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Loading... Bitten: True Medical Stories of Bites and Stingsby Pamela Nagami
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) mkfs | Aug 13, 2022 |  I liked Nagami’s preface and some of the articles which emphasize interesting things that can happen during ecotourism. The naturalistic fallacy is still alive and well; if you like the rain forest so much, it might be enlightening to read about the Phoneutria nigriventer, the Brazilian wandering spider, which accounts for 20% of hospital admissions in Sao Paulo and is so aggressive that if you try to kill it with a stick and miss it will run up the stick and bite you in the arm; the ecotourist birdwatcher who encountered a bushmaster and had to have his leg amputated at the hip; the Earthwatch expedition to Peru that gave a volunteer mucocutaneous leishmaniasis, known locally as “sponge face disease” because of its penchant for dissolving the victim’s face, starting at the nose; and what happens when you try to get up close and personal with a Komodo dragon. Good for an amusing afternoon’s reading, especially if you want to become dingbats paranoid about anything with more legs than you (but there’s a chapter about human bites, too). (  ) setnahkt | Dec 5, 2017 | A good read and a book that definitely made me want to explore several of the topics more deeply. ( ) Helcura | Jun 3, 2014 | The book covers a lot of creatures that can bite or sting you - spiders, snakes, dogs, cats, monkeys, jellyfish, snails, ticks, microscopic water-dwelling parasites, alligators, etc. There's a lot of info. The sections on the spiders and snakes were the most interesting to me, perhaps because I didn't know much about the effects of spider and snake venom. The reactions to spiders and snakes are often very acute as well, which made for a more frightening read. As the book progressed into other bites, like crocodile, cat, and dog bites, I felt that it was a little bit more rushed than the earlier sections, and somewhat drier. It still contained interesting information, but it wasn't as interesting or as in-depth as some of the earlier sections. Nonetheless, I think this is a four-star book due to the sheer volume of info. Overall, I recommend. ( ) slug9000 | Jan 27, 2014 | What I learned: Stay away from bats. If you even touch a bat, get the rabies shots. Never have a ferret as a pet. I'm glad there are no fire ants in Utah. If you HAVE to go to the jungle, as soon as you develop a rash or a fever, visit an infectious diseases specialist and DEMAND to be tested for every possible germ there is. And for Heaven's sake, TAKE ALL YOUR MEDICINE. And don't bite anyone. ( )1  cmbohn | Feb 9, 2012 | no reviews | add a review
We've all been bitten. And we all have stories. The bite attacks featured in this dramatic book take place in big cities, small towns, and remote villages around the world and throughout history. Some are as familiar and contemporary as encounters with mosquitoes in New York City and snakes in southern California's Hollywood Hills or as exotic and foreign as the tsetse in equatorial Africa, the camel in Riyadh, and the Komodo dragon in Indonesia. While others, such as people biting other people---well, these are in a category of their own. Among the startling stories and fascinating facts in Bitten. o A six-year-old girl descends into weeks of extreme lassitude until a surgeon plucks an engorged tick from her scalp. o A diabetic living in the West Indies awakes one morning to a rat eating his left great and second toes. o A twenty-eight-year-old man loses a third of his nose to a bite by his wife. o In San Francisco, after a penile bite, a man develops "flesh-eating strep," which spreads to his lower abdomen. o Severe bites by rabid animals to the face and digits, because of their rich nerve supply, are the most likely to lead to rabies and have the shortest incubation periods. o Following the bite of a seal or contact with its tissues, sealers develop such agonizing pain and swelling in their bites that, far from medical care, they sometimes amputate their own fingers. o Perhaps the most devastating human bite wound injuries are those involving the nose; doctors in Boroko near Papua, New Guinea, reported a series of ninety-five human bites treated in the Division of Surgery from 1986 to 1992---twelve were to the nose, nine in women, and three in men, and in most of the cases, the biter was an angry spouse. With reports from medical journals, case histories, colleagues, and from her own twenty-eight-year career as a practicing physician and infectious diseases specialist, Pamela Nagami's Bitten offers readers intrigued by human infection and disease and mesmerized by creatures in p0the wild a compulsively readable narrative that is entertaining, sometimes disgusting, and always enjoyable. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)617.1Technology Medicine & health Surgery, regional medicine, dentistry, ophthalmology, otology, audiology Injuries and woundsLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.94)
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