Omega - Softcover

This engrossing thriller probably isn't the book to read while suffering from a sore throat caused by a staph infection. "The cocci were perfect spheres, like eggs or dark spawn.... They clumped. And they doubled.... Doubling every twenty minutes and clumping together in grape-like clusters.... Clumped in clusters that numbered eight million and then sixteen million and then an hour later 128 million perfect peptidoglycan-plated spheres ..." Philip Sington and Gary Humphreys, who wrote Carriers under the Patrick Lynch pseudonym, combine news from recent headlines--flesh-eating bacteria, the increasing resistance of bugs to antibiotics--with an imaginative but plausible scenario of rampant infection, bureaucratic fumbling, and corporate greed. Even the minor characters are fully sketched, which is not always the case in scientific thrillers.

us Ford's trauma unit at the Willowbrook Medical Center is on the front line, fighting diseases that rage through South Central, L.A.'s violent, poverty-stricken inner city.  But suddenly Ford finds himself battling an insidious new enemy.  Patients brought in to the emergency room begin to develop routine infections, which suddenly bloom out of control.  None of the drugs in the vast arsenal of modern medicine can check the symptoms...or prevent the bacteria from multiplying.  As more and more cases appear, and infected patients throughout L.A. start to die, Ford knows he is witnessing the onset of a mass epidemic--a modern-day plague.

Then the horror strikes home.  Ford's thirteen-year-old daughter contracts the life-threatening infection.  Her only hope of survival is Omega, a radical, genetically engineered antibiotic that is only rumored to exist.  As Ford's search for the phantom drug becomes a frantic race agains