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Vector Contagion
by Robin cook
Description:
VECTOR:
New York cab driver Yuri Davydov is a disgruntled Russian immigrant ready to lash out at his adoptive nation, which he believes has denied him the American Dream. As a former technician in the Soviet Union’s biological weapons system, Yuri knows how to wreak havoc in his new home. But before he executes his masterpiece of vengenance, he experiments first on selected targets.
Dr Jack Stapleton begins to witness some unusual cases in his capacity as forensic pathologist in the City medical examiner’s office. A Greek immigrant apparently succumbs to sudden overwhelming pneumonia, while an obese Afro-American woman collapses with acute respiratory distress.
When an unexpected coincidence suggest to Jack that these seemingly unrelated deaths are actually connected murders, his colleagues and superiors remain sceptical. Meanwhile he is taking himself deeper into deadly danger – but can he reach the heart of the puzzle before Davydov and his associates unleash into the streets of New York the ultimate terror: a modern bio-weapon?
CONTAGION :
After he loses first his Midwestern ophthalmology practice to a for-profit medical giant and then his family to a commuter airline tragedy, Dr. John Stapleton’s life is transformed to ashes. Feeling less the golden boy than a jaded cynic, Stapleton retrains in forensic pathology and relocates to find an uneasy niche for himself in a city that suits his changed perspective: the cold, indifferent, concrete maze of New York.
Stapleton thinks he is past pain and past caring, but as a series of virulent and extremely lethal illnessescapped by a particularly deadly outbreak of a rare strain of influenzastrikes the young, the old, and the innocent, his suspicions are aroused. When the apparent epicentres of these outbreaks are revealed to be hospitals and clinics controlled by the same for-profit giant that cannibalized his old ophthalmology practice, Stapleton fears he has stumbled upon a diabolic conspiracy of catastrophic proportions: Could the for-profit giant be engaged in the systematic elimination of its more costly subscribers?
Getting at the truth leads to Stapleton’s unlikely pairingboth professionally and personallywith Terese Hagen, an art director at a hot Madison Avenue advertising firm. Together they discover that the real explanation behind the killer contagions is even more Machiavellian than could be imagined.
Contagion anticipates some of the uncharted consequences of managed health care, in an age when even the wariest consumer may be at risk. It is Robin Cook at his unerring best.
About The Author
Dr. Robin Cook (born May 4, 1940 in New York City, New York) is an American doctor / novelist who writes about medicine and topics affecting public health.
He is best known for being the author who combined medical writing with the thriller genre of writing. Several of his books have been bestsellers on the “New York Times” Bestseller List. Several of his books have also been featured in Reader’s Digest.
Cook is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Columbia University School of Medicine. He finished his postgraduate medical training at Harvard. He divides his time between homes in Boston and Florida where he lives with his wife Barbara. He is currently on leave from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. He has successfully combined medical fact with fantasy to produce a succession of bestselling books. Cook’s medical thrillers are designed, in part, to keep the public aware of both the technological possibilities of modern medicine and the ensuing ethical problems.
Cook got a taste of the larger world when the Cousteau Society recruited him to run its blood – gas lab in the South of France. Intrigued by diving, he later called on a connection he made through Jacques Cousteau to become an aquanaut with the US Navy Sealab when he was drafted in 1969.
Cook is a private member of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees, led by Chairman Joseph B. Gildenhorn, are appointed to six-year terms by the President of the United States.
Dr. Cook’s profession as a doctor has provided him with ideas for many of his novels. In each of his novels, he strives to write about the issues at the forefront of current medical practice.
To date, he has explored issues such as organ donation, genetic engineering,fertility treatment, in – vitro fertilization, research funding, managed care, drug research, and organ transplantation.
Dr. Cook has been remarked to have an uncanny ability to anticipate national controversy. In an interview with Dr.Cook, Stephen McDonald talked to him about his novel Shock; Cook admits the timing of Shock was fortuitous. “I suppose that you could say that it’s the most like Coma in that it deals with an issue that everybody seems to be concerned about,” he says, “I wrote this book to address the stem cell issue, which the public really doesn’t know anything about. Besides entertaining readers, my main goal is to get people interested in some of these issues, because it’s the public that ultimately really should decide which way we ought to go in something as ethically questioning as stem cell research.”
Keeping his lab coat handy helps him turn our fear of doctors into bestsellers. “I joke that if my books stop selling, I can always fall back on brain surgery,” he says. “But I am still very interested in it. If I had to do it over again, I would still study medicine. I think of myself more as a doctor who writes, rather than a writer who happens to be a doctor.” After 23 books,he has come up with a diagnosis to explain why his medical thrillers remain so popular. “The main reason is, we all realize we are at risk. We’re all going to be patients sometime,” he says. “You can write about great white sharks or haunted houses, and you can say I’m not going into the ocean or I’m not going in haunted houses, but you can’t say you’re not going to go into a hospital.”[4]
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