The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

A New York Times bestseller

The definitive classic about the infectious diseases threatening humanity by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Laurie Garrett

"Prodigiously researched . . . A frightening vision of the future and a deeply unsettling one." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

After four decades of assuming that the conquest of all infectious diseases was imminent, people on all continents now find themselves besieged by AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, cholera that defies chlorine water treatment, and exotic viruses that can kill in a matter of hours.

Based on extensive interviews with leading experts in virology, molecular biology, disease ecology and medicine, as well as field research in sub-Saharan Africa, Western Europe, Central America and the United States, The Coming Plague takes readers from the savannas of eastern Bolivia to the rain forests of northern Zaire on a harrowing, fifty year journey through our battles with the microbes, and tells us what must be done to prevent the coming plague.