One Book Lecture | Sonia Shah

Sonia Shah, Author of Pandemic: Tracing Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond

March 26, 2018 7-9pm, Public Lecture with Q&A, Agave 1240-1242. 

Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have emerged or reemerged in new territory. Experts around the world are bracing for a deadly, disruptive pandemic. In Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, prizewinning journalist Sonia Shah reveals how that could happen, by drawing parallels between cholera---one of history’s most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens---and the 

new diseases that stalk us today. As Shah traces each stage of cholera’s dramatic journey from harmless microbe to world-changing pandemic, she reports on the pathogens that have followed cholera’s footsteps---from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers emerging from China’s wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi, the slums of Port-au-Prince, and the suburban backyards of the East Coast. A true story that is both gripping and alarming, Pandemic delves deep into the convoluted science, strange politics, and the checkered history of one of the world’s deadliest diseases, offering a prelude to the future that’s impossible to ignore.

Sonia Shah is a science journalist and prize-winning author. Her writing on science, politics, and human rights has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and elsewhere, and she has been featured on Radiolab, Fresh Air, and TED.com, where her talk “Three Reasons We Still Haven’t Gotten Rid of Malaria” has been viewed by more than a million people around the world. Her 2010 book The Fever was long-listed for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize for Science Books.

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