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"theoretical epidemiology" and was used only for teaching, not prediction. Modeling has to some extent replaced more expensive epidemiological study with real people on the ground, but isn't as good because it relies on assumptions, some, if not many of which, turn out to be wrong. Page 46, bottom of paras 2. An extremely important missing piece on setting up a GERM like entity is how to get international buy-in and participation. No one has the authority to set up something like this "top down". It would have to come from a mixture of top down and bottom up, and requires consensus building as to the "how". Who can make this happen? The international politics doomed the League of Nations and has crippled the WHO since its beginning so that it is woefully underfunded, understaffed, and unable to do much except persuade and organize. Page 46, bottom. The polio example is both good and bad. The good part is well stated. The bad part is that the original goal of eradication has been missed for 22 years now, and the reasons are well known and likely to apply to almost every other international health endeavor. I think this needs to be discussed. Page 49, top line. You could compare the GERM cost to the cost we now accept for preventing nuclear war: pandemics over the years since 1945 have killed far more people, and are thus in the same league of existential threats as nuclear warfare, yet we spend a pittance on pandemic prevention. Chapter 3. Page 3, middle para. It's surprising here to see little mention of the use of smart phones and other devices to get health and epi data in many areas. Page 55, bottom para. That we knew "shockingly little" about why these kids died is debatable, but, as the author knows, there is a sad irony not addressed in this para that we HAD an efficacious rotavirus vaccine in 1999 and failed to deploy it internationally because of largely false scientific claims about side effects. In the interval between this episode and the development of the next 2 rotavirus vaccines, an estimate 4-6 million childhood lives were needlessly and tragically lost. Having the right tech to make the best vaccines isn't always enough. We need to be sure we don't have systems that encourage us to shoot ourselves in the foot. Page 59, para 2, line 3: I think most virologists would say that PCR is NOT the gold standard but rather that viral isolation is. Viral isolation is more expensive and doesn't always work, but it is generally agreed to be the gold standard, and we need to do more of it in addition to PCR and other rapid tests. Page 61, para 1, line 4: should be "most likely to spread the infection", not disease. Page 67, para 2, line 4: it's not true that the only cases that get reported are when a test is ordered by a doctor. Even in the US, some diseases are reported without tests, some based on syndromic presentations, and some are reported directly from labs without a doctor seeing a patient. Also, in poorer countries there is reporting based on entirely syndromic surveillance, and this can be critically important.