Why this book has such a horrible title I do not know; it is a serious, albeit popular, work. Robert Desowitz, now retired, spent his career in tropical medicine, particularly parasitology, partly as an academic researcher and teaching professor, and partly as field-hand advisor to the WHO. He has published several popular accounts of tropical diseases, apart from his large body of scientific papers. This is his latest and, alas, last. It is primarily an account of the complete failure of medical organization in the developed West, either to cope with "new" diseases, mostly those occurring in temperate regions for the first time in recorded history, or to continue the work done in the previous two centuries in the tropics themselves. The first part of the book considers the 1999 outbreak of West Nile Virus in New York State; he then turns to the ongoing problems of malaria, sleeping-sickness, AIDS and others.

The book is aimed at the educated lay reader. Showing the effects of years of teaching first-year biology and med students, Desowitz usually remembers to explain technical terms as he goes, and what he doesn't can easily be checked out on the net. In a painless way he lays out a basic history of tropical medicine, epidemiology, the pros and cons of DDT, US patent law as it affects medical research, the pathology of malaria, the politics of public health in the Third World. He has a nice style: A bacterium is a bacterium and a virus a virus, but a malaria parasite is a many-splendoured thing.

The main reason, it seems for writing this book, was to alert the public to the vastly underfunded, underprepared state of the public health organizations in America as they confront the biological consequences of global warming.

272pp; short index; no bibliography (for which the author apologises). (Desowitz's other general works include The Thorn in the Starfish (immunology in the 1980s); The Malaria Capers (history, aetiology and politics of malaria); Tropical Diseases: From 50,000 BC to 2500 AD (also published as: Who Gave the Pinta to the Santa Maria), New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers (parasitology). Get past the lurid titles and they are seriously informative.