Book Review
Animal Agents and Vectors of Human Disease
P. C. Beaver and R. C. Jung
5th edition, 1985, Lea and Febiger
Animal Agents and Vectors of Human
Disease covers the first half of its subject matter thoroughly by giving classical parasitological details about all the
significant (and many less significant)
eukaryote pathogens of man that are
usually thought of as animal parasites.
The business of vectors is much less well
served: only arthropods seem to count,
so one looks in vain, for instance, for
details of the snail hosts of schistosomes. Within the arthropods the
coverage of important groups such as
the mosquitoes is very superficial.
An important disease such as Bancroftian filariasis is considered under
section headings of: Morphology, biology and life cycle; Pathogenesis and
symptomatology; Diagnosis; Treatment; Epidemiology; and Control. This
covers some seven pages (including
three pages of illustrations). Of the
total, treatment, control and epidemiology command only about seven percent of the space.
Twenty-two pages at the back of the
book form an appendix on 'Aids to
diagnosis and treatment'. Whilst not
myself clinically qualified, I noted with
some disquiet that pyrimethamine with
trisulphapyrimidine is recommended
without qualification as treatment for
toxoplasmosis. One important candidate group for treatment is pregnant
women with a primary infection and I
am not certain that this regime does not
hazard the fetus in the first trimester.
Spiramycin (which is not mentioned)
may be preferable.
The way the subject matter has been
approached leaves me with the feeling
that this book is a living fossil. I cannot
say how much it has changed from the
previous editions, but its treatment is
quite consistent with its origins in the
early 1950s, and many of its illustrations
date from even earlier. Of course this
would be reasonable were they
uniformly good illustrations, but unfortunately by no means all of them are
good. Many of the line drawings original to E. C. Faust (the senior author of
earlier editions) or adapted by him are
poorly drawn and are labelled in a difficult and obscurantist way with dashed
lines. Some of them are interesting antiquities, such as the drawing of Schistosoma haematobium which originated in
1896. A number of the photographs,
which are rather small, are borrowed
from 'Clinical Parasitology' (of which
Animal Agents seems to be a poor relation). The traditional strength of parasitology books is in life-cycle diagrams.
Unfortunately Animal Agents must be
faulted in this regard too: there is no
uniformity of format so that sometimes
a token host is drawn and sometimes
not, a key with letters or numbers may
be used for labelling, or names may
appear in full on the diagram; moreover
they have not always been brought up to
date. For instance, the malaria diagram
has not been modified to include hypnozoites (the source of true relapses),
even though these dormant liver forms
have found their way into the text.
For reasons which one can only guess
at, the authors have chosen to eschew
mention of just about all of the vigorous
growth points of modern parasitology.
One would not know from this book
that any significant facts had emerged
about how trypanosomes evade the
immune response or how immunopathology figures in the pathogenesis of
schistosomiasis. Not even the pragmatic
business of diagnostic serology is properly attended to, whereas by contrast
the making of a blood film is, and so are
the methods for egg counts on stool
samples. Naturally in this myopic context one finds nothing to suggest that
the surface chemistry of malaria sporozoites is now understood from the structure of the coat's gene, nor that monoclonal antibodies have been used widely
to dissect the antigens of many of the
important organisms this book deals
with. Unlike hypnozoites, the new
understanding of the mechanism of specific venular endothelial adhesion which
mediates the retreat from the circulation and probably the fatal cerebral
complications of Plasmodium falciparum has been ignored. To cap it all
there
are irritating discrepancies
between the malaria distribution map
and the map for the occurrence of chloroquine resistance.
As well as Beaver and Jung, seven
other authors, all on the staff of Tulane
University, have contributed to this
work. The preface states that it is aimed
at medical students, students in biology
and in public and international health.
My recommendation would be that they
avoid this book unless they need to
know just the rudimentary biology of a
human parasite. For the readership of
Vaccine it can have little or nothing to
offer.
G. H. Mitchell
Guy's Hospita/ Medica/ School
London, UK
Erratum
Conference Report: Guidelines for the development of recombinant vaccinia viruses for
use as vaccines, Vaccine 1986, 4, 69
T h e title in the r e f e r e n c e s h o u l d r e a d " V a c c i n a virus: a s e l e c t a b l e e u k a r y o t i c c l o n i n g a n d
e x p r e s s i o n v e c t o r " a n d n o t " S i n g l e o r m u l t i p l e g e n e i n s e r t i o n s " as p r i n t e d .
204 Vaccine, Vol. 4, September 1986