Book Review: Farewell to the God of Plague
A book review by Matteo Pinna Pintor on ‘Farewell to the God of Plague: Chairman Mao’s Campaign to Deworm China‘ by Miriam Gross. This book’s title refers to a poem written by Mao Zedong in 1958. The God of Plague is schistosomiasis, a tropical disease which, in 2013, affected almost 300 million people around the world. Schistosome worms alternate parasitism of humans and freshwater snails, with aquatic larval stages in-between. Untreated heavy infections cause