I'm currently reading Douglas Preston's book The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story. Look for a review in The Tyee soon. But in the meantime, I recommend it if only for its remarkable description of leishmaniasis—which Preston and many other members of the expedition contracted, as well as members of the Honduran army who were providing security.
The first part of the book is what editors like to call "rollicking adventure"—exotic locales, unexplored wilderness, high tech, drug cartels, deadly snakes underfoot. It is indeed great fun, as long you're safely reading about them at home. And the expedition really did discover a major pre-Columbian civilization destroyed by Spanish diseases before the Spanish even set foot in Honduras. We fret about pandemics; the Americas suffered the real thing after 1492, with a likely loss of 95% of the pre-Columbian population.
The lost city was abandoned in the early 1500s, and evidently not revisited by humans until the expeditions that Preston describes. But its valley was full of sand flies that had been swapping leishmaniasis parasites for 500 years with various mammal hosts. When the archaeologists and their support staff arrived, the sand flies feasted on them—and a few months later, the victims were fighting for their lives.
Preston offers the most vivid account I've yet read about this disease. While he and his colleagues fought a New World strain of the disease, other strains have been killing humans and other species for a long, long time. As Preston observes, even the dinosaurs caught leishmaniasis.
