Seven Modern Plagues shares vignettes about scarily common ailments of the modern world that are the result of humans impacting their environment. For example, SARS and AIDS are examples of humans delving further into spaces that were previously wild and also examples of how things can spread so easily in our global community. Other diseases include Hantavirus, Salmonella, Lyme Disease, and Mad Cow Disease.

It's a harrowing book to read as we approach Fall 2020 with COVID-19 still making many of us in the US hunker down at home, and it makes me wonder if there's ultimately anything we can do to slow these disasters of our own making.

Now here's a happy thought--a veterinarian explains how seven diseases (among them antibiotic resistant salmonella, HIV/AIDS, Mad Cow Disease and Lyme Disease) are slipping the bounds of their usual location and transmission reservoirs because of climate change, human encroachment into new areas, industrial farming practices like rendering for feed and disruption of the usual predator/prey balance, as well as just how unprepared the health system is to identify and deal with it.