#peter c. doherty

[kranck007]

Gerade die aktuellen Ereignisse haben deutlich gemacht, wie wichtig die Erkenntnisse von Virologen sind. Der australische Virologe Peter C. Doherty hat in seinen nobelpreisgekrönten Forschungen herausgefunden, eine der unglücklichen Auswirkungen des Altwerdens sei, dass man mit den meisten Weinen nichts mehr anfangen kann, es sei denn, sie sind teuer. Er selbst kaufe nur noch Whiskey und Bier. Das wäre doch auch ein schöner Vorsatz für mein neues Lebensjahr. Whiskey und Bier, und das auf ärztlichen Rat, nach neuesten wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen! Denn von dem allerorten stattfindenden Virologenbashing halte ich, ehrlich gesagt, nicht viel.

[oupacademic]

What Everyone Needs to Know Q&A: With news of recent measles outbreaks, we want to know: 

Is measles something that we should still be worried about?                   Like polio, measles is one virus that we should be able to eradicate, as it is genetically stable and persists only in humans. One problem is that it spreads very readily. Another is that significant numbers of parents in the developed world are denying their offspring access to the vaccines that protect against the common infectious diseases of childhood.                                                                                                                                                  As a consequence, we see occasional school outbreaks where, for instance, an unvaccinated teenager vacationing with his parents in a developing country contracts the disease and brings it back home…. Measles is both extremely infectious and a bad pathogen.It can be lethal, particularly in the undernourished and the immunocompromised, including those who are undergoing cancer chemotherapy or have untreated HIV/AIDS.

[p 118, Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know by Peter C.Doherty.]

Learn more about pandemics and the most important topics of our time with the books in the What Everyone Needs to Know series. 

Image Credit: "Simian Measles Pneumonia - Case 287." Photo by Yale Rosen. CC by SA 2.0 via Flickr.

[litrant]

Feeling feverish?

Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know by Peter C. Doherty (Oxford University Press, $16.95)

It's that time of year again, when influenza is in the air and thoughts turn to avoiding death's door. That doesn't necessarily make this book mandatory reading, but when you're as interested in death, destruction, plagues and apocalypses as I am, well, why not?

Peter C. Doherty, an immunologist, won a Nobel Prize for his work on viruses and the immune system. In this book--part of Oxford University Press's "What Everyone Needs to Know" series--Doherty covers the basics of epidemic disease at the level of pandemic, including explaining that a pandemic is different from an epidemic. In a pandemic, the disease spreads quickly and across a wide geographic area (like the flu does); in an epidemic, there's an outbreak, but it's usually geographically limited (like a cholera outbreak in one particular region).

Set up as a series of answers to questions, there's nothing wrong with this: Doherty's answers are scientific yet readable for the non-scientist, and there are plenty of references for the reader who wants to dive deeper into the material. However, it could benefit--and become much more reader-friendly--through the use of a structure that differentiates between vital information ("What if I become ill while traveling?"), the interesting ("What is snot?"), and the deeply scientific, at least from the perspective of the typical layperson ("What is the difference between RNA and DNA?").

However, this series in general serves a valuable purpose as both a one-stop shop for those who don't want to be troubled with becoming experts on everything, as well as a first-stop resource for those who are looking for an overview and guide to further research.