In “The Coming Plague,” the litany of blame for the new onslaught of global infection is a long and complex one. That started her hunt, she says, “and by the time I had 12 file boxes (of research), I said, ‘It’s time for a book contract.’ ” There, for the first time, Garrett says, she heard experts voice grave concerns about medicine’s inability to cope with the burgeoning number of virulent contagions that had suddenly manifested-fears that, in essence, validated her anecdotal experiences. Still, the overall picture didn’t come into focus for her until a 1987 gathering of scientists and researchers in Washington, D.C. “As I traveled more and more in developing countries, I found diseases that I had grown up with and thought were quite common were killers, and that diseases I had never heard of were killing tens of thousands of people and taking millions of lives every year,” recalls Garrett, a health and science writer at New York Newsday. A former science correspondent for National Public Radio and fellow at the Harvard Public School of Health, Garrett wrote “The Coming Plague” in 17 months after several years of observing phenomena in sub-Saharan Africa, Central America and the Middle East, which challenged her assumptions that the defeat of disease by science was at hand. Garrett’s interest in infection, however, is the product of a much longer gestation. Likewise, last June’s appearance of the so-called flesh-eating bacteria-reports of which were endlessly replayed on TV news-remains fresh on many people’s minds. “The Hot Zone"-a book about the 1989 outbreak of Ebola virus in Virginia-is on the bestseller list, and a movie about a deadly virus gone awry-set to star Dustin Hoffman-is also in the works.
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