Cholera caused its first pandemic in Bengal in 1817, killing 10,000 people. The microscopic bacteria that causes that disease floated benignly in the coastal waters of the Bay of Bengal, attached to tiny crustaceans, until British-driven settlement of wetlands allowed it to adapt to humans. Her new book, Pandemic: tracking contagions, from cholera to Ebola and beyond, takes cholera as its central simile. If Shah sounds prescient, it’s at least in part because she’s a student of history. All three followed the same animal-to-human pattern, aided by fast and easy transportation. And on February 1, 2016, within weeks of Shah publishing her book, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Zika virus a global health emergency. The chikungunya virus established itself in the Americas for the first time. Since then, the Ebola virus has ravaged the West African nations of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Six years ago, science writer Sonia Shah began work on a book that would explain how the next pandemic might originate: It would start as a pathogen found only in animals, adapt to humans through close contact, and spread rapidly thanks to urbanization and modern travel.
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