As in CitationMcNeill's (1976) classic book Plagues and Peoples, evolutionary theory drives the narrative, as pathogens evolve to take advantage of environmental disturbances and new patterns of human movement and settlement, while we develop defenses (biological as much as social) in response. What does Shah's Pandemic have to offer to this already overloaded category?įor one, more than most writers in the scary-disease genre, Shah is committed to historicizing epidemic disease. As a medical geographer, my shelves are filled with many other examples, typified by their chilling cover art and hyperbolic blurbs: Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them ( CitationWalters 2012), The Monsters at Our Door ( CitationDavis 2005), and Spillover ( CitationQuammen 2012), to name just a few. The prototype for this kind of book is CitationPreston's (1995) The Hot Zone, which introduced Ebola fever to the wider world, inspired Hollywood movies such as Outbreak (bad) and Contagion (much better), and even shaped the media narrative of the 2014 Ebola epidemic. This book falls within a familiar genre of pathogen-centered nonfiction, in which journalists translate complex scientific findings to a general audience, introduce unfamiliar viruses from far-off lands, and terrify readers with lurid accounts of suffering and untimely death. As in her previous book, The Fever ( CitationShah 2010), a far-reaching historical account of malaria, in Pandemic Shah shows her knack for crisp analysis and compelling storytelling, untangling the complex dynamics of infectious disease while suggesting promising new pathways in public health-and the need for changes in the public's sensibilities-to confront epidemic threats.
Sonia Shah's new book explains how such pandemics develop in a complex web of microbiological, ecological, political-economic, and cultural factors. Most recently our attention has been focused (fleetingly, at least) on Zika virus before that, it was the Ebola outbreak, and a few years before that, the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic. We live in an era of elevated public anxiety over global epidemics of infectious disease.
viii and 271 pp., color photos and maps, glossary, notes, index. New York, NY: Sarah Crichton Books, 2016. Pandemics in the past, we can make predictions about the future.Sonia Shah. The next pandemic, by unraveling the story of how pathogens have caused While we can’t know which pathogen will cause It could be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant superbug, or That one of them will cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two Have either newly emerged or reemerged, appearing in territories where Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases
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