Name: Pandemic
ISBN: 9781250118004

Pandemic

Scientists agree that a pathogen is likely to cause a global pandemic in the near future. But which one? And how? Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either newly emerged or reemerged. Ninety percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. It could be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant superbug, or something completely new. While we can'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. Here, prizewinning science journalist Sonia Shah 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. To reveal how a new pandemic might develop, Shah 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.

What Hacker News says

lanstinJun 2026

I am optimistic about the future but I doubt happiness would increase so much; happiness is remarkably stable; I do think at the right time scale, humans as a group will have less sickness and brutality and more kindness and intelligence and fulfillment. But you know people in a society with 1/3 of children dieing within five years are remarkably not unhappier than one where only 0.2% die.

The right scale is not years or decades but maybe centuries. I recently read the powerhouse book “Pandemic” by Sonia Shah, among whose amazing ideas is a history of the ideas of medicine and germ theory in the last few hundred years. As idiotic as the Covid responses have been, they were way way better, not only than the European response to Plague, but to European response to cholera from 170 years ago. We are as a group slow learners, but seem to continue handling each recurrent example of a problem slightly better; our Achilles heel is slow moving disasters than just happen once, e.g. the carbon burn.

(Offtopic, another fascinating idea from the book is that both sexual reproduction and death or individuals may be evolved responses to microbial attacks, mixing up the variety in the species so the microbes can’t over adapt to the genome).

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lanstinSep 2026

I read a book on epidemics where some modern theories on death were essentially its selected for to force potential infecting organisms to keep starting over on mastering a given genetic environment. Ones grandchildren are more likely to survive the successor plague than you are, hence a population with excessively long life would have died out. I think the evidence was from long lived trees? (Pandemic by Sonia Shah).

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throw0101aAug 2021

I'm currently reading Pandemic by Sonia Shah (see also her The Fever on malaria):

* https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250118004

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23847947-pandemic

In it she mentions monkeypox:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeypox_virus

Seems that it has made the jump to humans, and those who were vaccinate against smallpox are somewhat protected against it.

So it may be that we have eventually have another 'pox virus that floats around. At the very least we have a lot of the 'base research' done on each, and so developing a vaccine wouldn't be difficult.

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