Month: February 2015

Author:  A. Townsend Peterson Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press – 210 pages Book Review by: Venkat Subramaniam In this pioneering work on the transmission of disease, the author A. Townsend Peterson breaks new ground. He integrates biogeographic and ecological factors with spatial models. He presents a synthesis that illuminates new and more effective infectious disease mapping methods. Peterson’s approach holds potentially enormous benefits for those charged with determining how disease spreads, and how to control that spread. This book is useful to epidemiologists and public health experts. To understand the importance of what Peterson has studied and discovered, we...

Editors: Jorge I Dominguez, Kenneth F. Greene, Chappell H. Lawson, and Alejandro Moreno Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press – 282 pages Book Review by: Paiso Jamakar The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was astonishingly returned to power in the 2012 presidential election in Mexico. It had ruled the country for more than seven decades before being ousted in 2002. Enrique Pena Nieto was elected President with more than 19 million votes, winning in a close race over PRD’s standard bearer Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who obtained nearly 16 million votes. Josefina Vazquez Mota, representing PAN, placed third with an impressive...

Author: Donald A. Barr, MD, PhD Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press – 308 pages Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram The United States has lower levels of life expectancy and higher rates of infant mortality than nearly all other developed countries, despite all the money Americans spend on health care, the author Dr. Donald Barr, a physician and a sociologist, points out in his Preface. He also discovered by accident one day, that cancer specialists in California provide bone marrow transplantation, a treatment proven to be effective for multiple myeloma, less often to African Americans than to whites. Why is...

Editor: Luiz Roberto Vialle Guest Editors: Manabu Ito and K. Daniel Riew Publisher: Thieme – 131 pages, with 62 illustrations Book Review by: Nano Khilnani This compact book of 131 pages with eleven chapters is on the narrow field of cervical spine procedures, most of which are common such as: anterior procedures, arthroplasty, laminectomy and fusion, laminosplasty, occipitocervical fixation, pedicle screw fixation, and posterior foraminotomy. Advances in imaging technology such as the operating microscope and navigation, and radiological imaging methods such computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), implant materials such as cobalt and titanium chromium, and implant...

Editors: Anthony P. Sclafani, MD; Robin A. Dyleski, MD; Christopher J. Linstrom, MD; Michael J. Pitman, MD; Steven David Schaefer, MD; Stimson P. Schantz, MD; and Edward J. Shin, MD. Publisher: Thieme – 1,098 pages with 667 illustrations Book Review by: Nano Khilnani In the specialty of medicine pertaining to the ear, nose and throat called otorhinolaryngology there are quite a few subspecialties, and the associated field of head and neck surgery makes it even more complex to master, especially when you take into account that new discoveries are being made, new surgical procedures are having successful outcomes, and...