In this brilliant and gripping medical detective story. Richard Rhodes follows virus hunters on three continents as they track the emergence of a deadly new brain disease that first kills cannibals in New Guinea, then cattle and young people in Britain and France -- and that has already been traced to food animals in the United States. In a new Afterword for the paperback, Rhodes reports the latest U.S. and worldwide developments of a burgeoning global threat.
The British epidemic of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or "mad cow" disease, is only one in a series of mysterious and often fatal afflictions that have baffled scientists for more than 40 years. Deadly Feasts is a compelling account of decades of research into a family of diseases ranging from kuru in primitive human tribes to scrapie in sheep. Richard Rhodes traces the attempts of scientists to understand these strange diseases, which are now known to be transmitted by ingesting the brain or nervous tissue of infected creatures, even though the pathogen itself is an enigma that seems to be neither bacterial nor viral. Deadly Feasts is packed with historical, anthropological, and epidemiological detail, and is graphic and occasionally even alarming in its speculations.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Mad-Cow-a-licious:
This book is particularly well researched and equally well written. It opens with a story of the cannibals in New Guinea, and their culture. It describes the Kuru disease that these people got from eating their dead. It goes on to discuss the evolution of our understanding of prions. It was written like a biography rather than a textbook, which kept me very interested and even hanging on the edge of my seat at times. (especially because I tend to be a hypochondriac when I read books about disease.) This... more info
Non-fiction that reads like Fiction:
I love a good medical mystery fiction story. This book reads almost like a work of fiction, but the diseases are frightenly real. I picked up this book, and read it in a course of a few hours. It really was too good to put down. I enjoyed the format of the book, linking one "mysterious" brain disease to the next. There were smaller stories within the main story. All lead to the discovery of prions as the causative agent of several brain eating Encephalopathy's. Not a detail was left out in regards to... more info
A Riddle, within an Enigma, within a Prion:
Deadly Feasts is a very readable condensation of decades of research into the bizarre, elusive class of diseases usually referred to as "prion" diseases or "transmisible spongiform encephalopathies" (TSEs). The story is a pageant of brilliant personalities, scientific heroes and villains, bold explorers and relentless researchers, which could well depict the romance of the scientific world in microcosm. As someone medically educated, this atypical, mysterious class of diseases has long captured my... more info
Gripping:
My wife and I read this book. It makes you very aware of what is going on with animals with the cows as the main focus. We are very selective where we buy our meat now. I have not eaten a Big Mac since reading this book, which has been 8 years now. It will change your life too. Read this book.
