Science Resources RSS Feeds
|
 |
 |
 |
| View Larger Image | Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health | Paperbackby Laurie Garrett (Author)
| List Price: | $18.95 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Hyperion | | Page Count: | 800 Pages | | Publication Date: | August 01, 2001 | | Sales Rank: | 205,381th |
|
FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780786884407
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
|
EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
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 readers across the globe to reveal how a series of potential and present public health catastrophes form a terrifying portrait of real global disaster in the making. |
Amazon.com Review
What do Russia, Zaire, Los Angeles, and--most likely--your community have in common? Each is woefully unprepared to deal with a major epidemic, whether it's caused by bioterrorism or by new or reemerging diseases resistant to antibiotics. After the publication of her critically acclaimed The Coming Plague, which looked at the reemergence of infectious diseases, Laurie Garrett decided to turn her highly honed reportorial skills to what she saw as the only solution--not medical technology, but public health. However, what she found in her travels was the collapse of public-health systems around the world, no comfort to a species purportedly sitting on a powder keg of disease. In Betrayal of Trust, Garrett exposes the shocking weaknesses in our medical system and the ramifications of a world suddenly much smaller, yet still far apart when it comes to wealth and attention to health. With globalization, humans are more vulnerable to outbreaks from any part of the world; increasingly, the health of each nation depends on the health of all. Yet public health has been pushed down the list of priorities. In India, an outbreak of bubonic plague created international hysteria, ridiculous in an age when the plague can easily be treated with antibiotics--that is, if you have a public-health system in place. India, busy putting its newfound wealth elsewhere, didn't. In Zaire, the deadly Ebola virus broke out in a filthy and completely unequipped hospital, and would have kept up its rampage if the organization Doctors Without Borders hadn't stepped in, not with high-tech equipment or drugs, but with soap, protective gear, and clean water. Most of the world still doesn't have access to these basic public-health necessities. The 15 states of the former Soviet Union have seen the most astounding collapse in public health in the industrialized world. But during a cholera epidemic, officials refused to use the simple cure public-health workers have long relied on--oral rehydration therapy. Many of the problems in these nations can also be found in one degree or another in the U.S., where medical cures using expensive technology and drugs have been emphasized to the detriment of protecting human health. The result? More than 100,000 Americans die each year from infections caught in hospitals, and America has a disease safety net full of holes. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (for Newsday and others), Garrett has deftly turned what could have been a very dry subject into dramatic reportage, beginning with the eerie silence on the streets of Surat, India, where half the city's population (including doctors) fled the plague, while a thick white layer of DDT powdered the ground. Fascinating, frightening, and well-documented, Betrayal of Trust should be read not only by medical professionals and policymakers but the general public, and should galvanize a change in thinking and priorities. --Lesley Reed |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 48 reviews)
|
Excellent seller by S. Dar  5 Stars
October 12, 2009
The book seemed like it was brand new, and it arrived within a few days.
| |
I should have read this years ago by Geoffrey J. Russell (Australia) 5 Stars
April 05, 2009
Garrett's descripition of the 1995 Ebola epidemic in (then) Zaire traces
the interplay between simple public health measures and the horror of one
of the most feared diseases on the planet. Encouragingly, she shows that
such epidemics are beatable. Discouragingly, she also shows that nobody who
with power to implement solutions actually gives a damn. But the horrors
of Ebola fade somewhat before the horrors of the collapse of healthcare
in Russia. Garrett interlaces statistics with personal stories but its
the stats which I find more horrifying. Its easy to dismiss one bad
story as just that, but the stats show the deep horror of a failed
state. This is a big book and I'm less than half way through, but this
is a book which everyone should read ... particularly those who
thinks that "the market" can solve all problems.
| |
compelling and frightening by Julie Plancarte (oregon) 5 Stars
December 12, 2007
i went into this book a bit skeptical at first. I work in a big city hospital and i thought: what can i really learn from some third world nation i've never been too? A lot apparently. I was shaken to the core by this book, because when an author comes out and really puts all the pieces together, a horrific picture is painted of just how close we are to crisis.
if you care at all about your health, read this book. if you are entering the field of medicine (I will be finishing my RN degree next month) then you HAVE to read this book. Infectous diseases are not a sexy field, but the far reaching affects of a microscopic virus are vast. the ease that someone could make a "dirty bomb" and set off a widespread panic is very, very real. The total absence of a system to isolate and prevent disease is mind boggling.
Laurie Garrett has written a riveting book that doesn't pull the punches. she makes public health an issue that should matter to everyone, everywhere. i will be passing this book on to my mom, she's a NICU nurse.
| |
Good- too US-centric by J. Cushing (Dhaka)  4 Stars
September 25, 2007
Very interesting book, however the last chapter focuses extensively on the US healthcare system, something that wasn't of much interest to me.
| |
Informative But Practically Unreadable by Seachranaiche (USA)  3 Stars
February 06, 2007
Laurie Garrett's researchers have compiled for her an enormous amount of data which clearly shows that health care infrastructures around the world are no longer in any condition to prepare or protect people from the next terrible plague let alone maintain the status quo among diseases that were once thought to have been all but eradicated from the planet. Garrett threads her way through health-care crises around the world, from Africa to India to Russia, but it is the state of American health care that makes up the largest chapter in the book, and it is the demise of American health care that should be the most startling. We have all known for a long time that something was terribly amiss with health care in the United States, but "Betrayal of Trust" reveals that the problems are much, much deeper than many of us realized, almost to the point of absolute despair. Health care may be tenuous at best in third-world countries and the former Soviet Union, but this is mostly because those countries are impoverished or cash strapped, whereas in the United States, although we are rich, we have allowed our health care to degrade through conservatism, politics, and greed.
All public responsibilities and services that have been privatized or deregulated have suffered similarly, driving up costs while lowering quality--private contractors must, after all, make a profit; they must get their little bite, their "mordida", and they must stifle competition and pay off politicians in order to maintain hegemony in their fields--but in the realm of health care this means that someone (or lots of someones, usually poor someones) will suffer or die needlessly. It also means that while no one is immune from contagion, the public health system is now too complex, with too many competing interests, to adequately direct any consistent policy of public health. Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that government exists only to serve the people, and he took extraordinary (and quite successful) measures which demonstrated that government could improve the lives of its citizens. For the last several decades, we have lived under a government that believes it exists to serve business, that in this way, indirectly, the people's lot will improve. But all of those little "mordidas" add up, and so costs and debt have gone up also.
This is all made very clear in "Betrayal of Trust", through timelines of indomitable men and women who took the reins and made things happen; who found cures for polio and eradicated smallpox; who created a generation of Americans with no memory of the sadness of all-too-common childhood diseases and death. But while this evolution from greatness to complacency becomes clear as the reader progresses through the book, Garrett's style of writing is so poor that it is a struggle to get from page to page. Basic grammar and punctuation may not be her strong suit, but at least her editor should have corrected her redundancies (how many times must we read that the doctors in Zaire had no gloves? One...two...three...four...five...six...). And why do academic writers refuse to set off their introductory prepositional phrases with commas? Sentence after sentence runs on such that the reader must stop, back up, re-read the sentence, mentally place the comma, and then go on. Graduate students cringe when they are assigned this book, but the information remains important. Garrett's researchers did their jobs well.
| |
SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
by Laurie Garrett (Author)
A critically acclaimed study documents the outbreaks of newly discovered diseases around the globe, such as HIV, Lassa, and Ebola, and explores the social and environmental deterioration that helps to keep such viruses alive. Reprint. Tour. NYT.
| 
| Who Controls Public Lands?: Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policies, 1870-1990
by Christopher McGrory Klyza (Author)
In this historical and comparative study, Christopher McGrory Klyza explores why land-management policies in mining, forestry, and grazing have followed different paths and explains why public-lands policy in general has remained virtually static over time. According to Klyza, understanding the different philosophies that gave rise to each policy regime is crucial to reforming public-lands policy in the future. Klyza begins by delineating how prevailing policy philosophies over the course of...
| 
| Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Studies in Environment and History)
by Alfred W. Crosby (Author)
People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world - North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain; in many cases they were a matter of firearms against spears. But, as Alfred Crosby maintains in this highly original and fascinating book, the Europeans' displacement and replacement of the native peoples in the temperate zones was more a matter of biology than of military conquest....
| 
| Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues
by Paul Farmer (Author)
Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor. This "peculiarly modern inequality" that permeates AIDS, TB, malaria, and typhoid in the modern world, and that feeds emerging (or re-emerging) infectious diseases such...
| 
| Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections
by Madeline Drexler (Author)
As timely as it is urgent, this well-researched book from veteran science journalist Madeline Drexler delivers a compelling report on today's most ominous infectious disease threats. She focuses on a different danger in each chapter-from the looming risk of lethal influenza to in-depth information on the public health perils posed by bioterrorism. With a novelist's descriptive eye and a thriller writer's sense of tension, she warns us that the most ceaselessly creative bioterrorist is still...
|
|
|
|
