num_pages: 288
description: 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 theyve 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 cant 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 Shahwhose 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 historys most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens and the new diseases that stalk humankind today.To reveal how a new pandemic might develop Sonia Shah tracks each stage of choleras 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 choleras footsteps from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers coming out of Chinas 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 worlds deadliest diseases Pandemic reveals what the next global contagion might look like and what we can do to prevent it.
language: English
title: Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond
publisher: Sarah Crichton Books