health Archives - The Y Logs

Yzabel / July 17, 2020

Review: Stopping the Next Pandemic

Stopping the Next Pandemic: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened, and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

Over the last 20 years of epidemics, we learned every lesson needed to stop this coronavirus outbreak in its tracks. We heeded none of them. The result is a pandemic on a scale never before seen in our lifetimes. In this captivating, authoritative, and eye-opening book, science journalist and researcher Debora MacKenzie lays out the full story of how and why it happened: the previous viruses that should have prepared us, the shocking public health failures that paved the way, the failure to contain the outbreak, and most importantly, what we must do to prevent future pandemics.

Debora MacKenzie has been reporting on emerging diseases for more than three decades, and she draws on that experience to explain how COVID-19 went from a manageable outbreak to a global pandemic. Offering a compelling history of the most significant recent outbreaks, including SARS, MERS, H1N1, Zika, and Ebola, she gives a crash course in Epidemiology 101–how viruses spread and how pandemics end–and outlines the lessons we failed to learn from each past crisis. In vivid detail, she takes us through the arrival and spread of COVID-19, making clear the steps that governments knew they could have taken to prevent or at least prepare for this. Looking forward, MacKenzie makes a bold, optimistic argument: this pandemic might finally galvanize the world to take viruses seriously. Fighting this pandemic and preventing the next one will take political action of all kinds, globally, from governments, the scientific community, and individuals–but it is possible.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I must be a glutton for punishment for reading this kind of book while the world is still not done with COVID-19. However, I also want to stay informed and learn things without having to wade through the dramafest that news in general have become, so all in all, this was a very appropriate read: informative, interesting, considering the ecological impact as well (no, killing all the bats is not a solution, plus it would collapse the whole ecosystem anyway), on the whistle-blowing side yet also covering what could be done (a.k.a not being alarmist just for the sake of being alarmist)… and not so depressing or anxiety-inducing as I had feared.

I didn’t know the author before reading this specific piece of her work. As a scientific journalist who’s been working that field for decades, she was able to bring her own experience and point of view, gathered from observations made on previous outbreaks, and that also gave the book a more personalised tone. In general, “COVID-19” seemed to me well-researched, easy to grasp and follow (no reliance on over-complicated scientific terms here), and a reflection on how countering such viruses is definitely not only scientists’ responsibility, but also governments’, for implementing (or choosing not to…) the policies that will help fund research and curb the spreading. (Let’s just say I wasn’t too impressed with the UK and the USA on that one… though they were far from being the only ones farting in their hands about this).

Conclusion: Perhaps not the kind of book I’d recommend to an audience who already knows a lot about SARS-CoV-2, because it reads more like an introduction—but as, well, a good intro and recap on the topic, it did the job top notch for me.

Yzabel / October 8, 2018

Review: Sleepyhead

Sleepyhead: Narcolepsy, Neuroscience and the Search for a Good Night by Henry Nicholls

My rating: [rating=4]

Blurb:

When Henry Nicholls was twenty-one, he was diagnosed with narcolepsy: a medical disorder causing him to fall asleep with no warning. For the healthy but overworked majority, this might sound like an enviable condition, but for Henry, the inability to stay awake is profoundly disabling, especially as it is accompanied by mysterious collapses called cataplexy, poor night-time sleep, hallucinations and sleep paralysis.

A writer and biologist, Nicholls explores the science of disordered sleep, discovering that around half of us will experience some kind of sleep dysfunction in our lives. From a CBT course to tackle insomnia to a colony of narcoleptic Dobermans, his journey takes him through the half-lit world of sleep to genuine revelations about his own life and health.

Told with humour and intelligence, Sleepyhead uses personal reflections, interviews with those with sleep disorders and the people who study them, anecdotes from medical history and insights from art and literature to change the way we understand our sleeping hours.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

There’s a wealth of information in this book, sometimes in the text, and sometimes through the references it offers—I’ve picked in those a couple of books I’ll need to read at some point.

“Sleepyhead” is probably more interesting if one is already suffering from sleep-related troubles, maybe not as bad as narcolepsy, but even temporary troubles, such as acute insomnia caused by stress. It goes through a certain amount of factors that trigger narcolepsy and other “X-somnias”, providing details about how misdiagnosed those used to be historically, and helping understand what they entail. For instance, I always thought that narcolepsy was about people falling asleep at any time of the day, but it had never occurred to me that their sleep at night was highly disturbed, and not the peaceful slumber one would imagine from that very basic description. I’m glad I know more about it now.

The book was also interesting for its insights about sleep in general, though the focus remains on the dysfunctional parts: it seems that over the centuries, lots of superstitions (like “incubi”) were in fact descriptions of parasomnia-induced symptoms, such as night terrors. I also didn’t know about the two-time sleep people seemed to have had before artificial lights: sleeping early for a few hours, then being awake for 1-2 hours in the dead of night, then sleeping again for a few more hours.

While note a bona fide scientific book, “Sleepyhead” is useful no matter what: for the journey it describes (Henry Nicholls went to meet and interview many people while researching), and for the information it provides. It could be beneficial for people who suffer from such troubles, sleep apnea for instance, if only to alert them in a “hey, that sounds exactly what -I- am going through!” way.

Yzabel / February 11, 2018

Review: Why We Sleep

Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

My rating: [rating=5]

Blurb:

Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life, health and longevity and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences: every major disease in the developed world – Alzheimer’s, cancer, obesity, diabetes – has very strong causal links to deficient sleep.

Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why its absence is so damaging to our health. Compared to the other basic drives in life – eating, drinking, and reproducing – the purpose of sleep remained elusive.

Now, in this book, the first of its kind written by a scientific expert, Professor Matthew Walker explores twenty years of cutting-edge research to solve the mystery of why sleep matters. Looking at creatures from across the animal kingdom as well as major human studies, Why We Sleep delves in to everything from what really happens during REM sleep to how caffeine and alcohol affect sleep and why our sleep patterns change across a lifetime, transforming our appreciation of the extraordinary phenomenon that safeguards our existence.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley.]

It took me so long to get to this book (which I also requested late, it didn’t help), and I’m wondering why! Although it *was* definitely scary, it was really interesting—and anyway, the ‘scare’ makes a lot of sense, so I wouldn’t be inclined as to consider it ‘alarmist stuff I can probably safely ignore because all these doctors and scientists write alarming stuff anyway’. I’ve had trouble to sleep for decades—while not a full night own, I’m clearly not a lark either, and this is part of my problems—and let’s be honest, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that on periods when I sleep less than 6-7 hours/night, I feel sluggiosh, fall sick more easily, stay sick longer, and am less focused in general. Considering my natural chronic lack-of-attention-span disorder, you can guess what it looks like.

(And now I’m wondering how much of this attention problem was really related to my Tourette’s, and how much was actually due to not sleeping enough… considering that when tics are flaring while in bed, well, falling asleep becomes an issue, too!)

Mostly what the author mentioned makes sense to me from a layman standpoint. Not enough sleep leads to increased risks of car crashes, due to microsleep attacks: yes, definitely, I almost went through that, and when I had to assess the risk of falling asleep at the wheel on a French motorway vs. stopping in a parking lot along that same motorway at 4 am to catch a couple of hours of shut-eye… Let me tell you, no argument about ‘it’s dangerous to be a female being alone at night in a deserted place’ would have made me keep driving. That was a scary, scary moment: feeling that I was falling asleep, and having those two or three seconds of complete inability to react, before I regained control of my body and managed to pull out. Yes, it was that bad. And I was extremely lucky that time. So I was definitely willing to consider Walker’s research in earnest, and not with my usual rolling-of-eyes at ‘alarmist books’.

Now, I also understand why my ageing parents are chronically tired, to the point of crashing on the sofa for a long nap every afternoon, yet can’t sleep most of the night. And why I’m going the same way, with the difference that for now I can’t afford to nap due to being at work. Naps reset the build-up of ‘sleep pressure’, and this affects in turn the moment when you’d get naturally tired in the evening, pushing it back by a few hours. (Also, now I get why melatonin pills don’t work for me: apparently I’m not old enough yet. XD)

In short, I finally got to understand a lot of things about sleep, which in turn will help me—I’m the kind of person who needs to ‘do’ and ‘understand’ in order to acquire and retain knowledge and act upon it, so this was actually perfect for me. Now I now what happens while we sleep, all the waste it helps our bodies get rid of, why sleep deprivation affects our emotions and moods, and many more things. It’s not a self-help book—while it does have an appendix with a few ‘tips and tricks’ about how to sleep better, don’t expect to see only that for two hundred pages or to find miracle cures—but it’s already doing a lot for me, just thinking about it. I can’t change my work hours, and society is not going to rearrange itself around me to give me more sleep time; but I can do little things like filtering out blue lights from my screens, not drinking so much caffeine (the old saying ‘coffee is OK as long as it’s before 5pm’ isn’t good enough, so slowly does one’s body processes caffeine), and stop begging my GP for sleeping pills.

Bonus point for the book’s accessibility. You don’t need to have medical knowledge or master its jargon to understand the author’s points. There’s even a bit of humour thrown now and then (that part about the women’s fashion magazine that was delighted to hear confirmed that ‘yes, sleep deprivation favours weight loss’… before the interviewed researcher went on to talk about the loss being mostly muscle mass and not fatty tissue, and let’s not forget the skin sores and generally awful look one develops).

Conclusion: If you do have sleeping troubles, read this, it should help with at least a few things. If you don’t, read it anyway, because it’s interesting.