When Birds Get Flu and Cows Go Mad!: How Safe Are We?

In 2004, 11-year-old girl living in Srisomboon, Thailand was very ill. She had come down with some flu-like symptoms and had to be rushed to the hospital. Her mother held her tight through this ordeal, but early one morning she died. Shortly after her mother died. Dr. Kumnuan Ungchusak and Dr. Scott Dowell from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) hurriedly and cautiously approached the scene. The girl had been playing with chickens and they worried that it was "a rare bird flu." "Epidemiologists worried that one or two sick chickens could infect a whole town. And that town could infect the country-or even the world." The mother and child had both died of H5N1, a "deadly bird flu strain." It was time to act! In 2003, the carcass of a cow in Washington state was discovered to be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease. It wasn't a disease to be trifled with because 150 people in Europe came down with the disease and died. "In Europe, hundreds of thousands of cows have caught it." Now it had apparently hit the United States. A USDA random scientific test done in Iowa had confirmed it. Will Hughes, an FDA investigator, rushed to the scene. Would he be able to retrace all the meat from this cow before it was too late? Were any more cows infected? This book is a bit alarmist and slightly dated, but also very realistic. Each "case" poses a question, presents the evidence and the conclusion. A disease fighter's vocabulary is presented, symptoms of bird flu and mad cow disease are listed, the composition of a medical team is laid out and there are several other examples of diseases and epidemics that have occurred. In the back of the book is an index, a glossary, a listing of schools and professional organizations, and additional recommended book and web site resources. If you think you'd like to be an epidemiologist you'd better look at books like this!