Marc Lappe's Evolutionary Medicine: Rethinking the Origins of Disease is an in-depth discussion of the evolutionary changes of microbes and how these changes are making diseases more and more difficult to combat with antibiotics and other forms of treatment. The book is a extremely well-documented exploration into the linked worlds of evolution and medicine and the evolutionary arms race between human medicine and genetically-adaptable microbes. Lappe's evolutionary approach to medicine differs from the common approach to medicine which involves finding ways to treat diseases through Pasteur-like experimentation and development of treatments and cures. According to him, long-term success over illness will be possible only when the medical community considers how and why new patterns of disease emerge. The book provides a basic discussion of evolution along with examples of how the theory of natural selection may relate to aging, cancer, allergies, and other diseases. .
Lappe argues that viruses are capable of rapid evolution, which allows them to overcome antibiotics, and that humanity's disruption of ecosystems threatens to unleash new viruses. He notes that during the first widespread use of antibiotics following World War II, medicine was able to subdue tuberculosis, syphilis and pneumonia-all of which could then be cured with pills or shots if caught in time. But some bacteria produce a new generation as often as every twenty minutes, and the fastest bacteria reproduce thirty generations in a day. Therefore, health care workers should not be surprised that forms of tuberculosis now exist that resist traditional treatments by antibiotics. This is one of many examples provided of how careless actions that have produced short-term results have caused many devastating long-term problems. Through improper use and overuse we have created an army of drug-resistant microbes while still giving little thought to the evolutionary ramifications.
