An informative guide to what the authors call “the pandemic in plain sight,” urgent without undue alarmism.
A doctor and his former patient explore what they posit is the pathogen-spread rise of autoimmune illnesses, with millions of victims.
Diseases such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia are not single illnesses as such but instead clusters of symptoms with many points in common. Because their etiology is hard to pin down, many sufferers are often dismissed with the simple notation that the illness is psychosomatic. Yet, writes Phillips, “maybe you were referred to a psychiatrist or prescribed an antidepressant by your general practitioner.” For various reasons, he and Parish write, pathogens are on the rise and ever more ubiquitous as a result of climate change; these pathogens include viruses, parasites such as protozoa, and bacteria. By 2050, they project, 12% of the U.S. population will be affected by a kind of “Lyme+” disease, costing billions annually in medical expenses and lost productivity. The list of vector-borne ailments is long, and too often our understanding of them is incomplete. The authors write, for instance, that bartonellosis is not strictly a tick-borne disease but can be transmitted by fleas, lice, and even ants. Apart from the fact that a spirochete is involved, everything else about Lyme is “bitterly debated,” with no agreed-upon treatment regimen. What’s worse, the range of illnesses that may be hidden by Lyme-like symptoms can include cancer, hepatitis, and tuberculosis. Phillips and Parish suggest a range of treatments, from anxiety-reducing exercises to herbal remedies such as oregano oil, cinnamon bark, and cumin seeds that have been shown to have “strong killing activity against ‘persister’ forms of the Lyme bacterium”—though none of those proposed treatments is definitive.
An informative guide to what the authors call “the pandemic in plain sight,” urgent without undue alarmism.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-06471-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
A penetrating look at the bitter controversy between animal rights activists and research scientists over the use of monkeys and chimpanzees in medical research. Given their proven intelligence, asks the author, can a chimp or monkey ``comprehend that it is being used by another species? It is not a question everyone wants to see answered.'' Blum, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Sacramento Bee articles that led to this book, acknowledges that in tracing the history of primate research- -and she discusses several horrendous abuses—any accounting ``must include the knowledge gained, the human lives saved.'' But some researchers who recognize the animals' suffering and strive for more humane handling, such as Roger Fouts at Central Washington University, find themselves ostracized and refused government funding. Fouts, renowned for his sign language work with the chimp Washoe, has battled the National Institutes of Health for years, finally filing suit to challenge its way of regulating experimental animal facilities. His 1986 visit, along with famed chimpanzee specialist Jane Goodall, to a notorious Maryland laboratory conducting AIDS research brought enough negative publicity to force some changes in the way the animals are caged. Other researchers, like Tom Gordon, director at Yerkes Field Station (a ``monkey farm'' in Georgia), fault both animal activists ``for making the monkeys too human'' and scientists for treating them as mere mechanical objects. Primates' humanlike physiology (a chimp's DNA is 98.5% identical to a human's) renders them perhaps indispensable in AIDS research and other crucial medical experiments. But, as Blum shows, it is their humanlike nature and their intelligence that give rise to important questions about ethics and respect for life. As a solution, Blum has nothing better to offer than a vague suggestion for ``education programs'' aimed at reaching a ``troubled'' middle ground. But she brings the issues into sharp, disturbing focus.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-509412-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
A rare treat: cutting-edge science combined with a perceptive portrait of the people who perform it. Dressler (Astronomy/Carnegie Institution) was one of a team that set out to perform a survey of elliptical galaxies and ended by revising a fundamental axiom of modern cosmology. The ``Seven Samurai,'' as they became known on the release of their results, combined expertise in observation and theory, bringing an unusual level of astronomical talent to their task. Dressler gives brief biographies of himself and the other team members and devotes considerable space to detailing their personal interactions over the course of the project, providing an unusually candid look at not only what scientists really do, but how they feel about it and about each other. As the data from their survey accumulated, the team's initial goal of discovering clues to the absolute magnitude of distant galaxies began to fade as they realized that a large number of galaxies were traveling at unexpectedly high velocities—1,000 km per hour or more—that could only be explained by the attraction of a huge mass. Equally important, this discovery forced a reconsideration of the assumption that the velocities of distant galaxies are almost entirely due to the expansion of the universe and directly related to their distances from Earth. The implications of the discovery, and its theoretical underpinnings, take up much of the last part of the book, a generally clear overview of current thinking on the origins of the universe. A readable and engaging glimpse behind the facade of contemporary science; Dressler does for astronomy what James D. Watson's The Double Helix did for molecular biology. (31 photos, illustrations, charts, and graphs) (Library of Science and Astronomy Book Club main selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-394-58899-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
