(FORTUNE Magazine) – Mention an exotic vacation spot, and odds are Robert S. Desowitz, a Bronx-born, British-educated, retired tropical-medicine epidemiologist, has sought to cure a strange disease there. There's Nigeria (trypanosomiasis--a.k.a. sleeping sickness), New Guinea (malaria--something he's had), and Singapore (filariasis--it involves elephantiasis; we'll leave it at that). Since 1981, Desowitz has also penned five nonfiction tomes about various maladies, including his latest, Federal Bodysnatchers and the New Guinea Virus (W.W. Norton). Recently FORTUNE talked to the 76-year-old Desowitz about bioterrorism, monkeys, and tin-pot dictators.

Q: In 1999 when West Nile came to the U.S., it took dozens of government agencies four months to identify it. Are we any better equipped now to handle dangerous bugs?

A: No. There's been a lot of talk. And they're trying to put much of the CDC's program and the NIH program into the Homeland Security Department. But that would be a disaster.

Q: So what is needed?

A: To begin with, train Americans for our front-line microbiology diagnostic labs. We have to get our schools of public health back into a very strong infectious-disease posture. Early this year I was a visiting professor at a fine school in public health, and it didn't have any microscopes!

Q: You say killers in the Third World like malaria and sleeping sickness are being ignored by the pharmaceutical industry. Why?

A: The drug companies say the cost of bringing out a drug is so high that we can't produce for poor people. But AIDS has opened some very interesting prospects. Countries' leaders say, "I'm not going to let my people die." So they go to the patent pirates like Brazil and India. That scares the pharmaceutical companies, which then say, "I'll give it to you at cost" or "I'll give it away for a year." But it can't be for just a year. And it can't be at cost. Cost as they calculate it is $10 for a pill that can be produced in Brazil for 49 cents.

Q: What's the likelihood that a pathogen will surface in the U.S. via a terrorist?

A: Very likely. There are real nasties that could come in, like Ebola and Marburg, a virus carried by monkeys that wipes out human beings. Any tin-pot dictator with a couple hundred thousand dollars can set up his own genetic-modification laboratory and send people to the U.S. to be trained. But I don't think you can draw a distinction between bioterrorism and Mother Nature's terrorism. Travel is so rapid. Immigration is so open from tropical countries.

Q: So what will happen if a virulent epidemic strikes the developed world?

A: If we're struck by a large infectious disease, health may well become a public-utility system that you're going to have to regulate. You may not like government, but when the chips are down, you want government to take over. If something like that happens, we may have a really radical reassessment of our whole health industry.