pandemic tracking contagions from cholera to ebola and beyond

In the US, Trump and his allies have long raised alarms about the contagiousness of unwanted foreigners, ignoring that of the rest of the populace. In Bulgaria, a 2013 study of articles about migrants found that the two most commonly appearing words were “threat” and “disease.” In Greece, right-wing vigilantes have marched into hospitals to evict sickly migrants. Right-wing populist leaders have for years singled out foreigners as vectors of crime, terror and disease, as if they alone posed such threats. Public fears of contamination by invasive foreigners reached a fevered pitch even before the first case of pneumonia at the Wuhan seafood market hit the news.

Along the way she reports on the pathogens now following in choleraâ€™s footsteps, from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers coming out of Chinaâ€™s wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi, and the suburban backyards of the East Coast.By delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the worldâ€™s deadliest diseases, Pandemic reveals what the next global contagion might look likeâ€” and what we can do to prevent it.There’s reason to suspect the pandemic of xenophobia in the wake of today’s novel coronavirus will wreak similar havoc. In Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, the prizewinning journalist Sonia Shahâ€”whose book on malaria, The Fever, was called a â€œtour-de-force historyâ€ (The New York Times) and â€œrevelatoryâ€ (The New Republic)â€”interweaves history, original reportage, and personal narrative to explore the origins of contagions, drawing parallels between cholera, one of historyâ€™s most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens, and the new diseases that stalk humankind today.To reveal how a new pandemic might develop, Sonia Shah tracks each stage of choleraâ€™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. While we canâ€™t know which pathogen will cause the next pandemic, by unraveling the story of how pathogens have caused pandemics in the past, we can make predictions about the future. It could be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant superbug, or something completely new.

Ninety percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. But which one? And how?Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either newly emerged or reemerged, appearing in territories where theyâ€™ve never been seen before.

Scientists agree that a pathogen is likely to cause a global pandemic in the near future.

Pandemic tracking contagions from cholera to ebola and beyond