But the epidemic, Richard Preston's The Hot Zone and the movie Outbreak combined to raise consciousness and fray nerves about microbial threats to human health. More and more people have come up in personal brushes with the microbes in recent years.
People are very well aware that something's worse than it used to be.
A longtime medical writer who has worked for Newsday , National Public Radio and Pacifica Radio, Garrett has a degree in biochemistry and studied immunology in a Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley. She pairs her medical knowledge with a journalist's ability to tell a good story, resulting in a serious tome of 750 pages that reads like a thriller. It's ludicrous that most medical injections in the world today are with contaminated syringes,'' she says. Wherever you have people plowing into ecospheres where people never were before and coming out to substandard medical facilities, you'll have outbreaks as we did with Ebola in Kikwit, Zaire,'' she says. But this is no time to despair.