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Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45.2 (2002) 300-302



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Book Review

New Challenges to Health:
The Threat of Virus Infection


New Challenges to Health: The Threat of Virus Infection. Edited by Geoffrey L. Smith, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 347. $125.

Ambivalence is the reaction of most policy makers and of the public at large when faced with yet another threat to health. The media are eager to report the results of the latest epidemiologic or laboratory discovery, but the press coverage can be superficial, indiscriminate, and even contradictory. As a consequence, people have become desensitized, reacting to the latest threat with a shrug. Suddenly, when the threat is realized or become personal, people then respond with panic.

Scientists share the blame for our inability to discern news that has immediate implications for health policies.Trained to caution, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature we unveil findings with painstaking precision, always footnoting with caveats. When communicating with the public, however, it is difficult to summarize succinctly the entirety of an issue and to not exaggerate the importance of our own parochial research results.

This book falls into a third forum of scientific literature, a symposium, in which a topic is highlighted with a modicum of depth and a minimum of fanfare. When well organized and well presented, as in this book, the several contributions can be weighed, compared, and contrasted with others. No one expects a newspaper reporter, member of Congress, or even Congressional researchers to be experts in topics like emerging infectious diseases. Publications like this provide a synopsis of current data for consideration as we work toward [End Page 300] defining and recognizing threats to human health and in developing prevention and treatment strategies.

This volume is the published proceedings of the 60th Symposium of the Society for General Microbiology, which was held in March 2001 at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The organizers assembled an impressive group of eminent researchers for state-of-the-art mini-reviews on 15 topics related to current or potential threats to health from viral (and prion) infections. Overall, the chapters are succinct, well written, well illustrated, well edited, and remarkably current, with many citations from 1998 to 2000. It fills a niche as a technical primer, when a quick overview rather than an exhaustive review of a particular infectious agent is needed.

Major themes in many of the chapters are the causes and consequences of viral epidemics and evolution, whether due to adaptation of the virus to the host species or vice versa, ecologic pressures on intermediate species or insect vectors, or pharmacologic pressure on the virus itself. As an epidemiologist, I especially liked the in initial chapter, in which C. J. Peters provides a historical and global view of pressures for and consequences of viral evolution. The second chapter, by Bryan T. Grenfell, elegantly summarizes the field of mathematical modeling of infectious epidemics. Remarkably, Dr. Grenfell's chapter is quite comprehensible for those of us who never really understood calculus. It achieves this through excellent illustrations and by adhering to basic concepts, such as the birth rate and the basic reproduction ratio (the number of people infected by an infectious individual).

B. J. Richardson's "tale of three invasions" should be read by anyone concerned with the threat of viral epidemics. It is the well-mapped and well-documented story of the massive 19th-century dissemination of hoards of European rabbits across Australia, followed by the 20th-century disseminations of two highly infectious viruses, myxovirus and rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus (a calcivirus). In each of the three cases, the efficiency of reproduction and modes of dissemination were so poorly understood that containment was ineffectual. Considering that the two viruses were being evaluated as biological weapons to reduce and ultimately control the rabbit population, recapitulating these outbreaks is certain to attract attention when the topic of biological warfare comes up at your next cocktail party.

The remaining chapters are of three types: current problems (human immunodeficiency virus [HIV], hepatitis viruses, morbilliviruses [measles...

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