Sonia Shah. Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, From Cholera to Ebola and Beyond. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2016. $26.00. pp. 271. Hardcover. ISBN 978‐0‐374‐12288‐1.

• Published date: 01 March 2018
• Author: Joshua R. Hutton
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.254
• Date: 01 March 2018

Book Review

Sonia Shah. Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, From Cholera to Ebola and Beyond. New

York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2016. $26.00. pp. 271. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-374-

12288-1.

Given the prominence of pandemics in national media, and the devastation

reaped by SARS, inf‌luenza, Ebola, Zika, cholera, and myriad other pathogens,

Pandemic is a timely foray into the dynamics and history of epidemic disease. The

book’s main theme is effectively a singular outline of a hypothetical future

outbreak, colored by historical narratives; scientif‌ic research; and the author’s

personal experiences in mainland China, India, Haiti, and even her own home in

the Unites States.

Pandemic is organized rather like its namesake and subject matter: in sequence

from the emergence of pathogens and their leap from animals to humans, the

transmission of disease across the globe, the effect of crowding, urbanization, and

dirt, the social and political factors which impede outbreak response, the rise of

epidemiological surveillance and biomedical countermeasures, and f‌inal chapters

envisaging a future pandemic and imagining a response to it. The book’s central

argument is that pandemics past, present, and future all have commonalities

which make them understandable from both a contemporary and historical lens;

studying present, and future epidemics by understanding the past.

What shines through in this book is the great care and detail given to

personal experiences that permeate each chapter’s central argument. One vignette

that stands out is an in-depth and horrifying account of cholera’s pathogenesis;

“Within hours ... shrivelled victims’ faces, wrinkling skin and hollowing cheeks,

drying up tear ducts. Fluid blood turned tarry ... Muscles, deprived of oxygen,

shuddered so violently that they sometimes tore” (p. 41). Shah also tells how

MRSA infected her and her son, and how after undergoing multiple treatments

which failed to rid her body of persistent f‌lare ups, the MRSA colonization

eventually normalized and fell into a healthy equilibrium with her body.

Additionally, Pandemic argues that epidemics are an inherently human

phenomenon; from the natural environment destruction and overcrowding that

promote zoonotic crossover, to industrialization’s promotion of international

World Medical & Health Policy, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2018

120

doi: 10.1002/wmh3.254

#2018 Policy Studies Organization