Customer Reviews

Virus Ground Zero: Stalking the Killer Viruses with the Centers for Disease Control

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A well written book about the Center for Diseases Control( as it is now called) in Atlanta. Carefully documented history about the agency from its earliest beginnings including accounts of how it has handled many famous cases such as the Ebola outbreak in Reston. Sometimes boring with the internal goings on at CDC but the case histories a nd the search to find the Ebola virus in Africa are certainly worth reading.

Ed Regis is an inconsistant author. At some points of this book I would stay up all night enjoying the suspense, yet at other points of time I would fall asleep with the book in my hand. If you are a historian, if you work at the CDC, or love informative books, then you will love his mix of writing styles. But if you are cruising the library for suspense thrillers, I don't recommend it.

This is a great book if you are interested in information about the CDC, how it was founded, and how it works. In that area it is very specific. However, if you are looking for a disease thriller like The Hot Zone, I wouldn't recommend this book to you.

_Virus Ground Zero: Stalking the Killer Viruses with the Centers for Disease Control_ attempts to use the 1995 Kikwit Ebola epidemic as a case study for an examination of humanity's struggle with deadly viral and bacteriological pathogens. Ultimately, however, _Virus Ground Zero_ turns out to be a lightweight read bogged down by two agendas: act as a cheerleader for the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) specifically and science in general, and serve as a polemic against Laurie Garrett's _The Coming Plague_.

Despite the recent (November 2000) announcement of a possible break through in the development of an Ebola vaccine, Regis' `Rah! Rah!' routine for science and its ability to protect us, specifically against threats like Ebola, does not quite ring true. His attack on the near apocalyptic conclusions suggested by viral doomsayer's like Laurie Garrett, for example, is based more on the deconstruction of their semantics than convincing evidence.

Ed Regis brings impressive credentials to what the _Washington Post Book World_ calls "A readable-even fun-book." A philosophy professor and College Fellow at Western Maryland College, Regis has written and reviewed science books for years. One would think that such a background would have produced a more useful text than _Virus Ground Zero_.

It reaaly was poorlywritten and uninterestin