Why a deadly disease might be coming your way soon: this scare story takes off from a “massive report issued this week by the U.S. Institute of Medicine, Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response. It might as well have the subtitle: How We’re Blowing It.” Slate

But none of this is new. Investigative journalist Laurie Garrett said it all in another (also massive) tome almost a decade ago, The Coming Plague: newly emerging diseases

in a world out of balance, and I’ll bet with far less turgid prose. [As loyal readers of FmH know, I try to follow this stuff in an occasional department here of ’emerging infectious disease news’.]