Tropical diseases - Robert Desowitz

Tropical Diseases is the first book to show how life-threatening diseases have travelled - and continue to travel - to Europe and America from Africa and Asia.

The tug of war between man and his parasites.

History and science mixed to perfection.

We live in a fool's paradise, comforted, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that we are isolated and insulated from the microbial and parasitic diseases that so beset tropical climates.

Yet recent history demonstrates clearly that pathogens have no respect for national borders, and that many of the diseases we assume are exclusively tropical actually occur with alarming frequency in developed countries with temperate climates

This book shows how the world has never fitted into neat compartments, and how human migrants from 50,000BC until today have brought dangerous pathogens with them to their new homes.

Desowitz demonstrates for the first time the social and economic effects of tropical diseases in more hospitable climates. He shows how one of the reasons for the perpetuation of slavery was that it was uneconomic to free African forced-labourers, whose semi-immunity to malaria and yellow fever meant that they were able to keep working when non-Africans would have become chronically unwell.

The final section of the book addresses the potentially catastrophic health problems facing the Third World today, and weighs the risk that new 'doomsday bugs' will emerge and be transferred to the developed world. This incisive and brilliantly well-written book shows that how we deal with such health threats may well be one of the most sensitive moral and political questions of our time.