The Tyee has published my review of The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband From a Deadly Superbug: How Science and the Internet Thwarted a Superbug and Saved a Life. Excerpt:
This book is likely to become a classic medical thriller, making feverish readers turn its pages even when they know the outcome. But it’s also a penetrating analysis of the culture of modern health sciences, where unchallenged conclusions risk becoming dangerous dogma until better evidence arises.
Such evidence might not have arisen for decades if Steffanie Strathdee and her husband Tom Patterson hadn’t stumbled into a deadly sequence of infections that would have killed anyone else. But Canadian-born Strathdee is an epidemiologist who in the 1990s worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to reduce needle-transmitted HIV. Patterson is a psychiatrist. Both have done remarkable work in fighting HIV/AIDS in Mexico and the U.S.
As professors at the University of California at San Diego, Strathdee and Patterson were at the peak of their careers in the fall of 2015: renowned in their fields, happy in a second marriage with adult children from their first, and accustomed to world travel to scientific conferences. A holiday in Egypt was just another break in their busy schedule.
But after a visit to the interior of a pyramid, Patterson felt unwell. A day later, on a Nile river cruise ship, he was violently ill. After some resistance, he finally allowed his wife to get him into a clinic in Luxor, where his condition worsened. It seemed to be some kind of pancreatitis, and it got worse.
Saved by a smartphone
Twenty years earlier, Patterson would likely have died in that clinic. But in 2015 Strathdee was on her phone to family and medical colleagues, getting sound advice and logistical help. Within a few terrifying days, a medevac jet took them to Frankfurt, where Patterson was found to have a gallstone that had created a “pseudo-cyst” the size of a football. Worse yet, it was full of multi-drug-resistant Acetinobacter baumannii, a superbug that scared the hell out of the Germans. If the pseudo-cyst burst, the superbug would flood his body and kill him.
We have no one but ourselves to thank for superbugs. Since the 1940s, our overuse and misuse of antibiotics have driven the evolution of bacteria that are now effectively unstoppable.
Strathdee had glimpsed the dawn of the “post-antibiotic era,” when giving birth or getting a hip replacement might bring a life-threatening exposure to deadly bacteria.
