Pandemic Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond

Sonia Shah

eAudio - 2016

From the author of The Fever, a wide-ranging inquiry into the origins of pandemicsInterweaving 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... more