What would happen to the world if a new bacterial disease appeared in the world that was immune to antibiotics and more deadly than the 1918 Spanish Flu? Or Ebola spread to much of the world? What would the world do? How could we prepare? How could we prepare people for an inevitable pandemic? These are the questions that Michael T. Osterholm's Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs (published in 2017) attempts to answer.
When it was released, Deadliest Enemy received incredibly positive reviews and was a bestseller. Kirkus Reviews, for example, liked the book. They called it "A well-rendered work of popular science. If you don’t emerge from it as the neighborhood expert on the flu, you skipped a chapter or two. If you emerge unworried, you missed the point." Publishers Weekly thought similarly, saying that "This is a convincing call to arms, among the best of a stream of similar warnings published recently." Deadliest Enemy once again gained a tremendous amount of popularity during the 2019-2020 world Coronavrius Pandemic, becoming one of the best-selling books on Amazon during that time period (along with books about the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic).
