Books : Science & Nature : Medicine : Medical Sciences A-Z : Diseases & Disorders : Infectious & Contagious Diseases

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Books : Science & Nature : Medicine : Medical Sciences A-Z : Diseases & Disorders : Infectious & Contagious Diseases

• Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine (Oxford Handbooks Series)

  Murray Longmore, Ian Wilkinson, Tom Turmezei, Chee Kay Cheung

  
  
   

• Oxford Handbook of Acute Medicine (Oxford Handbooks Series)

  Punit Ramrakha, Kevin Moore

  
  
   

• Mims' Medical Microbiology: With STUDENT CONSULT Online Access (Trauma Manual)

  Richard Goering, Hazel Dockrell, Mark Zuckerman, Derek Wakelin, Ivan Roitt, Cedric Mims, Peter L. Chiodini

  
  
   

• Infection Control in Clinical Practice

  Jennie Wilson

  
  
   

• The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses

  Dorothy Crawford

  
  Though the Berlin Wall has fallen, we find ourselves still struggling with an even older enemy in the eternal Common Cold War. Virologist Dorothy H Crawford has studied the link between Epstein-Barr virus and human cancer for years and casts a wary eye through the electron microscope to check up on them and report on our strange and occasionally deadly symbiosis in The Invisible Enemy.

  This slim book, scholarly but accessible, examines these barely-living (or unliving, depending on whom you ask) gene packages with a strong emphasis on their disease-causing antics and the intellectual heroics of the various campaigns of eradication and control humans have waged for centuries. Though biological relativists might cringe occasionally at Crawford's dogged humanocentrism, few of them would really pine for the days of smallpox or embrace the raging HIV pandemic if pressed. Crawford looks at the wake of devastation left by these two viruses as well as her own favorite subject, which is strongly implicated in the formation of many cancers. Going a bit farther afield, she explains the weird behavior of the non-genetic reproduction of prions that cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and bovine spongiform encephalopathy; though these scary proteins aren't viruses by any definition, their behavior is similar enough to warrant inclusion. The Invisible Enemy, calmer than its title would suggest, provokes a sense of optimism in the reader; though the war might last forever, we can hope for fewer and fewer casualties as the years go by.--Rob Lightner

  
   

• Oxford Handbook of Tropical Medicine (Oxford Handbooks Series)

  Michael Eddleston, Robert Davidson, Andrew Brent, Robert Wilkinson

  
  
   

• Fear of the Invisible

  Janine Roberts

  
  
   

• Oxford Handbook of Genitourinary Medicine, HIV and AIDS (Oxford Handbooks)

  
  
   

• Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe

  William Rosen

  
  
   

• ABC of Sexually Transmitted Infections (ABC Series)

  
  
   

• Antimicrobial Chemotherapy

  David Greenwood, Roger Finch, Peter Davey, Mark Wilcox

  
  
   

• The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abissinia (Oxford World's Classics)

  Samuel Johnson

  
  
   

• Immunisation Against Infectious Diseases

  Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation

  
  
   

• Hugo and Russell's Pharmaceutical Microbiology

  
  
   

• Clinical Microbiology: An Introduction for Healthcare Professionals

  Jennie Wilson

  
  
   

• Transfusion Science

  Joyce Overfield

  
  
   

• Medical Microbiology and Infection at a Glance (Blackwell's at a Glance) (At a Glance)

  Stephen H. Gillespie, Kathleen B. Bamford

  
  
   

• Sexually Transmitted Infections (Fast Facts)

  Jonathan Zenilman, Anne Edwards, Jackie Sherrard

  
  
   

• Communicable Disease Control Handbook

  Jeremy Hawker, Norman Begg, Iain Blair, Ralf Reintjes, Julius Weinberg

  
  
   

• Mosquito: The Story of Man's Deadliest Foe

  Andrew Spielman', u"Michael D'Antonio"

  
  According to Andrew Spielman, a Harvard University specialist in tropical disease and his coauthor of Mosquito, award-winning science writer Michael D'Antonio, no animal on earth has touched so directly and profoundly the lives of so many human beings as the mosquito. Mosquito is their fascinating account for the general reader of the life story of this tiny insect and the havoc it has wrought over the millennia from the Roman soldiers that died of malaria in Scotland to the tens of thousands that died of yellow fever during the first attempt by the French to build the Panama canal at the end of the 19th century. Now the mosquito is back with a vengeance and her pathogens are apparently getting worse, making more people sick and claiming more lives, millions of lives, every year. Mosquito is full of fascinating facts and stories about the amazing variability of the insect. There are some 2500 species of mosquito compared with 4000 species for all mammals. Mosquitoes can survive almost anywhere on land from below sea level in the Californian desert up to 8000 ft in the Himalayas, and Spielman has found the common house mosquito from Harvard in the US to Confucius's grave in China. Some are so numerous and voracious that herds of caribou will migrate hundreds of miles to try and avoid the aggressive Arctic mosquitoes. Only the female mosquito practices the vampirism that does the damage and then she is only trying to feed her eggs. Reading her life story, one almost feels sorry for her. But she is the unwitting host to numerous lethal pathogens that not only cause malaria but also dengue, West Nile fever, yellow fever, etc. As Spielman and D'Antonio say, "The key to our relationship with the mosquito is getting to know it better... we still do not know what it is about blood, specifically, that mosquitoes crave for reproduction." Check the distribution maps at the back before you next take an exotic holiday. --Douglas Palmer