Book review: Parasite Rex
Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures by Carl Zimmer.
Great book. About parasites. What they are, the recent discovery of how big a role they have in ecosystems, how they live, how they have jumped from animal to animal, and of course, which ones afflict people.
Several chapters describe a range of human parasites in amazing and often frightening detail. From botfly larvae to liver flukes, malaria’s Plasmodium to the nematodes that parasitize humans. There is some discussion of microbial parasites, but most of the book covers metazoan parasites. Zimmer tells the stories of some of these parasites–how they find their way to people, what they do once they arrive in a new host, how they escape detection, and the course of the disease. The story of how several parasites were discovered, how they were identified and followed through their changes of form and host are told. And there are pictures!
