New Books: Nursing

For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of aging that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late to help, prolonging lifespan at the expense of healthspan, or quality of life. Dr. Attia believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalized, proactive strategy for longevity, one where we take action now, rather than waiting. This a well-founded, strategic, and tactical approach to extending lifespan.

This powerful report on what went wrong--and right--with America's Covid response, from a team of 34 experts, shows how Americans faced the worst peacetime catastrophe of modern times. The Covid war showed Americans that their wondrous scientific knowledge had run far ahead of their organized ability to apply it in practice. Improvising to fight this war, many Americans displayed ingenuity and dedication, but they struggled with systems that made success difficult and failure easy. This book shows how Americans can come together, learn hard truths, build on what worked, and prepare for global emergencies to come.

In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. He begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine--that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. The discovery of cells announced the birth of a new kind of medicine.

One in two of us will develop cancer at some point in our lives and yet many of us don't understand how cancers arise. How many different kinds of cancer are there? What treatments are available? What does the future hold in terms of developing new therapies? This book demystifies cancer by explaining the underlying cell and molecular biology in a clear and accessible style. It answers the questions commonly asked about cancer, such as what causes cancer and how cancer develops. It also gives an overview of current therapies and how treatments may advance.

In 2018, Villarosa published an article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America. A Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education. Here she shows how today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, Villarosa describes that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely.

Where does one go without health insurance, when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? In this book, Nuila follows the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital where insurance comes second to genuine care. Each patient eventually lands at Ben Taub, the county hospital where Dr. Nuila has worked for over a decade. Nuila delves with empathy into the experiences of his patients, braiding their dramas into a singular narrative that contradicts the established idea that the only way to receive good healthcare is with good insurance.

Having nearly 40 years' experience of the subject, the author covers the history of vaccines, how they work, how research is carried out, their safety, how they are used in society, the inside track on COVID-19 and what the future holds. It is a deeply personal account, with anecdotes involving a cow called Blossom, a hospital in the Caribbean, a crocodile-infested lake in Malawi, an encounter with Russian soldiers in Prague and many others. An A-to-Z section covers every vaccine from Anthrax to Yellow Fever. It will educate, entertain and enlighten the vaccine scientific community and public health practitioners.

At every stage in our species' past, micro-organisms have had macro-effects on the development of human societies. Kyle Harper proposes the first history of human disease to make full use of a radical new source of evidence: pathogen genomes as a biological archive and window into prehistoric times. We can now begin to reconstruct the natural history of human disease at the molecular level, tracing the biographies of the viruses, bacteria, and protozoa that have haunted our species. This will reveal the continuing importance of the deep past in determining the patterns of global divergence today.

Scientists have warned for decades that the next big pandemic would be caused by a changeable new virus - very possibly a coronavirus - but such warnings were ignored for political or economic reasons. This book takes readers inside the frantic international effort to understand and control SARS-CoV-2 (aka COVID-19), peering over the shoulders of the scientists who led the chase and found the way to fight the virus. The author shows how new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems, and how these viruses adapt to the human hosts - sometimes causing global catastrophe.

COVID-19 is the biggest public health and economic disaster of our time. It has posed the same threat across the globe, yet countries have responded very differently and some have clearly fared much better than others. Peter Baldwin uncovers the reasons why in this definitive account of the global politics of pandemic. He shows that how nations responded depended above all on the political tools available -- how firmly could the authorities order citizens' lives and how willingly would they be obeyed? Whether citizens would follow their leaders' requests and how soon they would tire of their demands were crucial to hopes of taming the pandemic.