Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
Scientists agree that a pathogen is likely to cause a global pandemic in the near future. But which one? And how?
Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either newly emerged or reemerged, appearing in territories where they've never been seen before. Ninety percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. It could be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant superbug, or something completely new. While we can't know which pathogen will cause the next pandemic, by unraveling the story of how pathogens have caused pandemics in the past, we can make predictions about the future. In Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, fromCholera to Ebola and Beyond, the prizewinning journalist Sonia Shah—whose book on malaria, The Fever, was called a "tour-de-force history" (The New York Times) and "revelatory" (The NewRepublic)—interweaves history, original reportage, and personal narrative to explore the origins of contagions, drawing parallels between cholera, one of history's most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens, and the new diseases that stalk humankind today.
Read more
To reveal how a new pandemic might develop, Sonia Shah tracks each stage of cholera's dramatic journey, from its emergence in the South Asian hinterlands as a harmless microbe to its rapid dispersal across the nineteenth-century world, all the way to its latest beachhead in Haiti. Along the way she reports on the pathogens now following in cholera's footsteps, from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers coming out of China's wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi, and the suburban backyards of the East Coast.
By delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the world's deadliest diseases, Pandemic reveals what the next global contagion might look like— and what we can do to prevent it.
Liked Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
-
The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age Shares science, nonfiction, medical -
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic Shares nonfiction, science, medical -
Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus Shares nonfiction, science, medical -
The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear Shares nonfiction, science, medicine
“People who read Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond tend to reach for these next.”
-
Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy
-
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
-
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
-
Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World
