How long does it take to read The Coming Plague?
Laurie Garrett
The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett takes about 13 hours 45 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 13 hours 45 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1994. 750 pages, about 206,250 words.
28 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 22 hours 55 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 13 hours 45 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 8 hours 36 minutes |
The page count is the median across 14 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
This is an amazing book that Laura Garrett wrote back in the 90's. For anyone that has read the more popular book by Richard Preston "The Hot Zone" this is a must read. It is a much tighter more informative book. She takes us through the history of viruses in a journalistic/story approach. She breaks down the emergence of Ebola and the other emerging viruses and what it could mean in a brilliantly entertaining way. Each new disease/chapter starts with a journalistic story and ends with an educated informative narrative. With the Ebola outbreak going on now in Western Africa I had to come and revisit this classic. She warned us and nailed it. Unpurified drinking water, improper use of antibiotics, local warfare, massive refugee migration have contributed to changing social and environmental conditions around the world. These have fostered the spread of new and potentially devastating viruses and diseases : HIV, Lassa, Ebola, and others. The author takes the reader on a fifty-year journey through the world's battles with microbes and examines the worldwide conditions that have culminated in recurrent outbreaks of newly discovered diseases, epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas, and mutated old diseases that are no longer curable.
Subjects: Ebola, Marburg, Communicable Disease Control, Communicable diseases, Communicable diseases -, Epidemiology
