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Title: The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug Resistant Bacteria by Mark J./Shnayerson Plotkin ISBN: 0-316-71331-7 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: 03 September, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Stephen King...stand aside! Reality is scarier...
Comment: Excellent, excellent job done in research and writing by Shnayerson & Plotkin. If the reader is involved in science or public health, the 'news' in this book does not come as a surprise to anyone. It's been known for years among those in these communities that bacteria has been developing resistance to our antibiotics from day one. We get taught this if you work in a lab, because it becomes vitally important to keep everything absolutely sterile and clean. I know it is taught in medical school, but they don't emphasize this enough to medical students and doctors and nurses, because many doctors continue to dispense antibiotics like candy even though they have been warned and warned again by the Center for Disease Control and others.
For those who enjoy reading stuff like this to scare themselves...well, good luck. This is the stuff of nightmares, and if you spend a lot of your time worrying, I certainly wouldn't recommend you read this book. There is always hope, as the authors point out, that researchers will continue to find antibiotics that will temporarily restrain bacterial onslaught. However, be assured this hope has been relied upon in the past, and the bacteria always seem to find a way to mutate around medication, regardless of whether the antibiotics had an organic chemical basis or was a synthetic/man-made one, not seen in nature.
Most of the time, the people who pick up this type of book are already involved and concerned about this public health disaster-in-the-making. Yet these authors are trying to get this information out to the public, and write in such a way as to make this science knowledge understandable. The book starts out slowly, but picks up pace quickly. I had difficulty putting it down after the first couple of chapters. It is absolutely vital that the public be aware that responsibility for correct antibiotic use lies not just with the physicians, but with the patients and parents of patients who beg their doctors for antibiotics, when those antibiotics are not called for. As the authors bring up, most antibiotics given out by pediatricians are for ear infections (>60%). Yet often times those ear infections will go away on their own, with the antibiotics only minimalizing the length of time of the course of infection. Yet, all of us are guilty of expecting physicians to give us 'something' to make a cold or the flu 'go away'. Unfortunately, too often those illnesses are not caused by bacteria, but by viruses, and giving antibiotics in this manner just give bacteria an opportunity to switch genes around to build resistance. Same thing with not taking all of a prescription after the patient starts feeling better, or sharing medication not prescribed for others.
I hope this book is widely read. Maybe if enough consumers become concerned, we can put a stop to certain practices such as the use of antibiotics in animal feed as growth factors, regardless if they are known to be used for human consumption. The public needs to get more involved in their own medical care, and that means participating in governmental processes to fight against massive lobbying by pharmaceutical companies and livestock/meat companies and their lackeys, who often don't know and don't care about the possible consequences of their indiscriminate use of antibiotics.
Karen Sadler,
Science Education,
University of Pittsburgh
Rating: 5
Summary: This is an important book
Comment: This is a serious book about a very serious subject--the escalating arms race between humans and disease-causing microbes. The bad news is that we're losing, making the emergence of resistant disease causing bacteria "one of the greatest threats to the survival of the human species."
Co-written by Mark Plotkin, a leading ethnobotanist and Michael Schnayerson, a talented writer and editor, The Killers Within is a highly readable, often gripping narrative, full of stories, personalities and drama. At the same time, it presents a lot of the history, science and politics that surround the struggle of medical science to stay a step ahead of the deadly bugs that are proving remarkably adept at evolving ways to defeat our antibiotics.
The authors have no trouble identifying the culprits in this losing battle--an agricultural industry pouring millions of pounds of antibiotics into poultry and livestock as "growth promoters," doctors and patients who overuse antibiotics, and the interaction of profits and politics that determine what kinds of drugs reach the market and when. But behind these lies our naive blindness to the bacterial world's incredible capacity to defeat our most powerful weapons. Bacteria have multiple ways to evolve and swap handy genetic information, such as how to cleave penicillin molecules or pump antibiotics out of their cells. All it takes is one bacteria that survives an antibiotic by evolving a new resistance mechanism; within a few years even unrelated bacteria thousands of miles away will know the trick. It's as easy for the bacteria, the authors write, "as collecting charms on a charm bracelet."
The authors chillingly describe the costs of this war being fought out in our labs, hospitals and bodies--millions of illnesses, hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, and the risk to all of us of returning to a world where we are no longer protected by antibiotics. Most of the major pathogens have already evolved multiple drug resistance. The very young and the very old are already dying from untreatable infections, but any one of us is now at risk that a cut, an accident, a minor surgery or a bout of flu can lead on to a raging infection by bacteria resistant to most if not all antibiotics.
The authors do hold out some hope. Perhaps phages, vaccines, or new generations of genetically engineered antimicrobial agents will once again tip the balance in our favor. But for now, expect to see more headlines about outbreaks of resistant strains of bacteria and to hear more horror stories from friends whose scratch or surgery turned into a life-threatening nightmare. This book will help you make sense of those events. Let's hope that the dedicated and farsighted researchers it depicts will eventually win the day.
Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley, 2002).
Rating: 5
Summary: An eye-opener to the real world
Comment: This book was extremely interesting for me, but I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone. I would recommend it however to those interested in the Health/Science industry. The read isn't so hard but does require a basic understanding of some medical terminologies and you have to be able to pick things up and follow ideas easily. The book reads almost like a horror story, except its true. I wouldn't recommend reading this book if you get paranoid easy. I know I usually don't, but even I find myself thinking twice about alot of things now. This book gets a high rating from me because, as a studying pre-medical student, it has helped me to find my area of interest in the field.
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Title: The Antibiotic Paradox: How the Misuse of Antibiotics Destroys Their Curative Powers by Stuart B., MD Levy, M.D., Stuart B. Levy ISBN: 0738204404 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: 08 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.50 |
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Title: Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections by Madeline Drexler ISBN: 0142002615 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Demon in the Freezer : A True Story by Richard Preston ISBN: 0375508562 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 08 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Overkill : Repairing the Damage Caused by Our Unhealthy Obsession with Germs, Antibiotics, and Antibacterial Products by Kimberly Thompson, Debra Fulghum, Debra Fulghum Bruce ISBN: 1579545343 Publisher: Rodale Press Pub. Date: 20 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: DNA : The Secret of Life by Andrew Berry, James D. Watson ISBN: 0375415467 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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