For some reason we're supposed to abstain from reading books until we're on holiday and basting ourselves with sunscreen on some sweltering beach. Then we're supposed to lug some great doorstop of a best-seller with us and try to read it in the glare.
The mere idea is enough to fill me with horror. But if you do find yourself with time on your hands this summer, I suggest you stay in the shade in a comfortable chair, with a cooler full of good craft beer close at hand, and catch up on some really good books about diseases and the politics of public health. Here are the books I've read and reviewed for The Tyee in the last couple of years:
It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis. OK, it's not strictly diseases and public health, but you will be amazed to find that an 82-year-old political novel can give you the shivers on the hottest day of the year. How Lewis could foresee Donald Trump, over ten years before Trump was even born, is a mystery.
Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, From Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, by Sonia Shah. As I said in my review, "This is the best single book I have yet read about the disease threats we all face in the 21st century."
Cleaning Up: How Hospital Outsourcing Is Hurting Workers and Endangering Patients, by Dan Zuberi. Talk about the politics of public health! To save a few taxpayer bucks, the British Columbia government put those same taxpayers at risk by running hospitals on the cheap—thereby sabotaging infection control and exposing patients to MRSA, C. diff, and a host of other ills. Our government isn't notably different from other provinces, or from the US.
Deadly River: Cholera and Cover-Up in Post-Earthquake Haiti, by Ralph R. Frerichs. This is a genuine, page-turning medical thriller about Dr. Renaud Piarroux, who confirmed the source of the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti, and the denial he faced from PAHO and the CDC. To spare the UN and the US government from political embarrassment, cholera raged on—an utterly avoidable disaster. A copy should be placed on the desk of every health bureaucrat in PAHO, the CDC, ECDC, and WHO, with a quiet suggestion that they commit the entire book to memory because it will be on the final exam.
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg. In Isenberg's view, the British regarded North America as a kind of trans-Atlantic latrine where petty crooks and whores could be dumped and left to die. The survivors could breed soldiers for future British wars. Even the colonial landowners who made the 13 colonies an independent country didn't have much interest in non-landowning whites. Now the descendants of poor whites are being consumed by the opioid disaster.
The Politics of Fear: Médicins Sans Frontières and the West African Ebola Epidemic, edited by Michiel Hofman and Sokhieng Au. When MSF talks, I listen. Independently funded (in very small part by me), MSF can afford to be tactless—and honest. Suddenly overwhelmed by Ebola in West Africa, MSF learned some hard lessons about itself and about international health agencies. One of the key criticisms: WHO's "predominantly reactive nature," which precluded prevention of the conditions that gave rise to Ebola in the first place.
Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, by Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker. "Bad News" Mike Osterholm has been a major figure on the public health scene since 1980, and he is far from "predominantly reactive—he always thinking ahead to find a way to thwart everything from influenza to antimicrobial resistance to mosquito-borne diseases to bioterrorism. His proposals make a lot of sense, and would be adopted by any sensible American administration. Unfortunately, no such administration is currently in power.
Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations, by Anthony J. McMichael with Alistair Woodward and Cameron Muir. McMichael, an Australian epidemiologist, died before he could revise the first draft of this book. We owe his colleagues a lot for revising that draft. This book is now the standard for explaining health issues and climate change. It also offers a breathtaking, epic vision of humanity shaped from our beginnings by whatever climate we found ourselves in.
To this list I'll add one more, that I just picked up this afternoon at the library: Inferno: A Doctor's Ebola Story, by Steven Hatch, MD. While I'm just a few pages into it, Dr. Hatch's approach to his subject is encouraging: "I'm not interested in engendering fear but, instead, a sense of loss..."
