DEADLY INVADERS

Grady, author of a number of New York Times articles on the topic, describes in personal, sometimes-heartrending detail her 2005 visit to Angola to cover the outbreak of Marburg fever there. Then she goes on to profile six more viral diseases that have jumped from animal to human victims: HIV and SARS, Avian Flu, Hantavirus, West Nile and Monkeypox. Rather than getting involved in technicalities, she goes for the human angle, recalling her own anxieties over visiting a country with 10 million land mines and cockroaches the size of hockey pucks. Moreover, she describes the makeshift conditions in a hospital isolation ward with one dying occupant, and admits her mixed feelings about attending a family’s funeral for a possibly infected child. Enhanced by news photos, side notes and a large list of citations to relevant Times articles, her accounts will be useful for assignments. They will also leave readers profoundly affected by not only the dangers of these often-unpredictable potential pandemics, but by the complex challenges facing medical professionals who fight to understand and contain them. (source notes, Internet resources, further reading) (Nonfiction. 11-13)