Book excerpt: Protozoa and Human Disease is a textbook on medically important protozoa and the diseases they cause for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and professionals. It combines a taxonomic and medical approach and is therefore suitable for a parasitology, microbiology, medical, and public health readership. In addition to the basics such as morphological features, life cycles, and the clinical manifestations of the diseases, topics like the molecular and immunological basis of pathogenesis, metabolic pathways, specialized subcellular structures, ecology of disease transmission, antigenic variation, and molecular epidemiology are discussed for many of the protozoan pathogens. At the end of the book is an extensive glos