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| View Larger Image | The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria | Paperbackby Michael Shnayerson (Author), Mark J. Plotkin (Author)
| List Price: | $19.99 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Back Bay Books | | Page Count: | 336 Pages | | Publication Date: | September 02, 2003 | | Sales Rank: | 617,937th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780316735667
- Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
- Notes:
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
A battle is taking place on the frontiers of medicine between rapidly evolving bacteria that threaten our health and the doctors who are struggling to outwit them. These bacteria are everywhere: in and on our bodies, in homes, schools, hospitals, crowded airplaines, day-care centers. And, as THE KILLERS WITHIN makes frighteningly clear, so far the bacteria are winning. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 15 reviews)
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Better to know than to be ignorant by J. Taylor (Directly over the center of the earth)  5 Stars
March 02, 2007
Buy this book at the airport bookstore. Get on an airplane and travel across the continent; say, from Portland, Oregon to Albany, New York. Turn on the overhead light, ignore your jabbering seatmate, and dive in. You're going to love this book about hidden killers, and it might even save your life.
Your seatmate is coughing occasionally, catching most of the goo and sputum in a handkerchief but nonetheless vaporizing your personal space with unknown and unseen critters. Now, that hacking could be the result of too many cigarettes, or the first warning sign that you are sitting next to a human cesspool of contagious diseases, from TB to something really exotic and hemorrhagic. Stuck for the next six hours beside a raging smallpox blanket of a fellow traveler who wants to chat and breathe on you. You reach in your pocket for the Airborne, and spray it into your pie-hole with the same prayer that they said back in London when they put on a necklace of garlic and went out to mingle with the victims of bubonic plague. You open this book by Messrs. Shnayerson and Plotkin and tune out.
Reading this book will persuade you to wear a 3-M mask in public someday soon, as the Japanese have been doing for decades. And you'll finally figure out what your crazy aunt was talking about, when she told you to wash up your hands for supper. Human beings have the power to fight this undeclared war on bacteria, but not the will; maybe we need to see War of the Worlds a few more times to understand a point: bacteria OWN this planet. We seem to forget that. Without them, we couldn't even digest our food. Without them, no yogurt. Without them and their microscopic cousins, we'd eventually overpopulate ourselves into oblivion.
Fortunately, there is flesh-eating bacteria. This information alone was worth the price of the book: If you get really sick, going to a hospital is a questionable option. Read this book in the ambulance, and you'll tell the EMT's to let you off near a bus stop.
Definitely worth reading. I would also recommend this book to anyone who uses public transportation; it will enhance the ride immensely. If you are also reading Lives of a Cell, you may even get laid that night. Tell your friends about this book, because they really need to know that all worry is wasted. Either your number is up, or it isn't. Bacteria are everywhere, and whether or not they kill you is purely up to karma.
And while reading this book, in a fit of humanity, you might offer your leprous sky-comrade a shot of your Airborne, without sweating what microbes you might be picking up.
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For 'Intelligent Design' Fans by R. MARK Plummer (From the Former USA)  4 Stars
July 20, 2006
Do you have someone on your gift list who believes in "intelligent design"? Or maybe you know someone who thinks Charles Darwin's work on evolutuion was "just a theory"?
Give them this book! Bacteria ARE developing resistance to the weapons we have devised to combat them - and we are helping them develop that resistance thru our over-use and misuse antibacterial drugs.
The natural mechanism bacteria use to develop resistance to our drugs is called... drum roll please: "E V O L U T I O N"! Since bacteria reproduce so rapidly we can observe them going thru numerous generations right in the laboratory and watch as they develop new and novel ways to avoid the chemical weapons we humans throw at them... we become the agents of 'natural (or un-natural) selection' which is THE fundamental mechanism of evolution.
Forewarned is forearmed...Or read it and weep! Or, read it and be just a bit more "aware" of how life in the universe is constantly at work all around us, even when we are not looking.
(Plotkin's earlier book about the search for drugs among native people is also a wonderful read! )
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Excellent Book. Every one should read it. by Wong Wai Kei (Hong Kong) 5 Stars
February 12, 2004
This book describes the problem of the bacteria developing resistance to the many antibiotics that humans are using to fight them and, the most important, that we are losing this battle. The book talks about the reasons behind this : overuse and abuse of antibiotics by us, use of antobiotics as "growth enhancers" and so on. I am already aware of this resistance problem but after reading this book I was thrilled and frightened. If we do not change our ways of using antibiotics soon then we will soon be unable to fight those drug resistant bacteria when they cause infections and a huge health problem will unfold. I for one strongly agree with the authors that antibiotics use as "growth enhancers" should be totally banned as soon as possible.
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An eye-opener to the real world 5 Stars
June 14, 2003
This book was extremely interesting for me, but I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone. I would recommend it however to those interested in the Health/Science industry. The read isn't so hard but does require a basic understanding of some medical terminologies and you have to be able to pick things up and follow ideas easily. The book reads almost like a horror story, except its true. I wouldn't recommend reading this book if you get paranoid easy. I know I usually don't, but even I find myself thinking twice about alot of things now. This book gets a high rating from me because, as a studying pre-medical student, it has helped me to find my area of interest in the field.
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This is an important book by Robert Adler (Santa Rosa, CA USA) 5 Stars
December 12, 2002
This is a serious book about a very serious subject--the escalating arms race between humans and disease-causing microbes. The bad news is that we're losing, making the emergence of resistant disease causing bacteria "one of the greatest threats to the survival of the human species."Co-written by Mark Plotkin, a leading ethnobotanist and Michael Schnayerson, a talented writer and editor, The Killers Within is a highly readable, often gripping narrative, full of stories, personalities and drama. At the same time, it presents a lot of the history, science and politics that surround the struggle of medical science to stay a step ahead of the deadly bugs that are proving remarkably adept at evolving ways to defeat our antibiotics.The authors have no trouble identifying the culprits in this losing battle--an agricultural industry pouring millions of pounds of antibiotics into poultry and livestock as "growth promoters," doctors and patients who overuse antibiotics, and the interaction of profits and politics that determine what kinds of drugs reach the market and when. But behind these lies our naive blindness to the bacterial world's incredible capacity to defeat our most powerful weapons. Bacteria have multiple ways to evolve and swap handy genetic information, such as how to cleave penicillin molecules or pump antibiotics out of their cells. All it takes is one bacteria that survives an antibiotic by evolving a new resistance mechanism; within a few years even unrelated bacteria thousands of miles away will know the trick. It's as easy for the bacteria, the authors write, "as collecting charms on a charm bracelet."The authors chillingly describe the costs of this war being fought out in our labs, hospitals and bodies--millions of illnesses, hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, and the risk to all of us of returning to a world where we are no longer protected by antibiotics. Most of the major pathogens have already evolved multiple drug resistance. The very young and the very old are already dying from untreatable infections, but any one of us is now at risk that a cut, an accident, a minor surgery or a bout of flu can lead on to a raging infection by bacteria resistant to most if not all antibiotics. The authors do hold out some hope. Perhaps phages, vaccines, or new generations of genetically engineered antimicrobial agents will once again tip the balance in our favor. But for now, expect to see more headlines about outbreaks of resistant strains of bacteria and to hear more horror stories from friends whose scratch or surgery turned into a life-threatening nightmare. This book will help you make sense of those events. Let's hope that the dedicated and farsighted researchers it depicts will eventually win the day.Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley, 2002).
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