social science / disease & health issues

"[The author] expounds on the flu's deadly past to solve the mysteries that could protect us from the next outbreak. He talks with . . . epidemiologists, policy makers, and the researcher who first sequenced the genetic building blocks of the original 1918 virus to offer both a . . . history and a roadmap for understanding what's to come. [The author] digs into the discovery and resurrection of the flu virus in the frozen victims of the 1918 epidemic, as well as the . . . remedies that once treated the disease, such as whiskey and blood-letting. [The book] also breaks down the . . . dialogue surrounding the disease, explaining the controversy over vaccinations, antiviral drugs like Tamiflu, and the federal government's role in preparing for pandemic outbreaks"--Provided by publisher.

"From the author of The Fever, a wide-ranging inquiry into the origins of pandemics Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origins of epidemics, drawing parallels between the story of cholera-one of history's most disruptive and deadly pathogens-and the new pathogens that stalk humankind today, from Ebola and avian influenza to drug-resistant superbugs. More than three hundred infectious diseases have emerged or reemerged in new territory during the past fifty years, and 90 percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a disruptive, deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. To reveal how that might happen, Sonia Shah tracks each stage of cholera's dramatic journey from harmless microbe to world-changing pandemic, from its 1817 emergence in the South Asian hinterlands to its rapid dispersal across the nineteenth-century world and its latest beachhead in Haiti. She reports on the pathogens following in 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. By delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the world's deadliest diseases, Pandemic reveals what the next epidemic might look like-and what we can do to prevent it"--.