Abigail A. Salyers

I debated considerably about buying this book. It was old (1994) but was cheap (at a charity book sale). So when the prices were halved, I snapped it up. And I'm actually quite pleased with it. It gives a good coverage of pathogenic bacteria (from a human perspective anyway). And covers host defences such as mucosal barriers, and the blood borne defences such as phagocytes. they also look at virulence factors (from the bacterium's perspective: what helps them to invade and colonise the host's surfaces, etc., There is also quite a good coverage of vaccines and antibiotics and their functions. One of the things I liked about the book was the little "box stories".....really interesting in their own right; such as the fact that the nursery rhyme "Ring a ring a rosies" had nothing to do with the plague despite this oft repeated interpretation of the story.
I'm a bit disappointed that the scope of the book seems to be limited to bacterial pathenogenesis in humans. It seems to skip the whole plant kingdom ....and other kingdoms. There doesn't seem to be even a mention of how bacteria invade and colonise plants ....which I think is interesting ...even if it's just for comparison purposes. Anyway, that's not the scope of this book which is designed for medical students. Though, I think one of the things that I took away from my studies of Agricultural Science was that the world is made up of a huge variety of living things....viruses, bacteria, prions, fungi, algae, plants, insects, reptiles, mammals etc., and it is all one continuum and when you intervene at one point you inevitably affect something somewhere else. This book is so limited in its focus that it doesn't really educate the medical students about the rest of the world. OK what it does, it seems to do really well. It's easy reading and very understandable and covers a range of the bacterial disease of humans quite well.
I was also interested in the details about the differences between gram positive and gram negative bacteria in terms of their surrounding membranes. (Also that gram negative bacteria fall into a number of phylogenetic groups that are as distinct from each other as they are from the gram positive groups. ....The gram positive groups form a much tighter phylogenetic cluster.).
OK, I haven't yet read the book from cover to cover...but enough to convince me of its value. Unfortunately for me, the technology in this area has moved so fast that I think the whole section on identification of strains of bacteria by DNA testing is probably out of date. We were just starting to use electrophoresis when I did biochemistry some 60 years ago and it's advanced in leaps and bounds since then. (I must get some more recent material). But overall, I really like this book. Five stars from me.… (altro)