Pandemic

Science journalist Sonia Shah looks at the pandemics that have swept through human history and asks what they can teach us about facing a global health emergency today. Her subtitle takes the story from cholera to coronaviruses and beyond.

Shah blends historical research, her own reporting and personal experience. She uses cholera, one of the deadliest pandemic-causing pathogens ever known, as a model, following each stage of its journey to show how a new pandemic might take shape.

She then turns to the diseases now following in its path, from the MRSA bacterium that has threatened her own family to new killers emerging from China's wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi and suburban backyards on the American East Coast. Along the way she digs into the complicated science, the odd politics and the troubled past of one of the world's deadliest diseases. The book is an epidemiological history with lessons that feel urgent now.