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.
Sadly, Pandemic has no clear focus, and it is not the much-needed definitive analysis of cholera I hoped it would be. It tries instead to cover every single major outbreak of recent history, from the 2003 SARS epidemic to Shah’s own battle with MRSA, adding little to the large canon of outbreak and emerging-diseases literature.
For those who don’t know much about the history of cholera, Ms. Shah’s dense, compact book is a decent primer ... Perhaps my favorite chapter, though, is about waste — or, as Ms. Shah puts it, 'the rising tide of feculence.' Nothing seems to awaken the muse in Ms. Shah like excreta, the ideal delivery system for all kinds of diseases.
