Pandemic interweaves history, original reportage, and personal narrative to explore the origins of contagions, drawing parallels between cholera, one of history’s most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens, and the new diseases that stalk humankind today.
Zika provides a devastating backdrop for Sonia Shah’s Pandemic. But far from opportunism, the book represents six years’ work and considerable prescience on Shah’s part ... Shah’s book should be required reading for anyone working in global health. It should also alert a much wider audience to the ways that many kinds of the microorganisms called pathogens have caused Western pandemics of chronic, or so-called noncommunicable, diseases.
The science in Pandemic can sometimes be hard for a non-specialist to follow. In particular, some of the detail around mutation, transmission and virulence requires effort, but on the whole Ms. Shah does a good a job unraveling the complexities for the general reader.
...the power of Shah's account lies in her ability to track simultaneously the multiple dimensions of the public-health crises we are facing. If her analysis of the most important such dimension — the economic — is somewhat cursory, that is perhaps due to the sheer enormity of its scale.