DARK WINTER : An insider’s guide to pandemics and biosecurity is written by Professor Raina MacIntyre, an Australian woman doctor, a world leading epidemiologist and a biosecurity expert.

She is head of the Biosecurity Program at the Kirby Institute. She is also a skilled writer and Dark Winter is a page turner. It reads like a thriller and more so because she underlines the role of international policing at the forefront of biosecurity. I can think of no one better to write an Insider’s Guide to Pandemics and Biosecurity.

For me, her central message is that the community needs to know and must have a voice in the future of humanity and, from the perspective of this book and its subject matter, that means understanding that this pandemic is a harbinger of those still to come, and inextricably linked to those previously experienced. Our biosecurity is a real and present danger if not reviewed, and explored along with attempts to understand its frontiers and limitations.

In this book she has outlined the history of epidemics and pandemics and the central issue of the public health profession including its foibles of incomplete information, straight out misinformation and all the inevitabilities of complex social interactions.

Dark Winter is the Australian book I would recommend to review the experience of COVID-19.

[Raina MacIntyre, Dark Winter: An Insiders Guide to Pandemics and Biosecurity (UNSW Press LTD, November 2022) ISBN 9781742237671 (Paperback).]

Dr Marjorie Cross, OAM

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