When Food Kills: BSE, E.Coli and Disaster Science
£8.99
For professional and interested laymen alike. - This is more than just an interesting account of some notable public health crises, primarily the VTEC outbreak in Lanarkshire and the BSE-nvCJD problem. The author discusses the failure of safety procedures at the organisational level and compares these with other disasters such as Piper-alpha. This approach is, to my knowledge, entirely novel in a popular science book concerning infectious disease and is very welcome.I also very much enjoyed the description of historical investigations into illness in mental institutions and railway accidents and how the many government inspectorates evolved.On the negative side, there are many typos in the text, the number of which varies greatly between chapters, which is indicative of bad editing. The tone of some of the writing is a little self-congratulatory and the description of the sequence of events leading up to the 0157 outbreak in Wishaw is poorly written. Overall, this is worth the somewhat high cover price for a novel and entertaining take on some very important subjects, much neglected by popular literature. Those seeking detailed coverage of BSE, nvCJD and other prion diseases would be better served by getting hold of the excellent Fatal Protein by Ridley and Baker.
Rambling - The author draws parallels between food- and non-food-related disasters, the message being that similar mistakes were made in all of them and lessons can and should be learned from all of them. This point can be made with considerable more brevity than used in this title. Rather than long, detailed, blow-by-blow accounts of rail disasters and mining disasters and nuclear disasters and oil-rig disasters etc etc etc, it would have been better to make passing reference to these and concentrate on the the issue suggested in the title of this book.As a result, it takes a long time to get to where you re going, and the journey doesn t seem particularly worthwhile. A firm and determined editor could have made this book more readable and accessible.