The Lassa Ward: One Man's Fight Against One of the World's Deadliest Diseases - Softcover

"Effortlessly transmits both the facts and the fascination of a bad infectious outbreak...[a] portrait of contagion at the highest possible magnification." --The New York Times

"A touching and compelling account. The Lassa Ward brings to life the challenges and rewards that dedicated development workers face daily around the world." --Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2001 Nobel laureate in economics

"Required reading for all medical students and anyone looking for a little armchair medical adventure." --Library Journal

"Donaldson started out as an earnest, well-meaning American medical student, off on a great African adventure. He came of age in the middle of a raging epidemic, civil war, and hideous poverty, discovering a humanity few Americans ever experience. Donaldson has bared his soul, offering a lesson that should be required reading for every doctor-in-training." --Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health

"A potent mix of travel memoir, coming-of-age narrative and medical mystery. Donaldson's experiences treating a frighteningly infectious and often deadly hemorrhagic fever, the strength of his West African patients, and his own grave illness bring him to a contemplation of mortality, poverty, civil war, and medicine as it is practiced in the first and third worlds." --Jo Perry, BookBrowse.com

Ross Donaldson was an idealistic young medical student who gave up his comfortable life in the States to venture into Sierra Leone, a country ravaged by fighting and plagued by conflict streaming across the border from neighboring Liberia. In a hospital ward with meager supplies, Ross is in a race against time to find a way to care for patients afflicted with Lassa fever, a deadly and highly contagious hemorrhagic illness similar to Ebola. Forced to confront his own fears, he stands alone to make life-and-death decisions in the face of a never-ending onslaught of the sick. Ultimately, he finds himself not only fighting for the lives of others but also for his own. The Lassa Ward is the memoir of a young man studying to be a physician, while making his way through a land where a battle against one of the world's deadliest diseases matches a struggle for human rights and decency.