I can’t believe that I found another book about disease and illness that I loved so much when I just finished one not too long ago. It’s the perfect mix of biography and advocacy, but also medical science that an average person will be able to understand. Steffanie Strathdee and Thomas Patterson do an incredible job of telling the story of his battle against a killer bacteria, from the days leading up to his first symptoms, to a year after he finally was able to leave the hospital.
While I was already aware of the dangers our society is facing regarding antibiotic resistance, these two doctors really get the point across that this is an issue that we need to be more aware of and that we need to start making a plan of action towards. In this book, you can learn about how some bacteria have gone from harmless to deadly, the speeds at which they can detect threats and adapt to them, and how quickly they are able to pass along what they have learned when they reproduce, which all factor into how and why some bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics. When a deadly bacteria is resistant to all the medications you can throw at it, the last thing you may be able to do is attack it with bacteriophages, or viruses, but most people do not know about this type of treatment. Even so, knowing about this treatment doesn’t mean you can get it because the treatment is not available everywhere. It has pretty much only been implemented in medical facilities in Georgia and Poland since phage therapy was discovered. Other than that, phage therapy is mostly only studied in labs in very few locations elsewhere and it’s not tested or used to treat humans. This is pretty frightening.
While not as terrifying as some of the other medical and psychology books I have read, it is still scary to know that there is a really good treatment out there that is not being utilized to its full potential because it is thought of as dangerous, taboo, or second best to traditional antibiotics. I am going to keep my eye out for more books on the subject because I am very curious about this subject seeing as it could be the future of medicine.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 