En lo alto de los Andes, un arqueólogo se topa con una tumba antigua y, sin darse cuenta, libera los gérmenes de una civilización condenada por una plaga hace más de 5000 años.
Lo que sucede cuando este organismo mortal, para el cual no hay antídoto, reaparece, froma la base de esta sensacional novela.

I've always enjoyed medical fiction by Frank G. Slaughter. I feel like I have learned something, albeit a bit dated, but the theory applies. And Slaughter grew up in North Carolina, graduating from Duke, so I'm reading a North Carolinian writer. So at the tail end of a pandemic, how could I resist reading a novel that follows a fictional pandemic. This being a Slaughter novel, I knew it wouldn't end with the last person turning out the light.

With this book, it was fascinating to trace the path of the newly rereleased disease as it spread across the world. At each chokepoint, I thought, "With quick action now, they can catch it." Each time, the disease escaped. It wasn't hard to see the parallels today. The biggest difference is that the new plague had a 50% mortality rate. Like the hero, epidemiologist Dr. Grant Reed, I was frustrated by the superstition and ignorance of some of the characters. I, too, was frustrated by governments that put economics over the health of their citizens.

The main thing to remember is this book is set in 1961, so there are no cell phones, no handheld computers, and no miracle drugs. There is hard work and dedication. That makes the book worth reading. I'd suggest it for folks who enjoy medical suspense and don't mind that the medical part is far from current. ( )

Buried deep under the Andes mountains of Peru, an 5000-year-old plague waits to unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

When Dr. Grant Reed is summoned to the medical relief ship Mercy, docked for repairs at Chimbote, Peru, to ascertain what might be wrong with his dying brother, he initially has no idea that the culprit is a virulent germ from the distant past. But as more and more people in the region are infected, it soon becomes clear that he's dealing with an epidemic.

Written over thirty years ago, Plague Ship is a medical thriller from a previous generation. Slaughter does an excellent job of communicating through fiction the medical realities of his day, though many of the processes and technologies described in the book have changed over the decades. The narrative reflects an older style as well, with more emphasis on describing events and surroundings than on drawing the reader into the scene. The book does contain some mild language and a few sex scenes, though interestingly all the romance is based on the foundational idea that marriage is the eventual and inevitable conclusion of a successful relationship--more evidence that this book is from a different era.

In an age of global concern about the possibility (or certainty) of a future pandemic similar to pandemics that have ravaged human populations in the past, a thirty-plus-year-old book about an ancient plague serves as a reminder that these fears are nothing new. Whether it's swine flu, avian flu, malaria, or the fictional Yungay fever, history teaches us that we are susceptible to illness on a global scale. Plague Ship is a generation-old testament to human frailty on a number of fronts. ( )