome Walters weaves a fine thread of human disturbances through the quilt work of modern pandemics. After being drawn engagingly into the explosive symptoms of global environmental change, readers will come to understand that we have no choice but to make peace with nature." -PAUL R. EPSTEIN, M.D., M.P.H., CENTER FOR HEALTH AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL

West Nile Virus -- Mad Cow Disease -- HIV/AIDS -- Hantavirus -- Lyme Disease ... and a new strain of Salmonella. Such modern epidemics have emerged over the past few decades as mysterious, yet significant risks to human health. These "plagues" are forcing us to modify our lifestyles in ways that minimize our chances of becoming a statistic in the latest tally of the afflicted.

In Six Modern Plagues, Mark Jerome Walters offers us the first book for the general reader that connects these emerging health risks and their ecological origins. Drawing on new research, interviews, and his own investigations, Mark Jerome Walters weaves together a compelling argument: that changes humans have made to the environment, from warming the climate to clearing the forests, have contributed to, if not caused a rising tide of diseases that are afflicting humans and many other species.

According to Mark Jerome Walters, humans are not always innocent bystanders to infectious disease. To the contrary, in the case of many modern epidemics, we are the instigators. Six Modern Plagues, a ground-breaking introduction to the connection between disease and environmental degradation should be read by all those interested in their health and the health of others.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The SARS outbreak earlier this year was a classic illustration of how disease can spread around the world via intercontinental travelers and how diseases can jump from animals to humans. Walters, a veterinarian and Harvard Medical School visiting lecturer, describes how human actions affecting the environment and the animals that live in it have exacerbated the spread of six diseases that have jumped in similar fashion to our species from their original hosts, creating serious new threats to public health. He begins with perhaps the most frightening one of all, mad cow disease, which attacks victims' brains. Many scientists believe the biological agent that causes the disease spread from scrapie-infected sheep to cows when sheep by-products were put in high-protein livestock feed. A virulent new strain of salmonella, DT104, has been created in part through the food industry's feeding antibiotics to chickens and livestock. Walters also explains that as hunters and laborers in central Africa continue to eat bush meat, new diseases will almost surely emerge from out of the jungles, as HIV did. The author also looks at hantavirus, its outbreaks thus far restricted to parts of the Southwest; Lyme disease, spread by deer ticks that live on and are spread by mice; and the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, which made its way to America from the eastern Mediterranean a few years ago. Walters presents a compelling case that the "deep ecological, demographic, and industrial roots" of these diseases must be considered if we are to minimize the danger of future emerging diseases.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American

In the late 1960s the U.S. surgeon general declared that Americans could "close the book on infectious diseases." In 1999 the World Health Organization reported that "diseases that seemed to be subdued ... are fighting back with renewed ferocity." And then there are the new or transformed diseases that have made headlines in recent years. Walters, a veterinarian and journalist, focuses on six of them: mad cow disease, AIDS, salmonella DT 104, Lyme disease, hantavirus and West Nile virus. In an epilogue, he briefly describes the latest headline maker, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). "The larger story," he writes, "is not simply that humans and other animals are falling victim to new diseases; it is that we are causing or exacerbating many of them, not least of all through the radical changes we have made to the natural environment."

Editors of Scientific American

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: Island Press; 1 edition (September 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155963992X
• ISBN-13: 978-1559639927
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #205,943 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Jerome Walters is a veterinarian, a journalist, and a professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. He is the author of five books. His writing has been favorably reviewed in the New York Times, Nature, The New York Review of Books, and numerous other scholarly and popular publications. Dr. Walters speaks frequently on the subject of science and communication. He received his bachelor's degree in English literature from McGill University, his master's in journalism from Columbia University, and his doctorate in veterinary medicine from Tufts University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quick introduction into recent headline plagues., March 25, 2004

By 

Allan M. Gathercoal "fdoamerica" (Norcross, GA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them (Hardcover)

An engaging primer on six emerging diseases that have tormented the world recently: (1) Mad Cow Disease, (2) HIV/AIDS, (3) Salmonella DT104, (4) Lyme Disease, (5) Nile Virus, and (6) SARS. Walters' premise is that we have radically changed the environment and thus we are reaping the results of our own actions via plagues. Trained as a veterinarian, Walters sees all of the above plagues as the interactions between animals and our disruption of the environment. He states, "Intensive modern agriculture, clear-cutting of forests, global climate changes, decimation of many predators that once kept disease-carrying smaller animals in check, and other environmental changes have all contributed to the increase [of epidemics]." He also mentions how the increase of global travel has contributed to the spread diseases (i.e. SARS and HIV/AIDS).

The book is a short, (156 pages) quick read, and best suited for those outside of the medical community who want to know more about any, or all, of these plagues. If you have a good grasp of epidemiology, and are well-read, you will probably find the subject matter remedial. Also, Walters' treatment of the six plagues is uneven. His last chapter on SARS is a quick gloss over and disappointing in comparison to his more captivating treatment of the preceding five plagues. Recommended 3.5 stars.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars scary, compelling, fascinating!, October 8, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them (Hardcover)

I sped through this book on a plane ride. It is a quick read, but well researched and wonderfully written. It is so scary how the way we treat the environment actually comes back to us...and effects our health! The chapter on mad cow disease is particularly disturbing. The author's hopefullness is reassuring though; he believes that we can slow the tide of infection, by protecting and restoring our "ecological wholeness."

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An eloquent warning, January 23, 2004

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them (Hardcover)

"What threads we silently break; what voices we still. By what grace, I wondered, have we been kept so well by what we have abused for so long." (p. 95)

This expression by science writer and journalism professor Mark Jerome Walters was inspired by a walk in an old growth forest, and is in reference to the planet's ecology. It is indicative of his reflective and eloquent style.

It was thought not so many years ago that we had infectious diseases nearly under control and it would be only a matter of (short) time before they were eliminated as important causes of human morbidity. How naive such a pronouncement seems today!

The six modern "plagues" that Walters writes about are mad cow disease, HIV/AIDS, antibiotic-resistant salmonella, Lyme disease, the four-corners hantavirus, and West Nile virus. There is an Epilogue in which he discusses SARS and mentions avian flu, which is making headline news today as I write this. Walters's argument in each of these cases is that these diseases have come to prominence because of something we humans have done.

In the case of mad cow disease we have been mixing remnants from slaughtered cows and sheep in with their feed, including brain and nervous tissue parts that contain the prions responsible for the disease.

In the case of HIV/AIDS we have been clearing forests in the African jungles, and to feed the loggers have increased the traffic in bushmeat resulting in a commingling of humans and wild simians providing an opportunity for the virus to jump from apes to people.

In the case of Salmonella typhimurium DT104, it is our feeding antibiotics to farm animals that has allowed the antibiotic-resistant strain to develop.

Lyme disease, Walters argues is the result of our encroachment on forests that have been depleted of their natural variety of species with the result that the mice and deer that harbor the ticks that are the vectors for Lyme disease appear in unnaturally disproportionate numbers especially following seasons of acorn abundance.

A similar overabundance of mice in the Southwestern part of the US following El Nino years of heavy rains leads to more mice eating more pine nuts resulting in more human deaths from the hantavirus carried by the mice.

In the case of West Nile virus, it is the international traffic in birds that has allowed the virus, native to the Nile River in Egypt to get on planes and come to the US and other places in the world where indigenous mosquitos bite the birds and then bite native species and humans. Or, it is the mosquitos themselves who catch the planes and travel anywhere in the world, their cache of virus stowed inside their bodies.

Walters writes eloquently of these diseases and the tragedies they are causing. His purpose is to increase public knowledge about what we are doing to the environment and how that disturbance is wrecking havoc with the long establish ecosystems, and--like a tornado among forest litter--is causing pathogens that normally would not come into contact with humans, to literally fly into the air and be presented at our doorsteps.

Walters does not include drug-resistant tuberculosis (although he mentions it), which is even more of a threat to human health than some of the diseases above, but if he had, the story would have been similar. In a world in which a person or a pathogen can get on a plane and be just about anywhere else in the world in a matter of hours is a world in which infectious disease can spread and trade genetic material as if by design. We are the designers of this morbid mix, nurturing exponentially increased chances for pathogens to mutate into ever more deadly strains while foolishly wasting our antibiotics in support of profit margins for poultry and meat conglomerates.

Walters recalls the first waves of epidemic disease that visited humankind beginning with the agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago, and then how the trade between the new civilizations ushered in a new wave of epidemics about 2,500 years ago, followed by the horrific spread of disease during the age of exploration following the Columbian voyages. He now sees us "entering a fourth phase of epidemics, spawned by an unprecedented scale of ecological and social change." (p. 9)

Because Walters writes so well, and because he is such a passionate spokesperson for the fact that we are part of the planet's ecology and not above its logic, and because the next "ecodemic" is just around the corner, this is an important book that deserves a large readership. Sooner or later, a new strain of a virus or other pathogen is going to attack humans with a virulence to equal or exceed that of any plague of the past. We may have no defense until the disease has run its course, and so it is prevention that we must depend on.

Bottom line: eloquently-written and as timely as the evening news.