This paper is an overview of Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, a study of the recent emergence of viruses, bacteria, and diseases and the responses they invoked in the international health community. Her account details the detective work required in recognizing and dealing with life-threatening diseases. She also shows clearly the effects of international politics, economics, psychology, and other factors significant to attempts to understand and contain health crises. Repeatedly, her stories chronicle scientific ignorance and scientific arrogance, as modern medicine's confidence in its ability to eventually conquer disease begins to falter in the face of poverty, insufficient resources, and the remarkable ability of microbes to adapt to new obstacles. She demonstrates the complexity of international health issues and outlines some of the issues world health groups must address in order to deal more effectively with new diseases.
By the 1950s and 1960s, doctors dealing with international medicine had begun to believe that the days of worldwide health crises were numbered. Between the discovery and implementation of antibiotics and the international increase in awareness of the importance of sanitary procedures, modern medicine appeared to be winning the battle against most of the major scourges that had once threatened populations. Malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, yellow fever, polio - diseases that had once meant death were starting to become memories.
However, small setbacks were already beginning to chip away at this supreme confidence. Strange, virulent fevers caused a few dozen or a few hundred deaths in isolated parts of the world. Resurgences of old killers flared up long after doctors thought they had been eliminated. Some of the new miracle drugs started to be less effective. A few doctors began to get concerned.
By the time a new and...