Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health

This book is a twin, in many ways, of the author's best-selling The Coming Plague -- interesting, sprawling, heavily anecdotal, and amply footnoted. In the style favored by modern journalists, paragraph and sentence fragments abound; the thread of the argument often disappears in a blizzard of gee-whiz statistics, acronyms, and quotations from interviews with eminent folk of all kinds. Once extracted, however, the message remains an important one: old scourges (tuberculosis and syphilis) are alive and all too well, and newer ones (aids, most notably) have yet to abate their force. A whiff of hysteria and hype here, but nonetheless a useful warning that globalization may have a very dark side indeed.