Tapestry Press
Yellow Fever, Black Goddes
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Tapestry Press
Yellow Fever, Black Goddes
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Yellow Fever Black Goddess, The Coevolution of People and Plagues. Christopher Wills 1996. Helix Books, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA 324p. Christopher Wills, a California biologist, combines history, anecdotes and science to portray modern pathogens. The book begins with cholera in Belen, an impoverished community in eastern Peru. Wilma, a nurse, walking to work discovers the first case of an outbreak as a man collapses at her feet. The author describes factors that increase human survival and those that increase pathogen survival. Each disease compares to an ongoing competition between the human community and the pathogen community. He challenges the ideas that new pathogens are more virulent than older ones, and that lethal pathogens are evolutionary failures. Diversity within pathogen populations confronts diversity within human populations. Herd immunity protects uncommon susceptibility. Herd immunity promotes host diversity. Interestingly, impressive rain forest biodiversity in part reflects the presence of vigorous predators and pathogens. Christopher
Wills predicts that humanity will successfully respond to future human disease
outbreaks. He mourns that our
activities increase disease among wildlife, thereby increasing probable extinctions. Review written May 2003 Back to Book Reviews
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