Anatomy of an Epidemic

by Gordon Thomas

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385143710
• ISBN13: 9780385143714
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 366 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Inventing the Legionnaires' Bacterium

Gordon Thomas has written several books that question current orthodoxy simply by investigating a subject. My first experience with his style was with his book Issels the Biography of a Doctor. This book showed that the cancer establishment in most countries doesn't want effective treatments for cancer and is prepared to use any method to suppress them.This more recent book explores the investigation of the cause of Legionnaires' disease by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta immediately following the Legionnaires' disease outbreak at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia in 1976. It gives a blow by blow decription of the people involved and, more importantly, the political factors that led to the CDC looking for a virus or bacterium as the cause, rather than any other likely factor such as food contamination or any other toxic substance.The main conclusion I drew from the book, not necessarily shared by the author, came from the last few pages where the scientists finally found some signs of a microorganism which they named legionella. It was not found in large enough amounts to cause disease, nor was it found in the relevant tissues of all the victims who died (such as the saliva or mucus). This shows that it could not have been the main factor in the deaths of the Legionnaires. Since that time legionella has wrongly been singled out as the only cause of the disease. It thus adds to the long string of false assumptions made by the medical profession that lead to the situation where only 15% of medical interventions are based on solid evidence. The HIV as the cause of AIDS is a similarly wrongly accused innocent victim as described in Peter Duesberg's excellent book "Inventing the AIDS Virus"