Review: Patient Zero

 Patient Zero is a disease by disease exposition of various common diseases, some preventable by vaccination, others now curable by drugs. Each entry has an entry about an index case, provides symptoms, and a brief explanation of what the disease is. Scattered throughout the book are sidebars, including entries about outbreaks that got politicized, or the history of vaccination.

Once in a while, you'll encounter a breath-taking statistic, like this entry about Tuberculosis:

Tuberculosis has killed more than a billion people in the last two hundred years. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it killed 20 percent of the human population. It currently infects about 2 billion people worldwide—fully a third of the world’s population. It newly infects about 10.4 million people per year and is continuing to kill 1.5 million people annually. (kindle loc 5055)

I read through the book, barely retaining anything (though many items overlaps with stuff I already knew --- though there's a section about Polio that calls into question that FDR had polio as opposed to another similar disease), but it's not really meant to be read cover to cover. This isn't really a book meant to be read in one go. You're supposed to dip in for one or two diseases, and then go away and come back to it.

Nevertheless, I learned a lot about diseases like rabies, which I don't recall getting details about previously.