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Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond
by Sonia Shah
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, from Cholera 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 New Republic), 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.
"Starred Review. Investigative science journalist Shah (The Fever, 2011) is at it again, and if the words, and beyond, in her latest book's subtitle don't grab a reader's attention, they should ... Yes, Shah is back and in rare form. And this time it's personal." - Donna Chavez, Booklist
"In this absorbing, complex, and ominous look at the dangers posed by pathogens in our daily lives, science journalist Shah cautions that there are no easy solutions... Shah's warning is certainly troubling, and this important medical and social history is worthy of attention and action." - Publishers Weekly
This information about Pandemic was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sonia Shah is a science journalist and prizewinning author. Her writing on science, politics, and human rights has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and elsewhere, and she has been featured on Radiolab, Fresh Air, and TED.com, where her talk "Three Reasons We Still Haven't Gotten Rid of Malaria" has been viewed by more than a million people around the world. Her 2010 book The Fever was long-listed for the Royal Society's Winton Prize for Science Books.
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