Karolina Paniagua was horribly sick and no one could figure out why. At first, Karolina came down with a high fever and joint pain. Over the next couple of weeks, she could barely walk. A doctor decided to test Karolina for Chagas disease, a lethal illness spread by the deadly kissing bug. The test came back positive--Karolina was stunned. Read Karolina's harrowing tale of survival, and learn all about kissing bugs and the deadly disease they carry in this engrossing new narrative nonfiction book for young readers.
Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection Finalist for New American Voices Award and Lammy Award for Bisexual Nonfiction A TIME, NPR, Chicago Public Library, Science for the People, WYNC, WBUR Radio Boston, and The Stacks Podcast Best Book of the Year Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award As heard on Fresh Air Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas?or the kissing bug disease?is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus. After her aunt’s death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects?the “kissing bugs”?that carry the Chagas parasite. Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.
Come face to face with the most incredible insects on Earth, where you'll experience the microscopic world of bugs in mind-blowing depth and detail. Super Bug Encyclopedia showcases a huge variety of these tiny creatures at close range, making them millions of times bigger than their true size to give you the complete picture. From ants to wasps and centipedes to spiders, experience amazing anatomy and athleticism and find out who comes out on top for strength and speed. You'll meet the hawkmoth with the longest tongue of any insect and discover the velvet worm that squirts sticky slime to snare prey. Stand clear as the African bombardier beetle blasts out a sizzling hot chemical attack and race alongside the glorious green tiger beetle that lives life in the fast lane. This stunning visual feast incorporates jaw-dropping photography, at-a-glance facts, amazing statistics, dashboard-style profiles, and expert information to give you an unprecedented insight into the complex life of creepy crawlies. Did you know bugs are the most successful creatures on our planet? Or that insects took flight 150 million years before the first bird? Find out all this and much, much more inside as you become the ultimate bug hunter.
Whether at a zoo, on a camping trip, or under our bedsheets, we are surrounded by animals. While most are perfectly harmless, it's the magnificent exceptions that populate The Book of Deadly Animals. Award-winning writer Gordon Grice takes readers on a tour of the animal kingdom—from grizzly bears to great white sharks, big cats to crocodiles. Every page overflows with astonishing facts about Earth's great predators and unforgettable stories of their encounters with humans, all delivered in Grice's signature dark comic style. Illustrated with awe-inspiring photographs of beasts and bugs, this wondrous work will horrify, delight, and amaze.
Diseases caused by animal parasites remain, on a worldwide basis, among the principal causes of morbidity and mortality. This book gives the medical student-and the practitioner-the basic information about parasitic protozoa, worms, and anthropods and the diseases they cause that will enable the reader to recognize and manage them. One is impressed with the broad scope of the subject, the diversity of the parasitic modes of life, and how much there is yet unknown about the biology of parasitism. At the same time the book provides vignettes of the often fascinating historical background of our knowledge of animal parasites and glimpses of current research that is beginning to shape the future of parasitology. William Trager, PH.D. Professor Emeritus of Parasitology The Rockefeller University New York, New York Preface This book fills the need we have felt in teaching parasitic diseases to medical students. Many of the available texts are too detailed for what is inevitably an introductory course; others that do treat this subject with appropriate brevity are now out of date; still others lack documentation of references and thus fail to guide the readers to a broader understanding of this subject. We have addressed ourselves to medical students, but they are not our sole target. Clinicians unfamiliar with the complexities of parasitic diseases need a guide to the diagnosis and management of these infections. We intend our book to serve this function as well.
The next book in the successful 100 MOST series, 100 Most Feared Creatures features the scariest beasts in the animal kingdom! This book will explore the world's most ferocious creatures and reveal the deadliest facts about these terrifying animals. Who fights off predators by spraying blood from its eyes? How does the slender, deep-sea gulper swallow prey twice its size? Who sucks out body fluids with its short, sharp mouthparts? Readers will learn everything they ever wanted to know about some of the scariest creatures on the planet.
A fascinating compendium featuring over 70 unusual animal species. What's in a name? This lively, illustrated celebration is jam-packed with creatures notable for their bizarre, baffling, and just-plain-funny names. Meet the White-Bellied Go-Away Bird, whose cry sounds like someone screaming, "Go away!" Or the Aye-Aye, whose name means "I don't know" in Malagasy because no one wants anything to do with this bad-luck creature. Some are obvious, if still weird––guess what the Fried Egg Jellyfish looks like. Others sound like an inside joke: It's easy to figure out what was on the taxonomist's mind when he christened a fly he discovered Pieza Pie. Along the way you'll learn all about these curiously named animals' just-as-curious habits, appearances, and abilities.
Surprising though it seems, the world faces almost as great a threat today from arthropod-borne diseases as it did in the heady days of the 1950s when global eradication of such diseases by eliminating their vectors with synthetic insecticides, particularly DDT, seemed a real possibility. Malaria, for example, still causes tremendous morbidity and mortality throughout the world, especially in Africa. Knowledge of the biology of insect and arachnid disease vectors is arguably more important now than it has ever been. Biological research directed at the development of better methods of control becomes even more important in the light of the partial failure of many control schemes that are based on insecticide- although not all is gloom, since basic biological studies have contributed enormously to the outstanding success of international control programmes such as the vast Onchocerciasis Control Programme in West Africa. It is a sine qua non for proper understanding of the epidemiology and successful vector control of any human disease transmitted by an arthropod that all concerned with the problem - medical entomologist, parasitologist, field technician - have a good basic understanding of the arthropod's biology. Knowledge will be needed not only of its direct relationship to any parasite or pathogen that it transmits but also of its structure, its life history and its behaviour - in short, its natural history. Above all, it will be necessary to be sure that it is correctly identified.
