The Infectious Diseases Manual

David Wilks, Mark Farrington, David Rubenstein Blackwell Science, £16.95, pp 347 ISBN 0 86542 844 1

It is increasingly difficult to write a concise text about human infection. Although all the old infectious diseases remain, except for smallpox, dozens of new pathogens and infectious disease syndromes have appeared in the past two decades. So getting the balance right in a short book is problematic.

In many places, the authors of The Infectious Diseases Manual have it exactly right—the chapters on eye infections and HIV and AIDS being strikingly good examples. In others, a disproportionate amount of space is devoted to rarities. Haemophilus ducreyi and chancroid get as much space as scabies …