Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
Laurie Garrett
Language: English
Pages: 800
ISBN: 0786884401
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"On par with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring ... This chilling exploration of the decline of public health should be taken seriously by leaders and policymakers around the world."--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
In this meticulously researched and ultimately explosive new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett takes on perhaps the most crucial global issue of our time. She asks: is our collective health in a state of decline? If so, how dire is this crisis and has the public health system itself contributed to it? Using riveting detail and finely-honed storytelling, Garrett exposes the underbelly of the world's globalization to find out if it can still be assumed that government can and will protect the people's health, or if that trust has been irrevocably broken.
classic Soviet fashion. No one had a right to refuse HIV tests, and no nation conducted as many involuntary screenings as did the USSR. From the moment the first HIV case was identified in Moscow, and with even greater vigor following the 1989 Elista incident, HIV testing was executed at a phenomenal pace. Between 1987 and 1995 some 165,470,049 Russians alone were subjected to state-mandated tests. Records on the numbers of non-Russian Soviets who were tested are not available but surely would
virtual amateur could develop bioweapons which, if dispersed in the New York subway system, would claim tens of thousands of lives. But were America’s militants and fanatics ready to try biological terrorism? Law enforcement leaders claimed that religious cults and militant political groups were the most likely to try bioweapons. After all, they argued, the first domestic mass biological poisoning was carried out in 1984 by members of the Rajneesh religious cult. And the first bombing of a fully
wouldn’t breathe it, or we’d have some miraculous resistance to it. And the other half of us, somebody would have to diagnose in a hurry and then contain and treat.”125 The job of building the nation’s drug and vaccine stockpile fell to Hamburg. In her new capacity as assistant secretary of health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, she was racing to catch up with the Department of Defense and the FBI. Public health was a late entrant into the bioterrorism field, she said, and
worrisome swine link between the two. Flu strains that had arisen from pigs were thought by experts to be the most dangerous to people. 339. Guillan-Barré syndrome was a poorly understood nerve disorder that led to inflammation of major nerves, paralysis, pain, and other neurological symptoms. Nobody knew the cause of Guillan-Barré syndrome, but a certain number of people came down with it all the time. By examining thousands of medical records, Osterholm determined that there had been a slight
were being exposed over and over again.42 That meant that people in the region were in contact with monkey blood—probably while butchering animals for consumption—so often that the monkey SIV-2 viruses were reintroduced over and over again into the human population, becoming HIV-2.43 In 1999 two separate teams of scientists, led by Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama in Birmingham and Francoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Institut Pasteur, discovered that the same might be true for the far more