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Product Description
A normal, healthy woman becomes host to a pork tapeworm that is burrowing into her brain and disabling her motor abilities.
A handsome man contracts Chicken Pox and ends up looking like the victim of a third degree burn.
A vigorous young athlete is bitten by an insect and becomes a target for flesh-eating strep.
Even the most innocuous everyday activities such as eating a salad for lunch, getting bitten by an insect, and swimming in the sea bring human beings into contact with dangerous, often deadly microorganisms. In The Woman with a Worm in Her Head, Dr. Pamela Nagami reveals-through real-life cases-the sobering facts about some of the world's most horrific diseases: the warning signs, the consequences, treatments, and most compellingly, what it feels like to make medical and ethical decisions that can mean the difference between life and death.
Unfailingly precise, calmly instructive, and absolutely engrossing, The Woman with the Worm in Her Head offers both useful information and enjoyable reading.
Amazon.com Review
As a "bugs and drugs doc," Pamela Nagami has seen some of the worst diseases known to humankind--flesh-eating strep, parasitic worms that zigzag through the brain, and AIDS, the biggest infectious disease emergency around. Some of the infections profiled in Maneater can smolder for years before rearing up and killing their unsuspecting human host; others seem innocuous, like chickenpox, which can nevertheless devastate a body. Others, like malaria, travel from other countries, but equally dangerous microbes live in American soil, just waiting to be disturbed by a backhoe or a runner and inhaled in a single breath. These indelible dispatches from the frontlines of infectious disease reveal the danger lurking in everything from salads to the air we breathe, the heroic actions of doctors faced with these bizarre cases on a daily basis, and the limits of medical miracles. Like a detective unraveling a crime scene, Nagami shows us how the most innocuous actions can hurt us, or save our lives. --Lesley Reed
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