Norman G. Gratz, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2006, 393 pp.,
$134.00 hard cover, ISBN: 13 978-0-521-85447-4

The audience of this medical entomology monograph seems to be health professionals who are responsible for recognizing and acting on human epidemics of insect- and rodent-borne diseases. Written by the late Norman Gratz, a very knowledgeable and influential medical entomologist who was long-associated with the World Health Organization, the text was submitted for publication before his death and edited by Michael Service before it was posthumously published. True to the title, it is divided into two parts: one for Europe and one for North America, each of which briefly summarizes the diseases found in those regions.

Each part begins with a short history of indigenous vector-borne diseases and the rodent reservoirs and is followed by chapters summarizing several arboviral diseases, malaria, filariasis, diseases transmitted by sand flies, myiasis, flea- and louse-borne diseases, tick- and mite-borne diseases, and human diseases associated with rodents. Each of the two parts concludes with a discussion of the effects of climate change in the two regions and the economic impacts of the diseases including the costs of efforts to control them. With a publication date of 2006, the referenced articles from the literature were compiled until June 2005.

I thought that the overall organization, involving essentially two books back-to-back, created a number of difficulties. Treating identical topics separately in the two parts of the book necessitated considerable duplication when many of the disease complexes were very similar except for their geographic differences. The two chapters on Ceratopogonidae are each less than a page long and essentially identical in content. The two discussions of cockroaches and allergies take a bit more than a page each, with not much reason to separate them. Descriptions of the same arboviral diseases occurring in two large geographic areas tended to exaggerate their differences rather than their similarities.

I found the strongest aspects of this book to be the descriptions and distributions of rather obscure tick-borne and arboviral diseases identified from several European countries and the discussions of rodent-borne diseases, much of which appear nowhere else in such a readable form. There is a wealth of information in the literature referred to in these chapters. The discussions of economic implications are also valuable from the perspective of a public health professional attempting to allocate spending among competing needs. From an academic perspective, however, the treatment in general is a bit superficial, with many statements and descriptions lacking the citations for the reader to use for follow-up. It would have been interesting to learn Gratz's view of how the small but numerous malaria epidemics in the United States that occurred in recent years in California, Mississippi, Florida, New York, and Texas compared with those in European countries where malaria also has been eliminated. Had they been discussed in the same part of the book, the similarities and differences might have been more apparent and helpful in preventing future epidemics. There is a short discussion of baggage malaria, where infected anophelines packed in suitcases that have been transported from malarial zones lie in waiting to fly out and feed on uninfected hosts once the suitcases are opened. Anyone who has tried rearing and maintaining anophelines will attest that this is fairly improbable and may not deserve any mention. A few other statements need to be corrected, among them that the vaccine developed to immunize against Lyme disease was withdrawn because of disappointing sales, which is undoubtedly true, but there were also serious allegations about its safety. The few figures contained in the book are mostly distribution maps. It would have been helpful to have more figures that illustrated the components of the disease complexes and how those components differed in different geographic regions.

This book will never substitute for a good medical entomology text, but it does present a nice review for public health professionals who have one last chance to pick the brain of one of the best in the business.

Marc Klowden
Division of Entomology,
University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho

Journal of Medical Entomology
Vol. 46, No. 2, March 2009, Page 408 - 408