In this meticulously researched and ultimately explosive new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett takes readers across the globe to reveal how a series of potential and present public health catastrophes form a terrifying portrait of real global disaster in the making.
What do Russia, Zaire, Los Angeles, and--most likely--your community have in common? Each is woefully unprepared to deal with a major epidemic, whether it's caused by bioterrorism or by new or reemerging diseases resistant to antibiotics. After the publication of her critically acclaimed The Coming Plague, which looked at the reemergence of infectious diseases, Laurie Garrett decided to turn her highly honed reportorial skills to what she saw as the only solution--not medical technology, but public health. However, what she found in her travels was the collapse of public-health systems around the world, no comfort to a species purportedly sitting on a powder keg of disease. In Betrayal of Trust, Garrett exposes the shocking weaknesses in our medical system and the ramifications of a world suddenly much smaller, yet still far apart when it comes to wealth and attention to health.
With globalization, humans are more vulnerable to outbreaks from any part of the world; increasingly, the health of each nation depends on the health of all. Yet public health has been pushed down the list of priorities. In India, an outbreak of bubonic plague created international hysteria, ridiculous in an age when the plague can easily be treated with antibiotics--that is, if you have a public-health system in place. India, busy putting its newfound wealth elsewhere, didn't. In Zaire, the deadly Ebola virus broke out in a filthy and completely unequipped hospital, and would have kept up its rampage if the organization Doctors Without Borders hadn't stepped in, not with high-tech equipment or drugs, but with soap, protective gear, and clean water. Most of the world still doesn't have access to these basic public-health necessities. The 15 states of the former Soviet Union have seen the most astounding collapse in public health in the industrialized world. But during a cholera epidemic, officials refused to use the simple cure public-health workers have long relied on--oral rehydration therapy. Many of the problems in these nations can also be found in one degree or another in the U.S., where medical cures using expensive technology and drugs have been emphasized to the detriment of protecting human health. The result? More than 100,000 Americans die each year from infections caught in hospitals, and America has a disease safety net full of holes.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (for Newsday and others), Garrett has deftly turned what could have been a very dry subject into dramatic reportage, beginning with the eerie silence on the streets of Surat, India, where half the city's population (including doctors) fled the plague, while a thick white layer of DDT powdered the ground. Fascinating, frightening, and well-documented, Betrayal of Trust should be read not only by medical professionals and policymakers but the general public, and should galvanize a change in thinking and priorities. --Lesley Reed

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

compelling and frightening:

i went into this book a bit skeptical at first. I work in a big city hospital and i thought: what can i really learn from some third world nation i've never been too? A lot apparently. I was shaken to the core by this book, because when an author comes out and really puts all the pieces together, a horrific picture is painted of just how close we are to crisis.
if you care at all about your health, read this book. if you are entering the field of medicine (I will be finishing my RN degree next month)... more info

Good- too US-centric:

Very interesting book, however the last chapter focuses extensively on the US healthcare system, something that wasn't of much interest to me.

Informative But Practically Unreadable:

Laurie Garrett's researchers have compiled for her an enormous amount of data which clearly shows that health care infrastructures around the world are no longer in any condition to prepare or protect people from the next terrible plague let alone maintain the status quo among diseases that were once thought to have been all but eradicated from the planet. Garrett threads her way through health-care crises around the world, from Africa to India to Russia, but it is the state of American health care that... more info

Way scary, but a really good read.:

I read this for a University course. I kept it. The public is woefully undereducated about public health and by definition it affects us all. I highly recommend this book.

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