Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize | A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

“[A] grounded, bracingly intelligent study.” —Nature

Prizewinning science journalist Sonia Shah presents a startling examination of the pandemics that have ravaged humanity—and how history prepares us to confront the most serious acute global health emergency of our time. Now with a new preface written in response to COVID-19.

Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either emerged or reemerged, appearing in places where they’ve never before been seen. Years before the sudden arrival of COVID-19, ninety percent of epidemiologists predicted that one of them would cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. It might be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant superbug, or something completely new, like the novel virus the world is confronting today. While it was impossible to predict the emergence of SARS-CoV-2—and it remains impossible to predict which pathogen will cause the next global outbreak—by unraveling the stories of pandemics past we can begin to better understand our own future, and to prepare for what it holds in store.

In Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond, Sonia Shah interweaves history, original reportage, and personal narrative to explore the origins of epidemics, drawing parallels between cholera—one of history’s most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens—and the new diseases that stalk humankind today. She tracks each stage of cholera’s 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 cholera’s footsteps, from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers coming out of China’s wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi, and the suburban backyards of the East Coast.

Delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the world’s deadliest diseases, Pandemic is a work of epidemiological history like no other, with urgent lessons for our own time.

“Shah proves a disquieting Virgil, guiding us through the hells ruled by [infectious diseases] . . . The power of Shah's account lies in her ability to track simultaneously the multiple dimensions of the public-health crises we are facing.” —Chicago Tribune