Listed below are a few of the sources that provided me with inspiration and background information for "Germ Theory":
This is without doubt the most frightening book I've ever read. While The Coming Plague was a New York Times bestseller, it is not some pop-journalistic scare story, but rather a meticulously researched and footnoted compendium of the natural history of emerging disease and their awful toll on humanity.
With reference to my story, "Germ Theory," Chapter 13, "The Revenge of the Germs, or Just Keep Inventing New Drugs," is the most directly relevant. One of the things that came home to me in reading this chapter (as someone with a background in evolutionary biology) is that the power of antibiotic misuse to shape dangerous microbes into new and ever more lethal forms cannot be understood outside the context of natural selection. Hence, although it doesn't appear explicitly in the story, I conceived of the world in which "Germ Theory" takes place as one in which biological science has been forced to share "equal time" with creationism. Indeed, words like "evolution" and "natural selection" and "adaptation" cannot be used in grant proposals to government agencies--at least not if a scientist wants to have hope of acquiring funding.
I also have a copy of Laurie Garrett's more recent book, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, but I haven't quite worked up the nerve to read it. Or rather I did read the chapter on biowar. Especially the part where Russian scientists had engineered a strain of Bacillus anthrasis (anthrax) to be virulent (normal anthrax is not communicable) as well as antibiotic resistant--"...the first example of an artificially contrived new pathogen...." I wanted to sleep at night, so I stopped reading...
I first heard about this book on a writing-related news group (I forget exactly where and when), and it is indeed the fascinating goldmine that whoever recommended it promised. According to the jacket blurb, the author is a consultant pathologist, but he is also a talented writer and historian. The book covers all aspects of the disease from its supposed causes and treatment throughout history, to the isolation of its causal bacillus in 1882, to its recent reemergence in antibiotic-resistant form to become a world-wide threat once more. This is why I cringe in disgust when I see people spit in public.
Because TB is often such a long, slow killer, its wealthier victims often had years to travel the world in search of relief, and its more talented victims to produce great works of art, music, or literature. It almost seems as if all great artists of the 19th and early 20th century were afflicted, including: Keats, Chopin, all the Brontės, Robert Louis Stevenson, Checkov, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell. And even when the artists themselves were not sufferers, they were often inspired to depict the ravages of consumption in art or literature. Perversely, the condition became romanticized--almost idealized in people's minds as a sort of ethereal, seductive dance between sexuality and death.
If you scroll down to the bottom of the page on which "Germ Theory" appears, you'll find that the staff of HMS Beagle has provided a set of links to relevant articles on the web.
The paper scientific literature is replete with reports on alarming trends in antibiotic resistance, due primarily to agricultural practices. For a couple of examples:
Palumbi, SR (2001) Humans as the world's greatest evolutionary force. Science. 293:1786-1790.
Levy, SB (1998) Antimicrobial resistance: bacteria on the defence. British Medical Journal. 317:612-613.
This is the only environmental organization I'm aware of that actively campaigns on the issue of preventing and slowing antibiotic resistance.
From their website:
"While medicine must act to slow the emergence of resistant bacteria, it is equally important to eliminate uses -- primarily agricultural -- whose benefits are economic, not therapeutic. About 25 million pounds of antibiotics are fed every year to livestock for growth promotion and disease prevention, almost eight times the amount given to humans to treat disease. Both the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization have called for an end to the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in agriculture that we depend on in human medicine."
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett. Penguin Books. New York. 1995.
The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis by Thomas Dormandy. New York University Press. Washington Square, New York. 1999.
Other assorted sources
Union of Concerned Scientists: Citizens and Scientists for Environmental Solutions