Download or read book Have Bacteria Won written by Hugh Pennington and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, we are far less likely to die from infection than at any other time in history, but still we worry about epidemics, the menace of antibiotic resistance and modern 'plagues' like Ebola. In this timely new book, eminent bacteriologist Hugh Pennington explores why these fears remain and why they are unfounded. He reports on outright victories (such as smallpox), battles where the enemy is on its last stand (polio), surprise attacks from vegetarian bats (Ebola, SARS) and demented cows (BSE). Qualified optimism, he argues, is the message for the future but the battles will go on forever.
Download or read book I Contain Multitudes written by Ed Yong and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller New York Times Notable Book of 2016 • NPR Great Read of 2016 • Named a Best Book of 2016 by The Economist, Smithsonian, NPR's Science Friday, MPR, Minnesota Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Times (London) From Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong, a groundbreaking, wondrously informative, and vastly entertaining examination of the most significant revolution in biology since Darwin—a “microbe’s-eye view” of the world that reveals a marvelous, radically reconceived picture of life on earth. Every animal, whether human, squid, or wasp, is home to millions of bacteria and other microbes. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ed Yong, whose humor is as evident as his erudition, prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light—less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are. The microbes in our bodies are part of our immune systems and protect us from disease. In the deep oceans, mysterious creatures without mouths or guts depend on microbes for all their energy. Bacteria provide squid with invisibility cloaks, help beetles to bring down forests, and allow worms to cause diseases that afflict millions of people. Many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us—the microbiome—build our bodies, protect our health, shape our identities, and grant us incredible abilities. In this astonishing book, Ed Yong takes us on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery. It will change both our view of nature and our sense of where we belong in it.
Download or read book Missing Microbes written by Martin J. Blaser, MD and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In Missing Microbes, Martin Blaser sounds [an] alarm. He patiently and thoroughly builds a compelling case that the threat of antibiotic overuse goes far beyond resistant infections.”—Nature Renowned microbiologist Dr. Martin J. Blaser invites us into the wilds of the human microbiome, where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the equilibrium and health of our bodies. Now this invisible Eden is under assault from our overreliance on medical advances including antibiotics and caesarian sections, threatening the extinction of our irreplaceable microbes and leading to severe health consequences. Taking us into the lab to recount his groundbreaking studies, Blaser not only provides elegant support for his theory, he guides us to what we can do to avoid even more catastrophic health problems in the future. “Missing Microbes is science writing at its very best—crisply argued and beautifully written, with stunning insights about the human microbiome and workable solutions to an urgent global crisis.”—David M. Oshinsky, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Polio: An American Story
Download or read book Germs that Won t Die written by Marc Lappé and published by Anchor Books. This book was released on 1982 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rising Plague written by Brad Spellberg, M.D. and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2009-12-04 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spellberg's book is a powerful and compelling journey into the antibiotic resistance problem . . . [written] in a personal, compelling, and easy-to-understand manner. It's a must read.--Michael Osterholm, M.D., author of "Living Terrors."
Download or read book Guns Germs and Steel The Fates of Human Societies written by Jared Diamond and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1999-04-17 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history."—Bill Gates In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.
Download or read book Microbiology written by Holly Ahern and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a group of organisms that are too small to see and best known for being agents of disease and death, microbes are not always appreciated for the numerous supportive and positive contributions they make to the living world. Designed to support a course in microbiology, Microbiology: A Laboratory Experience permits a glimpse into both the good and the bad in the microscopic world. The laboratory experiences are designed to engage and support student interest in microbiology as a topic, field of study, and career. This text provides a series of laboratory exercises compatible with a one-semester undergraduate microbiology or bacteriology course with a three- or four-hour lab period that meets once or twice a week. The design of the lab manual conforms to the American Society for Microbiology curriculum guidelines and takes a ground-up approach -- beginning with an introduction to biosafety and containment practices and how to work with biological hazards. From there the course moves to basic but essential microscopy skills, aseptic technique and culture methods, and builds to include more advanced lab techniques. The exercises incorporate a semester-long investigative laboratory project designed to promote the sense of discovery and encourage student engagement. The curriculum is rigorous but manageable for a single semester and incorporates best practices in biology education.
Download or read book Superbug written by Maryn McKenna and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-03-23 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LURKING in our homes, hospitals, schools, and farms is a terrifying pathogen that is evolving faster than the medical community can track it or drug developers can create antibiotics to quell it. That pathogen is MRSA—methicillin-resistant Staphyloccocus aureus—and Superbug is the first book to tell the story of its shocking spread and the alarming danger it poses to us all. Doctors long thought that MRSA was confined to hospitals and clinics, infecting almost exclusively those who were either already ill or old. But through remarkable reporting, including hundreds of interviews with the leading researchers and doctors tracking the deadly bacterium, acclaimed science journalist Maryn McKenna reveals the hidden history of MRSA’s relentless advance—how it has overwhelmed hospitals, assaulted families, and infiltrated agriculture and livestock, moving inexorably into the food chain. Taking readers into the medical centers where frustrated physicians must discard drug after drug as they struggle to keep patients alive, she discloses an explosion of cases that demonstrate how MRSA is growing more virulent, while evolving resistance to antibiotics with astonishing speed. It may infect us at any time, no matter how healthy we are; it is carried by a stunning number of our household pets; and it has been detected in food animals from cows to chickens to pigs. With the sensitivity of a novelist, McKenna portrays the emotional and financial devastation endured by MRSA’s victims, vividly describing the many stealthy ways in which the pathogen overtakes the body and the shock and grief of parents whose healthy children were felled by infection in just hours. Through dogged detective work, she discloses the unheard warnings that predicted the current crisis and lays bare the flaws that have allowed MRSA to rage out of control: misplaced government spending, inadequate public health surveillance, misguided agricultural practices, and vast overuse of the few precious drugs we have left. Empowering readers with the knowledge they need for self-defense, Superbug sounds an alarm: MRSA has evolved into a global emergency that touches almost every aspect of modern life. It is, as one deeply concerned researcher tells McKenna, "the biggest thing since AIDS."
Download or read book Never Home Alone written by Rob Dunn and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A natural history of the wilderness in our homes, from the microbes in our showers to the crickets in our basements Even when the floors are sparkling clean and the house seems silent, our domestic domain is wild beyond imagination. In Never Home Alone, biologist Rob Dunn introduces us to the nearly 200,000 species living with us in our own homes, from the Egyptian meal moths in our cupboards and camel crickets in our basements to the lactobacillus lounging on our kitchen counters. You are not alone. Yet, as we obsess over sterilizing our homes and separating our spaces from nature, we are unwittingly cultivating an entirely new playground for evolution. These changes are reshaping the organisms that live with us -- prompting some to become more dangerous, while undermining those species that benefit our bodies or help us keep more threatening organisms at bay. No one who reads this engrossing, revelatory book will look at their homes in the same way again.
Download or read book Tiny Killers written by John Farndon and published by Hungry Tomato (R). This book was released on 2017 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When bacteria and viruses attack"--Cover.
Download or read book Man Versus Microbe What Will It Take To Win written by Brian Bremner and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2022-04-20 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The COVID-19 pandemic that swept the planet in the early 2020s killed more than six million, delivered unimaginable human suffering and $22 trillion in lost global growth. We weren't prepared and should have been.Unraveling the secrets of microbes, an invisible parallel universe of tiny life forms all around us, is central to managing the big twenty-first-century challenges of pandemics, bioterrorism, food security and climate change. Scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs and political leaders are racing to decode this biological realm with powerful new tools to extend human lifespans and make the world safer and more prosperous. Yet such technologies need to be handled with care. The price of getting this wrong will be unbearable.Man Versus Microbe is about humanity's competitive, symbiotic and precarious relationship with the microbial world. Brian Bremner (Senior Executive Editor, Bloomberg) offers a book on the exhilarating fields of synthetic biology and genetics, abundant with material on emerging technologies to deepen one's understanding of how virus hunters chase bugs or how geneticists unlock the workings of a microbe's constituent DNA. This book is for readers who want to learn more about humanity's fight to contain future pandemics and better understand the risks and opportunities of living in the world of microbes. After navigating through a disruptive pandemic, we are all amateur epidemiologists now.
Download or read book The Perfect Predator written by Steffanie Strathdee and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An electrifying memoir of one woman's extraordinary effort to save her husband's life-and the discovery of a forgotten cure that has the potential to save millions more. "A memoir that reads like a thriller." -New York Times Book Review "A fascinating and terrifying peek into the devastating outcomes of antibiotic misuse-and what happens when standard health care falls short." -Scientific American Epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee and her husband, psychologist Tom Patterson, were vacationing in Egypt when Tom came down with a stomach bug. What at first seemed like a case of food poisoning quickly turned critical, and by the time Tom had been transferred via emergency medevac to the world-class medical center at UC San Diego, where both he and Steffanie worked, blood work revealed why modern medicine was failing: Tom was fighting one of the most dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the world. Frantic, Steffanie combed through research old and new and came across phage therapy: the idea that the right virus, aka "the perfect predator," can kill even the most lethal bacteria. Phage treatment had fallen out of favor almost 100 years ago, after antibiotic use went mainstream. Now, with time running out, Steffanie appealed to phage researchers all over the world for help. She found allies at the FDA, researchers from Texas A&M, and a clandestine Navy biomedical center -- and together they resurrected a forgotten cure. A nail-biting medical mystery, The Perfect Predator is a story of love and survival against all odds, and the (re)discovery of a powerful new weapon in the global superbug crisis.
Download or read book The Demon Under the Microscope written by Thomas Hager and published by Crown. This book was released on 2006-09-19 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager chronicles the dramatic history of sulfa, the first antibiotic and the drug that shaped modern medicine. The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it. It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics. Sulfa saved millions of lives—among them those of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr.—but its real effects are even more far reaching. Sulfa changed the way new drugs were developed, approved, and sold; transformed the way doctors treated patients; and ushered in the era of modern medicine. The very concept that chemicals created in a lab could cure disease revolutionized medicine, taking it from the treatment of symptoms and discomfort to the eradication of the root cause of illness. A strange and colorful story, The Demon Under the Microscope illuminates the vivid characters, corporate strategy, individual idealism, careful planning, lucky breaks, cynicism, heroism, greed, hard work, and the central (though mistaken) idea that brought sulfa to the world. This is a fascinating scientific tale with all the excitement and intrigue of a great suspense novel.
Download or read book Infectious Diseases of Humans written by Roy M. Anderson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with infectious diseases -- viral, bacterial, protozoan and helminth -- in terms of the dynamics of their interaction with host populations. The book combines mathematical models with extensive use of epidemiological and other data. This analytic framework is highly useful for the evaluation of public health strategies aimed at controlling or eradicating particular infections. Such a framework is increasingly important in light of the widespread concern for primary health care programs aimed at such diseases as measles, malaria, river blindness, sleeping sickness, and schistosomiasis, and the advent of AIDS/HIV and other emerging viruses. Throughout the book, the mathematics is used as a tool for thinking clearly about fundamental and applied problems having to do with infectious diseases. The book is divided into two parts, one dealing with microparasites (viruses, bacteria and protozoans) and the other with macroparasites (helminths and parasitic arthropods). Each part begins with simple models, developed in a biologically intuitive way, and then goes on to develop more complicated and realistic models as tools for public health planning. The book synthesizes previous work in this rapidly growing field (much of which is scattered between the ecological and the medical literature) with a good deal of new material.
Download or read book What You Need to Know about Infectious Disease written by Madeline Drexler and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mims Medical Microbiology E Book written by Richard Goering and published by Elsevier Health Sciences. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn all the microbiology and basic immunology concepts you need to know for your courses and exams. Now fully revised and updated, Mims’ clinically relevant, systems-based approach and abundant colour illustrations make this complex subject easy to understand and remember. Learn about infections in the context of major body systems and understand why these are environments in which microbes can establish themselves, flourish, and give rise to pathologic changes. This systems-based approach to microbiology employs integrated and case-based teaching that places the ‘bug parade’ into a clinical context. Effectively review for problem-based courses with the help of chapter introductions and ‘Lessons in Microbiology’ text boxes that highlight the clinical relevance of the material, offer easy access to key concepts, and provide valuable review tools. Approach microbiology by body system or by pathogen through the accompanying electronic ‘Pathogen Parade’ – a quickly searchable, cross-referenced glossary of viruses, bacteria and fungi A new electronic ‘Vaccine Parade’ offers quick-reference coverage of the most commonly used vaccines in current clinical practice Deepen your understanding of epidemiology and the important role it plays in providing evidence-based identification of key risk factors for disease and targets for preventative medicine. Grasp and retain vital concepts easily, with a user-friendly colour coded format, succinct text, key concept boxes, and dynamic illustrations. New and enhanced information reflects the growing importance of the human microbiota and latest molecular approaches Access the complete contents on the go via the accompanying interactive eBook, with a range of bonus materials to enhance learning and retention – includes self-assessment materials and clinical cases to check your understanding and aid exam preparation.
Download or read book Review of Medical Microbiology and Immunology 15E written by Warren E. Levinson and published by McGraw-Hill Education / Medical. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher's Note: Products purchased from Third Party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product. The most concise, clinically relevant, and current review of medical microbiology and immunology Review of Medical Microbiology and Immunology is a succinct, high-yield review of the medically important aspects of microbiology and immunology. It covers both the basic and clinical aspects of bacteriology, virology, mycology, parasitology, and immunology and also discusses important infectious diseases using an organ system approach. The book emphasizes the real-world clinical application of microbiology and immunology to infectious diseases and offers a unique mix of narrative text, color images, tables and figures, Q&A, and clinical vignettes. • Content is valuable to any study objective or learning style • Essential for USMLE review and medical microbiology coursework • 650 USMLE-style practice questions test your knowledge and understanding • 50 clinical cases illustrate the importance of basic science information in clinical diagnosis • A complete USMLE-style practice exam consisting of 80 questions helps you prepare for the exam • Pearls impart important basic science information helpful in answering questions on the USMLE • Concise summaries of medically important organisms • Self-assessment questions with answers appear at the end of each chapter • Color images depict clinically important findings, such as infectious disease lesions • Gram stains of bacteria, electron micrographs of viruses, and microscopic images depict fungi, protozoa, and worms • Chapters on infectious diseases from an organ system perspective
