mayasophia 's review for:

The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir by Steffanie Strathdee, Thomas Patterson

4.0

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What an utterly fascinating and gripping book. This is about an epidemiologist whose husband, also a scientist, contracted an antibiotic resistant bacteria while they were traveling in Egypt and the extraordinary lengths that she went to to save his life using a rarely used technique in Western medicine called phage therapy. There are times when this broke my heart and made me tear up because I cannot possibly imagine how difficult this was for the both of them, to be so sick and so close to death so far from home. Strathdee covers a lot of topics from the advent of antibiotics, the factors that led to the overprescription of antibiotics, and the geopolitical reasons why phage therapy hasn't been researched in the West. Everything about it, from the medical to the historical was fascinating and it was held up beautifully by their own personal story. There were so many times that I was just in awe at how brilliant humans can be, and while there is a decent argument to be made that we wouldn't have an imminent need for phage therapy without the overuse of antibiotics, I remain amazed at the science behind phage therapy.