Enthralling history of infectious diseases and the role of vaccination in their control and defeat. . A professor of Paediatrics, David Isaacs’ writing is concise but fluid and fills his pages with vignettes and human stories to lay bare the story of smallpox, rabies, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis B, meningitis, German measles and more.

The shocking story of the 19th Century GP, Dr Edward Jenner, giving an eight year old labourer’s son a dose of smallpox to see if his prior vaccination with the related cowpox would protect against the deadly disease! The first polio vaccines led to the Cutter Incident where 40,000 children caught an abortive form of polio, 50 were paralysed and 5 died. The cause of cervical cancer, the Human Papilloma Virus, was eventually discovered because the inventor of the Pap smear, George Papanicolaou bred some brave female guinea-pigs to practise on before moving onto his accommodating wife! Crikey!

The trials and tribulations of Louis Pasteur with anthrax, cholera and rabies. Chopin, Paganini and Stravinsky all died of TB. We jump seamlessly from Louis XVI to Shakespeare, the Hunchback of Notre Dame to Egyptian mummies, Japanese sumo wrestlers to US football teams. Isaacs packs his book with fascinating anecdotes and tragicomic histories, bringing to life and balancing the undoubted benefits of vaccination and the views of the anti vaccination movement.

We end up in the most modern of ethics debates... the fight against liver cancer, foetal cell lines, autism vs. the MMR vaccine and the appallingly racist, Tuskegee Study of untreated syphilis in black Americans.

Prof Isaacs explains enough of difficult medical terminology to captivate joe public and health professionals alike, indeed there’s so much of interest in these 360 pages, I might even read it again!

First appeared on my blog : It's Good To Read - https://wordpress.com/view/ebookwormssite.wordpress.com

Summary:
This is essentially a numbers book:
- Spanish flu 1918: Infected 500 million people globally, killing up to 50 million.
- Smallpox 1950: 10 million die from an estimated 50 million cases worldwide.
- Diphtheria 1930’s: Third leading cause of child death in England and Wales. (This one is personal, as my own mother had it as a child!).
- Measles 1980: An estimated 2.6 million children died.

There are myriad other diseases out there, for example TB (tuberculosis) and Polio, which have killed and maimed millions of our fellow human beings.

The other numbers to look at are the dates. The above named killers are largely a thing of the past, albeit in some cases the recent past.

What changed? Vaccination and anti-biotics.

The author gives a fantastic re-telling of the history and journey behind vaccination. He tells us of the tragedies (such as befell Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, and Lincoln), the successes (elimination of smallpox), as well as vignettes of some of the major achievers and innovators in this field, to whom a lot of us probably owe our lives.

The facts are stark. Top ten global killers in 2015 were:

Coronary artery disease; stroke; lower respiratory tract infections; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; lung cancer; diabetes mellitus; dementia, diarrhoea; TB; and road accidents.

Top ten killers in 1915 would have included SEVEN infectious diseases – TB, malaria, influenza, pneumonia, gastroenteritis, diphtheria, and smallpox, causing well over half the deaths.

Conclusion:
This book should be made available everywhere. It requires attention, but is more than a mere recitation of facts. Given the material, the author makes it interesting and instructive. It is hard to believe anyone could remain an anti-vaxxer after reading this.