"After decades spent assuming that the conquest of infectious disease was imminent, people on all continents now find themselves besieged by AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, cholera that defies chlorine water treatment, and exotic viruses that can kill in a matter of hours. Relying on extensive interviews with leading experts in virology, molecular biology, disease ecology, and medicine as well as field research in Sub-Saharan Africa, Western Europe, Central America, and the United States, Laurie Garrett's the COMING PLAGUE takes readers from the savannahs of eastern Bolivia to the rain forests of the northern Democratic Republic of the Congo on a harrowing fifty-year journey through the history of our battles with with microbes. This book is a work of investigative reportage like no other and a wake-up call to a world that has become compalacent in the face of infectious disease -- one that offers prescient warning about thedangers of ignoring the coming plague."

"Published in 1994 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux" -- veso of title page.

Introduction -- Machupo: Bolivian hemorrhagic fever -- Health transition : the age of optimism, setting out to eradicate disease -- Monkey kidneys and the ebbing tides: Marburg virus, yellow fever, and the Brazilian meningitis epidemic -- Into the woods: lassa fever -- Yambuku: Ebola -- The American bicentennial: swine flu and Legionnaires' Disease -- N'zara: lassa, ebola, and the developing world's economic and social policies -- Revolution: genetic engineering and the discovery of oncogenes -- Microbe Magnets: urban centers of disease -- Distant thunder: sexually transmitted diseases and injecting drug users -- Hatari: vinidogodogo (danger: a very little thing): the origins of AIDS -- Feminine hygiene (as debated, mostly, by men): toxic shock syndrome -- The revenge of the germs, or just keep inventing new drugs: drug-resistant bacteria, viruses, and parasites -- Thirdworldization: the interactions of poverty, poor housing, and social despair with disease -- All in good haste: hantaviruses in America -- Nature and homo sapiens: seal plague, cholera, global warming, biodiversity, and the microbial soup -- Searching for solutions: preparedness, surveillance, and the new understanding -- Afterword.