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Praise for Mike Davis and his work:
A powerful mixture of environmental, political and socioeconomic analysis on a worldwide scale.
Smart and tough: an author with one eye out for the underdog, the other on the sickness of the political and corporate landscape.
The Monster at Our Door
The Global Threat of Avian Flu
hardcover
$21.95 / £12.99
—SHIGERU OMI, REGIONAL DIRECTOR, WESTERN PACIFIC OFFICE OF THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION, NOVEMBER 2004
Avian influenza is a viral asteroid on a collision course with humanity. In 1918, a pandemic strain of influenza killed at least 40 million people in three months. Now, leading researchers believe, another world catastrophe is imminent.
A virus of astonishing lethality, known as H5N1, has become entrenched in the poultry and wild bird populations of East Asia. It kills two out of every three people it infects. The World Health Organization warns that it is on the verge of mutating into a super-contagious pandemic form that could visit several billion homes within two years.
In this urgent and extraordinarily frightening book, Mike Davis reconstructs the scientific and political history of a viral apocalypse in the making, exposing the central roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments, in creating the ecological conditions for the emergence of this new plague. He also details the scandalous failure of the Bush administration, obsessed with hypothetical “bio-terrorism,” to safeguard Americans from the greatest biological threat since HIV/AIDS.
MacArthur fellow Mike Davis is the author of several books, including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, Dead Cities, and—with Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller—Under the Perfect Sun. He lives in San Diego.
Fall 2005
hardcover
5 1/4 x 7 1/2, 224 pages
978-1-59558-011-5
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