Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize| A New York Times Editor's Choice “[A]
grounded, bracingly intelligent study”—Nature Prizewinning science journalist Sonia Shah
presents a startling examination of the pandemics that have ravaged humanity—and shows
us how history can prepare us to confront the most serious acute global health emergency of
our time. 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 …

We live in an era of elevated public anxiety over global epidemics of infectious disease.
Most recently our attention has been focused (fleetingly, at least) on Zika virus; before that, it
was the Ebola outbreak, and a few years before that, the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic. Sonia
Shah's new book explains how such pandemics develop in a complex web of
microbiological, ecological, politicaleconomic, and cultural factors. As in her previous book,
The Fever (Shah 2010), a far-reaching historical account of malaria, in Pandemic Shah …