Title : Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching
Author : Michael Greger
Publisher: Lantern Books,
Pages : 465
Price : $30
ISBN : 10: 1590560981
Dr. Michael Greger’s Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching is more terrifying than a horror novel or anything that ever could be imagined, since it prophesied a real-life doomsday scenario that seemed to him to occur very soon. As per him, the new H5N1 strain of influenza, known as “bird flu,” has mutated into a form that can be transmitted by human contact, though not yet on a massive scale, meaning a mass outbreak is more a question of when, not if.
Whereas humans generally contract the disease by ingesting contaminated birds or being in frequent contact with them, bird flu could blanket the globe when the virus learns to jump from human to human. Dr. Greger sets the stage for what could come by giving readers a grisly account of a previous avian influenza outbreak: the 1918 flu pandemic, in which 50 to 100 million humans perished. These were gruesome deaths, with blood oozing from eye sockets as the victim’s lungs liquefied.
Fatalities were so abundant that officials were unable to keep up with burying the corpses. It seems this was merely a sample of what’s in store for humanity. As devastating as the 1918 pandemic was, on average the mortality rate was less than five percent. The H5N1 strain of bird flu virus now spreading like a plague across the world currently kills about 50 percent of its known human victims, on par with some strains of Ebola, making it potentially ten times as deadly as the worst plague in human history.
George W. Bush’s decision in April of 2006 to lift the ban on poultry products from China, a country well known for its recent outbreaks of avian influenza, possibly in return for China’s agreement to drop its mad cow disease-related ban on U.S. beef imports. Other troubling highlights include the world’s inadequate hospital capacity and the inability to create a vaccine, or enough of it, to combat a virus that kills half its victims. In other words, we are as ill-prepared for avian flu today as we were in 1918.
Bird Flu is exceptionally well documented, with more than 3,000 references and input from the most respected names in the fields of communicable diseases and virus research. With so many insights from health experts, food industry representatives and medical journals, this is an excellent resource for animal advocates looking to cite the latest data. Moreover, in an effort to make this book as accessible as possible, Lantern Books has even posted the entire manuscript online at www.birdflubook.org
Review Courtesy: http://www.satyamag.com
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