Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health

In this meticulously researched and ultimately explosive new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett takes readers across the globe to reveal how a series of potential and present public health catastrophes together form a terrifying portrait of real global disaster in the making.

"In her surprise best-seller The Coming Plague, Pulitzer Prize-winning Newsday reporter and former NPR science correspondent Garrett drew readers' attention to emerging, antibiotic-resistant diseases. Her primary recommendations were more (and more effective) public-health fieldwork, research, and preventive medicine. In Betrayal of Trust, Garrett's subject is public health itself: the desperate inadequacy of public-health infrastructure in much of the developing world and the shocking neglect of that infrastructure in 'developed' nations....Garrett's 'biowar' chapter makes clear that the threat of biological terrorism has gained the attention of world (and U.S.) leaders, but their responses to date have been dominated by a military (rather than public-health) mind-set. Dramatic changes in attitudes as well as resource allocation will be needed to construct a public-health infrastructure capable of coping with the myriad challenges of globalization." Booklist

"These are lurid, disturbing, and well-documented images that are not easily dismissed as alarmist....But it is Garrett's observations about the United States that are the most disturbing....[Her message] is a momentous one that is delivered persuasively." Fitzhugh Mullan, The New York Times Book Review

An explosive and meticulously well-researched look at the dangers of a failing public health system unequipped to handle large-scale global risks like a coronavirus pandemic
"A frightening vision of the future and a deeply unsettling one . . . a sober, scary book that not only limns the dangers posed by emerging diseases but also raises serious questions about two centuries' worth of Enlightenment beliefs in science and technology and progress." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

In this "disturbing, meticulously researched medical alarm" (New York Times Book Review) by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett takes on perhaps the most crucial global issue of our time. She asks: is our collective health in a state of decline? If so, how dire is this crisis and has the public health system itself contributed to it? Using riveting detail and finely-honed storytelling, exploring outbreaks around the world, Garrett exposes the underbelly of the world's globalization to find out if it can still be assumed that government can and will protect the people's health, or if that trust has been irrevocably broken.

In this "meticulously researched" account (New York Times Book Review), a Pulitzer Prize-winning author examines the dangers of a failing public health system unequipped to handle large-scale global risks like a coronavirus pandemic.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett takes on perhaps the most crucial global issue of our time in this eye-opening book. She asks: is our collective health in a state of decline? If so, how dire is this crisis and has the public health system itself contributed to it? Using riveting detail and finely-honed storytelling, exploring outbreaks around the world, Garrett exposes the underbelly of the world's globalization to find out if it can still be assumed that government can and will protect the people's health, or if that trust has been irrevocably broken.
"A frightening vision of the future and a deeply unsettling one . . . a sober, scary book that not only limns the dangers posed by emerging diseases but also raises serious questions about two centuries' worth of Enlightenment beliefs in science and technology and progress." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Laurie Garrett is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has been a health and science writer for Newsday since 1988, and a contributor to such publications as Vanity Fair, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Affairs. Previously, she was science correspondent for NPR. She is the only person to have received all of the top four awards in American journalism: the Pulitzer Prize (for which she has three times been a finalist); the George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award; the George C. Polk Award; and three times honored by the Overseas Press Club of America. Her book The Coming Plague (1994) was named "one of the best books of 1994" by both the New York Times Book Review and Library Journal, and was a national bestseller. Garrett lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
1. Filth And Decay: Pneumonic plague hits India and the world ill responds
2. Landa-Landa: An Ebola virus epidemic in Zaire proves public health is imperiled by corruption
3. Bourgeois Physiology: The collapse of all semblances of public health in the former Soviet Socialist Republics
4. Preferring Anarchy And Class Disparity: The American public health infrastructure in an age of antigovernmentalism
5. Biowar: Threatening biological terrorism and public health
6. Epilogue: The changing face of public health and future global prophylaxis
Notes
Index