Virus Hunters: How Science Protects People When Outbreaks and Pandemics Strike
by Amy Cherrix
Intermediate, Middle School    Harper/HarperCollins    336 pp.
9/24    9780063069541    $19.99
e-book ed.  9780063069565    $9.99

Epidemiologists are scientists who study the causes, patterns, and control of diseases in groups of people. Positioning epidemiologists as forensic detectives, Cherrix examines six case studies that convey the scope and importance of their work. Opening with the appearance of a mysterious illness within the Navajo Nation in 1993, she shows how, through a series of breakthroughs, scientists were able to identify this illness as rodent-borne hantavirus. (As Cherrix points out, it was widely known in Indigenous communities that the mice carried disease; this was simply a confirmation of Native knowledge.) Cherrix then revisits a nineteenth-century London outbreak of cholera; the decades-long hunt for the virus that caused the influenza pandemic of 1918; the creativity and cooperation that led to the global eradication of smallpox; the medical activism of the HIV/AIDS epidemic; and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout these riveting profiles, we learn how health and science professionals cooperate, collaborate, and corroborate to develop increasingly effective vaccines; we also learn about the contributions of historically marginalized communities in these efforts. Dr. Anthony Fauci plays a leading role in both the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 overviews, allowing readers who might only have heard of his COVID pandemic work to see him in a different context. Occasional sidebars and captioned photographs complement the text, while an extensive bibliography, comprehensive source notes, and an index (unseen) are appended.

From the ">January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.