In the trauma wards of Cape Town, every weekend is a war, and the enemy comes in a bottle. Dr. Elara Vance, a brilliant surgeon burned down to her last nerve, spends her nights stitching together the casualties of a plague her country calls 'culture.' But when a fatal car crash involving a politician's son is systematically covered up before her eyes, she realizes this river of blood is not an accident. It's a business plan.
Halfway across the country, community activist Zola Mbeki cares for the plague's most tragic victims: a "forgotten generation" of children with incurable brain damage, the living ghosts of a poison sold as liberation. When her sanctuary is targeted for demolition to make way for a new liquor mega-warehouse, her fight for survival becomes a quest for justice.
Meanwhile, disgraced journalist Ben Dekker receives an encrypted data dump that contains the enemy's playbook. It's a monstrous conspiracy of corporate greed and political corruption, a plan to cultivate addiction in the nation's most vulnerable communities. The architect is a charismatic CEO who sees human misery as a market demographic; his enforcer is a ruthless assassin from the darkest days of apartheid, a man who knows how to make problems disappear.
As these three strangers unite to expose the truth, their investigation becomes a desperate fight for their lives. Hunted, discredited, and pushed to the breaking point by a series of brutal attacks that target their friends, their careers, and their families, they are left with one last, desperate choice: unleash their findings and ignite a revolution, or become the plague's final, silent victims.
They have forged their grief, their data, and the ghosts of the dead into a single, devastating weapon they call The Eleventh Plague. In a world where the sickness writes the laws, is the truth enough to save them?
This is more than a thriller. It is a diagnosis. Read the book the powerful do not want you to see.
Autorentext
T. K. ANGA is a public health specialist and health promotion activist with over nineteen years of experience on the front lines of the global health crisis. Their work has taken them from remote clinics in Namibia.
After two decades of writing reports, analyzing data, and designing public health interventions, T. K. ANGA came to believe that the greatest barrier to change was not a lack of evidence, but a lack of empathy on a global scale. Facts and statistics can describe a crisis, but they often fail to convey the profound, human truth of living within it.
The Invisible Epidemic is an act of "narrative epidemiology"?an attempt to use the immersive power of fiction to expose the complex, interconnected, and often invisible systems that shape our health. It was written out of the conviction that to truly change the world, we must first be able to feel its wounds. A story, unlike a policy brief, can be a powerful prescription for a new way of seeing.
T. K. ANGA lives and works in Namibia, where the global story of our health is being written every day.