Review by Booklist Review
So timely is the subject of Pulitzer Prize^-winning author Rhodes' new book, the publisher pushed its release date up several months. And when you read this chilling chronicle of the spread of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), deadly brain diseases of the mad-cow variety affecting both people and animals, you'll realize that crucial as this exposeis, it is already too late: this is a crisis we will be living with for a long time. Rhodes' dramatic account of three decades of demanding research into the origins of these mysterious, cross-species killer diseases is animated by vivid portraits of the scientists involved, especially the brilliant and eccentric Nobel Prize winner Carleton Gajdusek. His quest began in the late 1950s in New Guinea, where a disease called kuru was eventually linked to the tribe's cannibalism, a connection that, in turn, revealed the cause of mad-cow disease: animal cannibalism, that is, the forced feeding of animal-protein supplements to cattle. Researchers eventually realized that the rendering of dead animals into meat-and-bone meal--which is used not only as animal-protein supplements but also as an ingredient in everything from butter to soap and the bone meal we spread on our gardens--can not only release the deadly infectious protein into our food, including lamb, pork, and chicken, but also can contaminate our blood and organ transplant supplies. Rhodes offers the first popular documentation of a disaster with profound implications, and the sooner the alarming facts are widely known, the better our chances are of combating this insidious plague. Expect heavy media coverage. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"The U.S. still has a chance to avoid a BSE [bovine spongiform encephalopathy] epidemic" like the outbreak of "mad cow disease" that has ravaged the British cattle industry, warns this explosive report by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb). In Britain, Rhodes notes, BSE spread after lax government regulations permitted millions of cattle to ingest ruminant wastes by way of meat-and-bone meal, and evidence mounts that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a human variant of BSE, has already killed Europeans who ate infected beef. Both CJD and BSE belong to a strange new group of "slow virus diseases" (transmissable spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs) that riddle the brain with holes, result in slow death and so far defy efforts to stop them. In cinematic fashion, Rhodes creates a complex, colorful and sometimes gory medical documentary, beginning with a 1950s-era cannibalism-induced epidemic of kuru (a fatal neurological disorder) in New Guinea, then jump-cutting to a San Francisco lab where, in 1983, biochemist Stanley Prusiner identified prions, or abnormal proteins, as the possible disease agent of TSEs, then moving on to a 1985 global outbreak of CJD in children with dwarfism who were injected with human growth hormone. Rhodes's important, gripping book ominously warns that unless the FDA bans and strinctly enforces that ban the feeding of ruminant protein to cattle, Americans could face its own plague of fatal brain diseases. Photos. BOMC and QPB alternate selections; first serial to Washington Post Magazine; author tour. (Mar.) FYI: Publication of Deadly Feasts has been moved up three months in order to inform public comment regarding a proposed ban, announced by the FDA in January, on the feeding of processed ruminant animal wastes to cattle. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Scheduled for June but just moved to March, this book tracks related human and animal diseases perhaps worse than Ebola. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This gripping study of ``mad cow disease'' by Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 1987, etc.) weaves careful research and powerful stories into a chilling narrative that often reads more like science fiction. Indeed, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle gets credit for prescience at one point: The plot of that novel involves an aberrant form of ice crystal that freezes the oceans and brings about the end of life on earth. For ice crystal, read ``prion,'' the term coined by Stanley Prusiner, a California biochemist/neurologist, to describe a proteinaceous infectious particle that is thought to work by triggering the aberrant folding of a normal brain protein. The end result is fatty deposits in the brain, holes where nerve cells used to be, and, eventually, death. There is no cure. The scary thing about the TSEs (transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, a generic term used to refer to several diseases generating this damage in humans and animals) is that they can be passed within, and sometimes across, species by the consumption of suspect tissues. (Many kinds of animal feed include ground-up animal parts.) Normal chemicals and heat treatment that inactivate DNA do not, for some reason, destroy TSE agents. Rhodes faults the British for being terribly slow to get started slaughtering infected herds and for failing to insure that farmers complied with new regulations for feed preparation. He goes on to assert that there is enough evidence to suggest that Americans may also fall victim to cross-species brain diseases: the animal TSEs exist here, and we are regularly exposed to a variety of products (milk, meat, gelatin) that may carry infection. Rhodes's argument, that suveillance and protection are needed as much as research, is persuasive. A powerful and alarming book. (First serial to Washington Post magazine; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection; author tour)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
