Betrayal of Trust

From the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Coming Plague, comes an explosive new work on a full-blown global health crisis in the making. Garrett takes readers around the world to reveal how a series of potential and present public health catastrophies mark the death of public health and taken together form a terrifying portrait of real global disaster in the making. Public health is a bond between a government and its people and if either side betrays that trust the system is likely to collapse like a house of cards. Garrett illustrates how over the last twenty years this trust has frayed and our global public health system systematically destroyed. With globalization, no person is safe from anti-biotic resistant 'superbugs', epidemics or biowar. Garrett takes us to India, where an outbreak of bubonic plague created international hysteria. To Zaire where the deadly Ebola virus broke out in a filthy and completely unequipped hospital. The 15 States of the former soviet Union have seen the most astounding collapse in public health in the industrialised world. She also exposes the increasingly chaotic, ungoverned world of biological terrorism, a threat we have yet to fully comprehend. Betrayal of Trust is a monumental achievement and a wake-up call to all those involved in public health. In the aftermath of September 11 her story rings only too true.