Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health - Softcover

Rhodes, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684844257 ISBN 13: 9780684844251

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1998

Synopsis

In this brilliant and gripping medical detective story. Richard Rhodes follows virus hunters on three continents as they track the emergence of a deadly new brain disease that first kills cannibals in New Guinea, then cattle and young people in Britain and France -- and that has already been traced to food animals in the United States. In a new Afterword for the paperback, Rhodes reports the latest U.S. and worldwide developments of a burgeoning global threat.

About this title

Review:

Fans of The Hot Zone will find Deadly Feasts irresistible. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a gripping account of a disease and its discovery. If you thought the Ebola virus was bad news, check out transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). Always fatal, they can lurk in a body for years before emerging to claim their victims by turning their brains to slush. At least Ebola sickens quickly and occasionally spares a life. Rhodes exaggerates when he calls this a "new plague" in his subtitle, but TSEs are to blame for the real-world disaster of mad cow disease in Britain. And they do pose a genuine threat to human life.

Review:

"A vivid and engrossing account of a scientific saga worthy of Paul de Kruff's Microbe-Hunters."-Beryl Lieff Benderly, San Jose Mercury News

"Classic medical detective story."- George Johnson, The New York Times Book Review

"An Upton Sinclair-ish look inside the modern meat industry...Rhodes tells this medical detective story beautifully."-John Schwartz, The Washington Post

"[Rhodes] is a wonderful storyteller, Deadly Feasts is a great mystery story."-Nancy Schapiro, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Deadly Feasts is a breezy, immensely readable account....It is a splendid description of the process by which scientific knowledge is advanced."-Claudia Winkler, The Weekly Standard

"In the science literature of Armageddon, Deadly Feasts is in a class by itself....Rhodes is able to make hard science come alive."-Peter Collier, Chicago Tribune

"Deadly Feasts is a book to be read and pondered carefully -- and perhaps acted on -- possibly before eating one's next hamburger."-Oliver Sacks, The New Yorker

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0684844257
• ISBN 13: 9780684844251
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 274