Communicable Diseases: A Global Perspective

This is the 5th edition and 20th anniversary edition of Communicable Diseases: A Global Perspective, a single-author book by Roger Webber. The book covers a huge topic, but is compact, 340 paperback pages in the flesh, and also available as an e-book. It is small enough to carry around without risk of injury, and is reasonably priced for a textbook. At first glance one learns that the book has an unusual and clever organization, with diseases organized not by pathogen taxonomy but rather based on means of transmission or other unifying features, for example, chapters entitled " Diseases of Poor Hygiene, " " Diseases of Soil Contact , " and " Insect-borne Diseases. " This organization seems not only a positive, as it offers a more interesting read than does the usual pathogen-based organization, especially for those not focused on pathogen biology, but also a negative, as it is hard to find diseases of interest. Indeed, this should not be seen as a reference book on tropical pathogens; there are much thicker books to fill that niche. Rather, this book offers easily portable one-stop shopping covering global infectious diseases. The book should not be the only text covering tropical infectious diseases on the shelf of a tropical medicine clinician or researcher, but it offers a broad and approachable introduction on this large topic for students, tropical medicine health workers, and others interested in international infectious diseases. The book opens with 80 pages on principles of communi-cable diseases and public health. These include discussions of basic principles of communicable diseases, disease control principles and methods, control strategies, and public health. These chapters cover a lot of ground efficiently, will be particularly useful to students, and are a strong feature of the book. The remainder of the book entails 13 chapters and a total of 113 subsections, most covering a specific infectious disease , and some covering important topics not linked to a single disease. The chapters are organized, as mentioned above, by various criteria that link the diseases, such as how they are transmitted (" Diseases Transmitted by Body Fluids "), shared clinical features (" Respiratory Diseases and Other Airborne-Transmitted Infections "), or special factors (" Pregnancy and Infection "). This organization makes good sense, but since it is different than what we usually see in textbooks , it takes some getting used to. If you want to find meningococcal meningitis, …