The Tyee has published my article A Christmas Prescription: 12 Books That Deliver Insights on Health. Excerpt:
Health care is a big component of the Canadian economy (about $115 billion this year), not to mention a major issue in Canadian politics. We tend to worry about our health in personal terms, but it’s public health that really determines how long (and how peacefully) we live.
You know public health is working, it’s said, when nothing happens. But getting to that uneventful state is usually a very turbulent process that can inspire some brilliant (and eye-opening) stories.
So here are some health-related books that I’ve reviewed in the last couple of years, with links to those reviews. You may find they make good Christmas presents, whether for health care workers, health care recipients, or anyone interested in political solutions to literal life-or-death problems.
Deadly River: Cholera and Cover-Up in Post-Earthquake Haiti, by Dr. Ralph R. Frerichs.
Likely the best book I’ve yet read on the politics of global health. Frerichs follows Dr. Renaud Piarroux’s search for the cause of the 2010 cholera outbreak, which has so far sickened over 800,000 Haitians and killed almost 10,000 of them. The book turns into a suspenseful medical thriller and exposes villains in places no villain should be.
Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, From Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, by Sonia Shah.
Brilliantly organized and beautifully written, this book uses cholera as a gateway to a host of modern public health problems. The maddening thing about those problems, Shah argues, is that infectious diseases rely on us to spread them around… and we stupidly oblige them, whether by not washing our hands or refusing to get our kids vaccinated.
