Sonia Shah spoke about her book, Pandemic, at Politics & Prose on Friday, February 26, 2016.

Just as seismologists talk about the Big One, epidemiologists are alert for signs of a major pathogen—Ebola? SARS?—that could sicken as many as a billion people sometime in the next two generations. In her new book, Shah, an award-winning science journalist and the author of The Fever, which chronicled the science and social impact of malaria, draws on a wide range of historians as well as cutting-edge public health experts to describe past pandemics—notably outbreaks of cholera, which emerged in 1817 as a harmless microbe, steadily evolving into a global mass-killer—study how we’ve coped, and describe what we might face next and how we can prevent it.