iBlog: Nishit Shah

I guess this is the first book related to medical issues that I have picked up. I had seen this book for a while at Crosswords but never bothered to buy it. On Friday I was looking for bestsellers online and came across this book again. What prompted me to buy this was its complete title Survival of The Sickest : A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease After checking the reviews at Amazon, I was sure that I wanted this on my shelf. So, I bought this book and completed the whole of this weekend in one sitting. This book is a genuine page turner.

Survival of the Sickest is a book by Dr. Sharon Moalem in which he explains why we have deadly genetic diseases. He argues that some of those “bad genes” which cause diabetes for example, helped our ancestors survive at some point in our evolutionary history. Knowing the environment where those genes were beneficial to our survival, may help to deal with the disease.This is one of those books that is a delightful read, educating, interesting, and entertaining. The author puts forth his theories that many modern diseases are variations of evolutionary traits that were held by our ancestors that enabled them to survive the ice age and bubonic plague. He goes on to describe how viruses cause certain behavior in their carriers to help the viruses survival. The common cold leaves you well enough to stay moving and go to work so you can spread the virus to others, while the parasitic malaria wants you immobile and in bed because mosquitos can continue to carry it even better with you immobile.
This book added that layer of understanding to my knowledge. Had never thought about anything like this.

Wanna read something new. Try this .. worth reading !