Secret Agents!!!
The Menace of Emerging Infections!!!
by Madeline Drexler
(Notes written in August, Year 2)
Oh, all right, the title has no exclamation points. It might as well have. For that matter, most of this book could have served as script for a Fox TV shockumentary.
On the plus side, Secret Agents amounts to three books, and one of them is pretty good. The first concerns epidemics, pandemics and the super-resistant microbes we're breeding with our overmedication and our antibacterial hand creams. The third addresses bioterrorism. The good one, in the middle, is about a hypothesis that's now being debated in the medical profession, that many chronic and degenerative diseases result from infections.
I should add that, to my dismay, the book is published by the Joseph Henry Press, an imprint of the National Academy of Sciences.
Drexler seems to have one aim here, to scare the bejesus out of reading-class America. She assembles lots of evidence, much of it in the form of quotes from researchers, to show that flu is going to kill us all; that smallpox is going to kill us all; that brucellosis is going to inconvenience many of us (little hitch in the presentation there); that rampaging drug-resistant E. coli is going to kill us all; and that semisentient bioterrorists are going to kill us all. Add 'em up, folks, and you can forget about being hacked to pieces in your bed by maniacal home invaders. It makes a good plot, but not for a science book.
Flu, for example. Nearly every paragraph in Chapter 5 seems to point to one conclusion: The next mutation in the flu virus that lives in Chinese ducks will spell the end of the human race. We get a slightly jumbled history of the 1918 epidemic and its microbiology; some discussion of the flu virus, or rather viruses—there are dozens of varieties—and how it couldn't be transmitted from poultry to people, until one day it could; pages of explanation why it is impossible to protect ourselves against the next wave of flu; and a good number of doomsday predictions. By the way, you never "get over" the flu; your weakened constitution leaves you easy prey to brucellosis or plague.
I unreservedly admire journalists. Drexler works as a science journalist, a severely tried breed to begin with, running like hell to keep up with current research while trying to sell inverted-pyramid stories about it to editors who question what kind of scandal affects only seven people. Science isn't easy, and journalism isn't easy, and maybe science journalism is harder than either one.
My argument is not with Drexler's facts, not with her skills, but with her stance. Her book won't appeal to nonreaders, but it seems to be written for them. It piles scare story upon scare story. Sure, there is scary stuff out there, and in here too, but I come to the book already motivated to read. Anyone not so motivated is certain to miss the book entirely. Writers can hold me or lose me, but the nonreading audience isn't there to hold. Give me vivid narrative, give me tables and graphs and drawings, give me references if you like, but don't write to me as if I had my thumb on the remote control and sat ready to zap you if my horror and pity should ever flag.
In the end, I can recommend this book highly, but only to people who are bound not to read it. Everybody else keep away.
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Secret Agents