Epidemic! the World of Infectious Disease

Linked to an American Museum of Natural History traveling exhibit and to a PBS special, this gathering of essays and explanations looks at what we now know about bacteria, viruses, parasites and their remedies, and at how science and medicine came to the knowledge and methods they now use. Editor and curator DeSalle (The Science Behind Jurassic Park) corrals work from 25 contributors (among them former health and human services secretary Louis Sullivan) into six discrete segments, dealing respectively with ""evolution, ecology and culture""; vectors and carriers; mechanisms of infection and resistance; ""outbreaks,"" ""epidemics"" and public health policy ""action."" Each segment includes a summary, at least one case study focusing on a single disease or outbreak and at least one laudatory profile of an individual. Section two's case study, for example, shows how Dr. John Snow used a map of London to prove that contaminated water transmitted cholera. Section five ends with a box describing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the AIDS researcher who runs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Readers can learn elsewhere in the volume about vaccines and antibodies; about prions, the malformed, DNA-less proteins that probably cause BSE (mad cow disease); and about tuberculosis in New York. Large-type questions for further study, along with photographs, charts and numerous sidebars, accentuate the book's presentation as a teaching tool and as a stimulus to further research for medically and biologically inquisitive readers of almost any age. 60 photographs and 22 illustrations. (Sept.)