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A review by getlostmatilda
The End of Plagues: The Global Battle Against Infectious Disease by John Rhodes
5.0
5 stars
This book provides a wonderful account of the fields of microbiology, virology, immunology and public health. It is highly readable and I believe it could be understood by people with any level of background in science. Having studied microbiology at the undergraduate level, I still found myself engaged and intrigued by interesting facts that I hadn't learned in my course. Often, we do not learn about the history and background of famous scientists, only their concepts and contribution to the field, so that was a lovely touch to this book.
A slight pitfall was the layout of the book. It would have made a stronger read if it was set out in either chronological order, or by splitting up the chapters so they focused on a single disease, microbe/virus, discovery, etc. at a time. I think this improved towards the end of the book, but early on, the chronology jumped around a lot between chapters. If you aren't hyper-focused and miss the change in time period, it makes it easy to get lost.
It would have also been valuable if the author focused more on the reasons that smallpox was able to be eradicated by vaccination and contrasted these against current diseases. For example, smallpox only infects humans, so you don't need to vaccinate other animals as they are not potential reservoirs. In contrast, rabies virus can infect a large range of animals (domestic and wild), making it almost impossible to vaccinate and eradicate the natural reservoirs.
It's a very relevant read at the moment with the development of vaccines against the novel coronavirus!
This book provides a wonderful account of the fields of microbiology, virology, immunology and public health. It is highly readable and I believe it could be understood by people with any level of background in science. Having studied microbiology at the undergraduate level, I still found myself engaged and intrigued by interesting facts that I hadn't learned in my course. Often, we do not learn about the history and background of famous scientists, only their concepts and contribution to the field, so that was a lovely touch to this book.
A slight pitfall was the layout of the book. It would have made a stronger read if it was set out in either chronological order, or by splitting up the chapters so they focused on a single disease, microbe/virus, discovery, etc. at a time. I think this improved towards the end of the book, but early on, the chronology jumped around a lot between chapters. If you aren't hyper-focused and miss the change in time period, it makes it easy to get lost.
It would have also been valuable if the author focused more on the reasons that smallpox was able to be eradicated by vaccination and contrasted these against current diseases. For example, smallpox only infects humans, so you don't need to vaccinate other animals as they are not potential reservoirs. In contrast, rabies virus can infect a large range of animals (domestic and wild), making it almost impossible to vaccinate and eradicate the natural reservoirs.
It's a very relevant read at the moment with the development of vaccines against the novel coronavirus!