Review- Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World's Worst Diseases by Lydia Kang & Nate Pedersen

Title: Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World's Worst Diseases

Author: Lydia Kang & Nate Pedersen

Genre: Adult, nonfiction, science

Publication date: November 2021

Published by: Workman Publishing Company

Source: Borrowed from library

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Synopsis: From the masters of storytelling-meets-science and co-authors of Quackery, Patient Zero tells the long and fascinating history of disease outbreaks—how they start, how they spread, the science that lets us understand them, and how we race to destroy them before they destroy us.

Written in the authors’ lively and accessible style, chapters include page-turning medical stories about a particular disease or virus—smallpox, Bubonic plague, polio, HIV—that combine “Patient Zero” narratives, or the human stories behind outbreaks, with historical examinations of missteps, milestones, scientific theories, and more.

Learn the tragic stories of Patient Zeros throughout history, such as Mabalo Lokela, who contracted Ebola while on vacation in 1976, and the Lewis Baby on London’s Broad Street, the first to catch cholera in an 1854 outbreak that led to a major medical breakthrough. Interspersed are origin stories of a different sort—how a rye fungus in 1951 turned a small village in France into a phantasmagoric scene reminiscent of Burning Man. Plus the uneasy history of human autopsy, how the HIV virus has been with us for at least a century, and more.

My rating: ★★★★☆

For many millennia, humans blamed sickness on anything but germs. When boils, lethal amounts of diarrhea, and vomiting blood brought whole cities to their knees, responsibility was cast on comets, eclipses, earthquakes, demons, gods, or witchcraft. Powers far larger than ourselves were forever the reasons behind outbreaks of disease.

As we've learned more about infectious diseases through the years, it's no surprise that our goal has always been to understand them, to control them, and to kill them—before they kill us.

Quackery by these authors was one of my favorite books of 2023 so I was very happy when I saw that they had written another nonfiction book! While I didn’t love Patient Zero as much as Quackery, I still very much enjoyed it!

For this book, the idea of a patient zero is not to point a definitive historical finger, but to present the stories of diseases and their origins as examples of the ways in which outbreaks and pandemics are infinitely more complex, unexpected, and often more unexplainable than we realize.

The introduction of this book read very dry so I was a little worried that this book was going to be hard to read, but it actually wasn’t! It was very easy to follow and each chapter talked about a different disease and it easily explained where the viruses came from and how humans acquired them. The storytelling was pretty linear for the most part, which was nice. Sometimes it would double back as the scientists tried to figure out where the disease came from as they investigated and did testing. I also appreciated how it seemed to answer all my questions as they popped up. Like, I wondered if there was a vaccine for a certain disease, and all I had to do was read a little bit further to find out 🤦‍♀️😂 Patient I am not, apparently. Lol.

One thing I noticed from reading this book is that a lot of the diseases tend to be zoonotic infections, meaning that they originate in animals and then hop over to humans. One animal in particular that seemed to make a lot of appearances in this book was the bat.

I hope scientists are studying the hell out of bats because they sound cool! But also scary. Bats are really good for the environment, obviously, but they actually carry a lot of diseases. However, the bats somehow remain unaffected by all these diseases that are deadly to us. It’s incredible.

We should think about bats as allies. As conservationist Kristin Lear at the University of Georgia recommends, "Don't kill bats. They might actually be the key to learning how to fight these viruses in the future. If bats can live with these viruses without succumbing to them, perhaps they can teach us how, too.

I really enjoyed learning about all these different deadly diseases and where they originated from. The first one we are thrown into is about a parasitic fungus (ergotism) that grows on grain and causes either bad hallucinations that can lead to suicide or can make your limbs fall off, depending on the type you get.

It’s wild! The story of Typhoid Mary was another wild one because Mary was asymptomatic and ended up infecting over 100 people! And ebola, good god. We all know what a horrible disease that is. The exact origin is still a mystery, but there are theories about where it came from. One such theory, you will never guess, suggests the culprit is bats 👀 And I didn’t know this, but the first ever ebola vaccine wasn’t approved until December 2019!! That literally just happened! That’s insane!

And remember that Mad Cow Disease panic that happened all those years ago? Yeah, the disease that was caused by CANNIBALISM? Yeah, there is also a disease called kuru that happened in the Fore people from, um, human cannibalism 😰 Something really interesting about these diseases specifically is that they weren’t caused by a virus, bacteria, parasite, or even a fungus. They were caused by an infectious protein. So because your body didn’t recognize it as a foreign body, there would be no immune response, the proteins would become toxic to your neurons, and then you would just... die.

The book also broke down the biblical plague with modern scientific explanations, which I found very interesting. It just made sense! As for leprosy, the fact that it’s one of the LEAST contagious diseases out there (in fact, most of us are naturally immune to it these days!) and yet the people who had it were severely ostracized. So much so that in Hawaii, they had an island (that was there until 1969!!) where they would send those who were infected. And get this, having leprosy was CRIMINALIZED! What?! So if you were sent to this island, you were legally declared DEAD!

And the book also went into The Columbian Exchange where, as the subtitle of this chapter said, “The ‘Exchange’ was Not Equal.” Ain't that the truth! It was just so sad to read about all the Native Americans being hit with all these awful diseases that they had never encountered before. The mortality rate in indigenous people was 60-95%!! That's insane! And it wasn’t just when Columbus came to America, but also when the Spaniards invaded Central and South America.

There was also a section on COVID and honestly, it was too soon 😭 Reading about the initial response just made me mad. Reading about rampaging diseases that you haven’t lived through is so much easier 😭

I did enjoy this book overall, though! It was very informative and easy to read. I think I like Quackery by these authors more just because the writing in that one was a little more sassy. Lol. But I get why the writing in Patient Zero was more serious since it was dealing with, well, serious topics. Although there was a chapter on quackery which I enjoyed very much! I thought it was going to be almost a recap of that book, but it wasn't! It was all mostly new information that wasn’t in the previous book, so that was nice.

But this book was overall very interesting and I enjoyed learning about where certain diseases came from, how these diseases were initially perceived and treated, and how medicine and science have evolved over the years.

And to end this on a sort of positive note, 1978 was when we had the very last smallpox victim. Smallpox may be the only major infectious disease that has been eradicated to date, but I call that a win for humanity!

Take care of your body. After all, scientists have been doing crazy things like drinking H. pylori shakes in order to save lives. Being better to ourselves is really the least we can do.

Have you read this book? If so, what did you think about it? If not, what do you think? Does it sound like something you might want to read? Leave me a link to your review or comment below! 😊