Unpurified drinking water, improper use of antibiotics, local warfare, massive refugee migration have contributed to changing social and environmental conditions around the world. These have fostered the spread of new and potentially devastating viruses and diseases : HIV, Lassa, Ebola, and others. The author takes the reader on a fifty year journey through the world's battles with microbes and examines the worldwide conditions that have culminated in recurrent outbreaks of newly discovered diseases, epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas, and mutated old diseases that are no longer curable.

Includes index.

Introduction -- Machupo: Bolivian hemorragic 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.