Betrayal of Trust

by Professor James Russo, Chemistry

* Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett (Hyperion, 2000). Betrayal of Trust is journalist Laurie Garrett’s sequel to her 1994 book The Coming Plague. In The Coming Plague, she described the global emergence of viral diseases and the resurgence of bacterial and parasitic diseases which are resistant to multiple antibiotics and for which effective vaccines do not exist. In Betrayal of Trust, her five years of travels to India, Zaire, Russia, and the U.S. unveil a global public health system teetering on the brink of collapse.
She clearly shows that the spread of epidemic disease is one inevitable side effect of global travel and trade and of the widening global disparities in wealth. To her, the solution is not high-tech medicine or the latest pharmaceutical, but a commitment to clean water, adequate nutrition, and a public health infrastructure. Unfortunately, it is difficult to mobilize the political support for these low-tech needs. Her chapter on the threats of bioterrorism (including anthrax and smallpox) are of particular note in 2002. Garrett’s 550-plus pages are of interest and understandable to all, while the additional 150 pages of endnotes and data are of greatest interest to those interested in biomedicine, health care, and public health policy.

* Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides (Doubleday, 2001). Warning: once started, this book is very difficult to put down! Hampton Sides’s narrative alternates with chapters describing the surrender to Japanese soldiers and death march of American and Filipino soldiers on the Bataan peninsula of Luzon Island in the Philippines in 1942. The narrative then switches to the hour-by-hour account of the heroic four-day rescue mission in which U.S. Army rangers and Filipino guerrillas liberated 500 of the survivors from the Cabana-tuan POW camp.
All chapters give a disturbing reminder of the torture and brutality that can result when one group of humans denies personhood to another group of humans. Yet Sides also weaves in the remarkable resilience of the human body and spirit to endure the physical and emotional trauma of war and imprisonment. In addition, his account of the loss of life to American, Filipino, and other Allied soldiers during the march and internment due to starvation, vitamin deficiency, and infectious disease is a poignant reminder that little has changed in the past 60 years. Armed conflict results in large numbers of prisoners and refugees, which leads to a rapid breakdown of the public health network and one more episode of epidemic disease and death.
Though a feeling of joy at the final rescue and self-sacrifice is unavoidable, this book is much more than a good war story. It is a journey through the spectrum of human potential for good and evil toward one another.

James Russo, Associate Professor of Chemistry