Legionnaires' disease and Toxic Shock Syndrome are newly virulent manifestations of known bacteria, and the Hantavirus that suddenly kills people in the rural Southwest is a new genetic variation of an old virus carried by an unusually robust population of deer mice. Sex, drugs, war and travel have on their own and together created circumstances where venereal and blood-borne diseases have been effectively seeded and spread. Increased heterosexual and homosexual promiscuity and prostitution have brought syphilis and gonorrhea back from virtual extinction. Hepatitis and AIDS have followed the same routes, amplified by needle sharing, attacking knowing participants and unknowing spouses and offspring. War and civil strife have given us back cholera in Rwanda, created a seedbed for AIDS in Uganda and Tanzania, and launched drug-resistant gonorrhea in Vietnam.
Air travel provides the means to send a microbe anywhere in the world with staggering efficiency.
An outbreak on one continent is now a potential outbreak on all continents. She estimates that 21 million people were living as refugees or in war zones at the end of 1993. One has to read carefully and at some length to find signs of hope amid Garrett's disturbing annals of bad microbes, venal behavior and dissolute politics. Technologies are improving and genetic engineering, in particular, now provides magnificent tools to diagnose and trace the origin and spread of bacteria and viruses. In the end she argues for a brand of global communitarianism as the only possible counteroffensive to devastating diseases.