Bioterrorism and Deadly Diseases: Fact and Fiction
Explore the chilling world of bioterrorism and deadly diseases with top books on real threats and gripping fiction. Uncover facts, myths, and must-reads to stay informed.
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Germs
by Judith Miller
In the wake of the anthrax letters following the attacks on the World Trade Center, Americans have begun to grapple with two difficult truths: that there is no terrorist threat more horrifying -- and less understood -- than germ warfare, and that it would take very little to mount a devastating attack on American soil. In Germs, three veteran reporters draw on top sources inside and outside the U.S. government to lay bare Washington's secret strategies for combating this deadly threat. Featuring an inside look at how germ warfare has been waged throughout history and what form its future might take (and in whose hands), Germs reads like a gripping detective story told by fascinating key figures: American and Soviet medical specialists who once made germ weapons but now fight their spread, FBI agents who track Islamic radicals, the Iraqis who built Saddam Hussein's secret arsenal, spies who travel the world collecting lethal microbes, and scientists who see ominous developments on the horizon. With clear scientific explanations and harrowing insights, Germs is a masterfully written -- and timely -- work of investigative journalism.
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Guns, Germs, and Steel
by Jared M. Diamond
In this "artful, informative, and delightful (book)" ("New York Review of Books"), Diamond offers a convincing explanation of the way the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Photos. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
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Pox Americana
by Elizabeth A. Fenn
Fenn is the first historian to reveal how deeply Variola affected the outcome of the War of Independence, and why it caused a continental epidemic, affecting the lives of virtually everyone in North America from Florida to Alaska."--BOOK JACKET.
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Biohazard
by Ken Alibek
“Read and be amazed. . . . An important and fascinating look into a terrifying world of which we were blissfully unaware.”—Robin Cook, author of Contagion Anthrax. Smallpox. Incurable and horrifying Ebola-related fevers. For two decades, while a fearful world prepared for nuclear winter, an elite team of Russian bioweaponeers began to till a new killing field: a bleak tract sown with powerful seeds of mass destruction—by doctors who had committed themselves to creating a biological Armageddon. Biohazard is the never-before-told story of Russia’s darkest, deadliest, and most closely guarded Cold War secret. No one knows more about Russia’s astounding experiments with biowarfare than Ken Alibek. Now the mastermind behind Russia’s germ warfare effort reveals two decades of shocking breakthroughs . . . how Moscow’s leading scientists actually reengineered hazardous microbes to make them even more virulent . . . the secrets behind the discovery of an invisible, untraceable new class of biological agents just right for use in political assassinations . . . the startling story behind Russia’s attempt to turn a sample of the AIDS virus into the ultimate bioweapon. And in a chilling work of real-world intrigue, Biohazard offers us all a rare glimpse into a shadowy scientific underworld where doctors manufacture mass destruction, where witnesses to errors are silenced forever, and where ground zero is closer than we ever dared believe. Praise for Biohazard “Harrowing . . . richly descriptive . . . [an] absorbing account.”—The New York Times Book Review “Remarkable . . . terrifying revelations . . . [Ken Alibek’s] overall message is ignored at great national peril.”—Newsday
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Plague
by Edward Marriott
Finally he addresses the possibility of a new pandemic, one in which plague has become resistant to antibiotics."--BOOK JACKET.
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Underground
by Haruki Murakami
In this haunting work of journalistic investigation, Haruki Murakami tells the story of the horrific terrorist attack on Japanese soil that shook the entire world. On a clear spring day in 1995, five members of a religious cult unleashed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system. In attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakmi talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe, and in so doing lays bare the Japanese psyche. As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere.
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Anthrax
by Jeanne Guillemin
This book has implications in an era of growing concern over chemical and biological weapons.
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The Barbary Plague
by Marilyn Chase
""San Francisco in 1900 was a Gold Rush boomtown settling into a gaudy middle age. . . . It had a pompous new skyline with skyscrapers nearly twenty stories tall, grand hotels, and Victorian mansions on Nob Hill. . . . The wharf bristled with masts and smokestacks from as many as a thousand sailing ships and steamers arriving each year. . . . But the harbor would not be safe for long. Across the Pacific came an unexpected import, bubonic plague. Sailing from China and Hawaii into the unbridged arms of the Golden Gate, it arrived aboard vessels bearing rich cargoes, hopeful immigrants, and infected vermin. The rats slipped out of their shadowy holds, scuttled down the rigging, and alighted on the wharf. Uphill they scurried, insinuating themselves into the heart of the city." The plague first sailed into San Francisco on the steamer Australia, on the day after New Year's in 1900. Though the ship passed inspection, some of her stowaways--infected rats--escaped detection and made their way into the city's sewer system. Two months later, the first human case of bubonic plague surfaced in Chinatown. Initially in charge of the government's response was Quarantine Officer Dr. Joseph Kinyoun. An intellectually astute but autocratic scientist, Kinyoun lacked the diplomatic skill to manage the public health crisis successfully. He correctly diagnosed the plague, but because of his quarantine efforts, he was branded an alarmist and a racist, and was forced from his post. When a second epidemic erupted five years later, the more self-possessed and charming Dr. Rupert Blue was placed in command. He won the trust of San Franciscans by shifting the government's attack on the plague from thecool remove of the laboratory onto the streets, among the people it affected. Blue preached sanitation to contain the disease, but it was only when he focused his attack on the newly discovered source of the plague, infected rats and their fleas, that he finally eradicated it--truly one of the great, if little known, triumphs in American public health history. With stunning narrative immediacy fortified by rich research, Marilyn Chase transports us to the city during the late Victorian age--a roiling melting pot of races and cultures that, nearly destroyed by an earthquake, was reborn, thanks in no small part to Rupert Blue and his motley band of pied pipers.
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The Demon in the Freezer
by Richard Preston
Jahrling is haunted by the thought that biologists in secret labs are using genetic engineering to create a new superpox virus, a smallpox resistant to vaccines.".
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Biological Weapons
by Joshua Lederberg
The essays in this book, many of which were originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, examine the medical, scientific, and political dimensions of limiting the threat posed by biological weapons. The contributors consider the current threat posed by biological weapons, the history of attempts to control them, episodes in which biological agents have been used, Iraq's biological warfare program, and policies that the United States might pursue to reduce the threat.
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America's Achilles' Heel
by Richard A Falkenrath
Nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons delivered covertly by terrorists or hostile governments pose a significant and growing threat to the United States and other countries. Although the threat of NBC attack is widely recognized as a central national security issue, most analysts have assumed that the primary danger is military use by states in war, with traditional military means of delivery. The threat of covert attack has been imprudently neglected.Covert attack is hard to deter or prevent, and NBC weapons suitable for covert attack are available to a growing range of states and groups hostile to the United States. At the same time, constraints on their use appear to be eroding. This volume analyzes the nature and limits of the covert NBC threat and proposes a measured set of policy responses, focused on improving intelligence and consequence-management capabilities to reduce U.S. vulnerability.About the authors: Richard A. Falkenrath is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He served as Executive Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA) and, before that, as a Research Fellow. He is the author and co-author of Shaping Europe's Military Order (1995), Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy (1996), America's Achilles' Heel:Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack (1998), and numerous journal articles and chapters of edited volumes. Falkenrath has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the German Society of Foreign Affairs (DGAP) in Bonn. He holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies, King's College, London, where he was a British Marshall Scholar, and is a summa cum laude graduate of Occidental College, Los Angeles, with degrees in economics and international relations. He is on leave in 2001-2002 and is currently serving as Director for Counterproliferation and Homeland Defense at the National Security Council.Bradley A. Thayer is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
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The Hot Zone
by Richard Preston
The virus kills nine out of ten of its victims. Its effects are so quick and so gruesome that even biohazard experts are terrified. It is airborne, it is extremely contagious, and it is about to burn through the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Is there any way to stop it? This doomsday scenario confronted a biohazard SWAT team struggling in secret to stop the outbreak of an exotic "hot" virus at an Army research facility outside Washington. "The Hot Zone" tells the dramatic story of their dangerous race against time, along with an alarming account of how previously unknown viruses that have lived undetected in the rain forest for eons are now entering human populations. From the airlocked confines of a biosafety level 4 military lab, to an airliner over Kenya carrying a passenger dissolving into a human virus bomb, to a deserted jungle cave alive with deadly virus, THE HOT ZONE is a non-fiction thriller like no other. "The Andromeda Strain" was fiction--- "this is real!"
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The Cobra Event
by Richard Preston
“One of those books you literally can’t put down . . . makes The Hot Zone virus—far away in a rainforest—look like no big deal.”—Detroit Free Press Five days ago, a homeless man on a subway platform died in agony as startled commuters looked on. Yesterday, a teenager started having violent, uncontrollable spasms in art class. Within minutes, she too was dead. Dr. Alice Austen is a medical pathologist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. What she knows is that the two deaths are connected. What she fears is that they are only the beginning. . . . “Manages to grab you with the authenticity of its scientific detective work and haunt you with its sheer plausibility.”—Entertainment Weekly
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Prey
by Michael Crichton
A cloud of nanoparticles - all programmed to become predators - has escaped from a laboratory in Nevada.
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The Decameron
by Giovanni Boccaccio
Set against the backdrop of the fourteenth-century Black Death, an anthology of one hundred interlinked tales presents a variety of works recounted by the citizens of Florence--nobles, knights, abbots, nuns, doctors, philosophers, students, peasants, pilgrims, thieves, and others--who have fled the city to escape the plague.
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Executive Orders
by Tom Clancy
Don't Miss the Original Series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Starring John Krasinski! The President is dead. Now, the weight of the world falls on Jack Ryan’s shoulders in this extraordinary #1 New York Times bestseller from Tom Clancy. At the climax of Debt of Honor, the most devastating terrorist act in the history of the world left the President, the Joint Chiefs, the Supreme Court, and nearly all of Congress dead. Only Jack Ryan, confirmed Vice President mere minutes before, survived to take the reins of a shaken and leaderless country. Now he must rebuild a government, comfort a grieving nation, and become a true leader. Meanwhile, he is surrounded by enemies—both inside the White House and around the world—all of them plotting to destroy an untested President. And bring an already wounded country to its knees....
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Rainbow Six
by Tom Clancy
In this #1 New York Times bestselling John Clark thriller, author Tom Clancy takes readers into the shadowy world of anti-terrorism and gets closer to reality than any government would care to admit... Ex-Navy SEAL John Clark has been named the head of Rainbow, an international task force dedicated to combating terrorism. In a trial by fire, Clark is confronted with a violent chain of seemingly separate international incidents. But there is no way to predict the real threat: a group of terrorists like none the world has ever encountered, a band of men and women so extreme that their success could literally mean the end of life on earth as we know it.
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The Stand
by Stephen King
Horrific disaster as a plague virus sweeps the U.S., leaving only a handful of survivors.
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Living Terrors
by Michael T. Osterholm, Ph.D., M.P.H.
America is one killer organism away from a living nightmare that threatens all we hold dear.... A deadly cloud of powdered anthrax spores settles unnoticed over a crowded football stadium.... A school cafeteria lunch is infected with a drug-resistant strain of E. coli.... Thousands in a bustling shopping mall inhale a lethal mist of smallpox, turning each individual into a highly infectious agent of suffering and death.... Dr. Michael Osterholm knows all too well the horrifying scenarios he describes. In this eye-opening account, the nation’s leading expert on bioterrorism sounds a wake-up call to the terrifying threat of biological attack — and America’s startling lack of preparedness. He demonstrates the havoc these silent killers can wreak, exposes the startling ease with which they can be deployed, and asks probing questions about America’s ability to respond to such attacks. Are most doctors and emergency rooms able to diagnose correctly and treat anthrax, smallpox, and other potential tools in the bioterrorist’s arsenal? Is the government developing the appropriate vaccines and treatments? The answers are here in riveting detail — what America has and hasn’t done to prevent the coming bioterrorist catastrophe. Impeccably researched, grippingly told, Living Terrors presents the unsettling truth about the magnitude of the threat. And more important, it presents the ultimate insider’s prescription for change: what we must do as a nation to secure our freedom, our future, our lives.
