Edward Willett

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I get a box full of disease detectives!

Oh, all right, not the actual detectives themselves, but my latest book from Enslow, Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Disease. That's the cover at left. Here's the blurb from the back: Working from high-tech labs in Canada or remote villages in Africa, epedemiologists travel the world trying to keep us safe from deadly diseases. Learn how these "disease detectives" are coming up with new wayts to fight disease, and find out if you have what it takes to become an epidemiologist, too! I'd seen that before. What I hadn't seen, until the books arrived today, was this very nice cover quote from Jonathan M. Samet, MD, Professor ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 17:03, July 10th, 2009 under Blog | Comment now »

Disease-Hunting Scientist: Marta Guerra and Ebola

[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/marta-guerra-and-ebola.mp3[/podcast] Here's one last column condensed from a chapter in my new children's book Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases (Enslow Publishers): In the movie Outbreak, researchers from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have to figure out how to stop a kind of super-Ebola virus from ravaging the U.S. In 1995, the same year Outbreak came out, Marta Guerra, who already had her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree and was finishing her master's degree in public health. "I remember seeing that movie and thinking, 'Wow, that's what I want to do!'" Five years later, Guerra, now with a Ph.D. in epidemiology and a brand-new officer of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 13:58, June 9th, 2009 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns | Comment now »

Disease-Hunting Scientists: Jonathan Epstein and the search for SARS

[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/jonathan-epstein-and-sars.mp3[/podcast] My next book, due out this summer from Enslow Publishers, is entitled Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases. Each of its chapters focuses on one particular scientist whose work is related to hunting disease. The chapters are much longer than these science columns, but I thought in honour of the book’s release, I’d try over the next little while to boil down some of those chapters into columns. Call it the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books Version—not just condensed, but extremely condensed! One chapter focuses on Jonathan Epstein, a veterinarian epidemiologist with the Consortium for Conservation Medicine. In 2005, he led the first of five expeditions into China that eventually determined that bats were the “natural reservoir” of the ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 11:38, May 20th, 2009 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns | Comment now »