Download Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond AudioBook Free
From the writer of The Fever, a wide-ranging inquiry into the roots of pandemics Interweaving background, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the foundation of epidemics, drawing parallels between your report of cholera - one of history's most disruptive and fatal pathogens - and the new pathogens that stalk humankind today, from Ebola and avian influenza to drug-resistant superbugs. A lot more than 300 infectious diseases have emerged or reemerged in new territory in the past 50 years, and 90 percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them may cause a disruptive, fatal pandemic sometime within the next two generations. To show you how that might happen, Sonia Shah tracks each stage of cholera's dramatic journey from harmless microbe to world-changing pandemic, from its 1817 introduction in the Southern Asian hinterlands to its immediate dispersal across the 19th-century world and its own latest beachhead in Haiti. She accounts on the pathogens pursuing 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 medical wards of New Delhi, the slums of Port-au-Prince, and the suburban backyards of the East Shoreline. By delving into the convoluted science, odd politics, and checkered background of one of the world's deadliest diseases, Pandemic uncovers what the next epidemic might appear to be - and everything we can do to prevent it.
