From the author from the Fever, a wide-ranging inquiry in to the origins of pandemics

Interweaving history, first reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origin of epidemics, drawing parallels between your story of cholera–one of history’s most disruptive and deadly pathogens–and the brand new pathogens that stalk humankind today, from Ebola and avian influenza to drug-resistant superbugs.

More than three hundred infectious illnesses have emerged or reemerged in new about Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond place during the past fifty years, and 90 percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a disruptive, deadly pandemic sometime within the next two generations.

To reveal how that might happen, Sonia Shah songs each stage of cholera’s dramatic journey from harmless microbe to world-changing pandemic, from its 1817 introduction in the South Asian hinterlands to its rapid dispersal over the nineteenth-century globe and its latest beachhead in Haiti. She reviews around the pathogens pursuing in cholera’s footsteps, from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family towards the never-before-seen killers growing from China’s damp markets, the medical wards of New Delhi, the slums of Port-au-Prince, and the suburban backyards of the East Coastline.

By delving into the convoluted science, unusual politics, and checkered history of one from the world’s deadliest diseases, Pandemic reveals what another epidemic might appearance like–and what we are able to do to avoid it.