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ST. PETERSBURG - Mark Walters wants people to think differently about disease.
Not just about cures, but about causes.
That's why Walters, a veterinarian and associate professor of journalism at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, wrote his book, Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them.
"People have somehow overlooked the big picture," Walters said during a recent interview in his office. "People have this sense that diseases are coming at us from every different direction, and every different source, and they're not. They're very predictable."
In other words, the drumbeat of SARS and West Nile, mad cow and monkeypox, are not random coincidence. Their appearance is linked to the ecological changes humans are causing in the world.
In the book, Walters tells the stories of six different diseases, tracing the links between disease and deforestation, industrial agriculture and even global warming.
Walters visits the West Sussex farm where the first British "mad cows" appeared in 1984. He walks through an open-air market where monkey meat is sold as he discusses the origins of AIDS, believed to have jumped to man from lesser primates. He tours an ancient hickory forest in New Jersey with an ecology professor as he talks about subdivisions encroaching on Northeastern woods as Lyme disease spread.
The book, published in October, just entered its second printing. It likely won't hit the bestseller lists - it has sold between 5,000 and 10,000 copies - but it has garnered widespread critical praise. Positive reviews have run in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Library Journal. Walters also has done several radio spots, including an interview on National Public Radio's weekly show Living On Earth.
"It persuasively raises the alarm," said the New York Times review. "It draws compelling, even disturbing, connections between disease and forces as implacable as population growth, deforestation and modern lifestyles that consume fuel, meat and acreage at an ever-growing pace."
At its heart, the book tries to put together two groups that don't always see eye to eye: environmentalists and public health scientists.
"I expected environmentalists to adopt it and public health to reject it as alien and subversive," Walters said. "I have been pleasantly surprised."
Walters, 51, a Florida native, returned here last fall after two years as a visiting lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Six Plagues is his third book. He received his undergraduate degree from McGill University, a master's in journalism from Columbia University, and his D.V.M. from Tufts University.