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Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origin of epidemics, drawing parallels between the story of cholera—one of history's most disruptive and deadly pathogens—and the new pathogens that stalk humankind today, from Ebola and avian influenza to drug-resistant superbugs.
More than three hundred infectious diseases have emerged or reemerged in new territory during the past fifty years, and 90 percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a disruptive, deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations.
To reveal how that might happen, Sonia Shah tracks each stage of cholera's dramatic journey from harmless microbe to world-changing pandemic, from its 1817 emergence in the South Asian hinterlands to its rapid dispersal across the nineteenth-century world and its latest beachhead in Haiti. She reports on the pathogens following in cholera's footsteps, from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers emerging from China's wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi, the slums of Port-au-Prince, 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 epidemic might look like—and what we can do to prevent it.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 23, 2016 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780451482174
- File size: 275700 KB
- Duration: 09:34:22
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Nine and a half hours of the history and biology of fatal disease transmission may not be everyone's listening pleasure, but you do come away feeling this is something you, and everybody else, should hear. Author Sonia Shah is not a practiced narrator, but her perspective as a scientist and mother gives her narration authority and immediacy. And she definitely knows what she's talking about. Historically, governments have handled disease outbreaks badly, and have been slow to warn citizens of the full danger they face. Ignorance and denial inevitably heightened the toll. Shah tells grim stories that are always most terrifying in terms of what was to come. Yet her overall account is implicitly reaffirming in its "history" of all the outbreaks that did not occur, thanks to modern science, responsible government, and the vigilance of an informed public. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine -
January 25, 2016
In this absorbing, complex, and ominous look at the dangers posed by pathogens in our daily lives, science journalist Shah (The Fever) cautions that there are no easy solutions. Of particular note is the challenge of tracking those pathogens that remain uncontained and which could overtake humans in a pandemic. As an example, Shah tracks the waterborne Vibrio cholerae bacterium from its home in the southwest Indian Ocean as it radiated from China and India to Paris in 1832, and then sailed to the U.S. with emigrants from cholera-plagued Europe heading to the eastern coast of North America—at the time there were 5,800 reported cases and nearly 3,000 deaths in New York City alone. Shah then meticulously dissects the conditions that made cholera’s transmission so effective and new outbreaks inevitable, including filthy water, overcrowding, political corruption and inaction, scapegoating, and even the expedited expansion of the human population by the harnessing of fossil fuels. “For most of our history, we’ve been unaware of pathogens’ role in our lives,” Shah writes, adding that most of the challenges still lay ahead. Shah’s warning is certainly troubling, and this important medical and social history is worthy of attention—and action. Agent: Charlotte Sheedy, Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.
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