Pandemic – Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond By Sonia Shah
ABOUT BOOK
Pandemic (2016) explores the fascinating world of pathogens and diseases and how they can spread from a bat in China to five other continents in a single day. How do these diseases evolve, and how does modern society help contribute to their success? And most importantly: what can we do to stop the next pandemic?
ABOUT AUTHOR
Sonia Shah is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American and The Wall Street Journal. Her TED Talk, “Three Reasons We Still Haven’t Gotten Rid of Malaria,” was watched by over a million people around the world. Her other books include Crude: The Story of Oil and The Body Hunters.
Delve into the mystery of pandemics.
At school, we all learned, with a shudder, how the Black Death ravaged Europe. Thanks to modern medicine and good hygiene, a pandemic like that could never devastate the modern world! Or could it?
Many epidemiologists believe that a global pandemic is going to hit in the near future. So what can we do? Well, to protect our own society and help others, we need to understand how outbreaks emerge and how they grow to catastrophic proportions.
TED TALK: Sonia Shah: “Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond” | Talks at Google
FROM HISTORY
How the founding of a bank contributed to a devastating cholera epidemic;
A virus that spread to five continents in the course of a single day
KEY POINTS
1) As humans spread across the globe, previously harmless animal pathogens adapted to our bodies and made us sick.
2) Pathogens use our own transportation system to spread around.
3) Despite advancements in human waste management, feces can still lead to dangerous outbreaks.
4) Pandemics thrive in large crowds.
5) Political deceit can enable pandemics.
6) Time and again, medical progress has been held back by strict beliefs.
7) Fixating on foreign pathogens can distract us from other dangerous diseases at home
BOOK SUMMARY
Civilization has brought many new pathogens with it and researchers think that a new pandemic will emerge in the decades ahead. In order to survive this, we need to be aware of the origins and causes of these new pathogens. Crowds, waste management and a lack of communication between different fields of medicine are only a few factors that contribute to the spreading of new diseases.
