<p><b>From the author of <i>The Fever</i>, a wide-ranging inquiry into the origins of pandemics</b><br><b></b><br><b></b>Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, <i>Pandemic</i> explores the origins of epidemics, drawing parallels between the story of cholera--one of history's most disruptive and deadly pathogens--and the new pathogens that stalk humankind today, from Ebola and avian influenza to drug-resistant superbugs.</p><p>More than three hundred infectious diseases have emerged or reemerged in new territory during the past fifty years, and 90 percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a disruptive, deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations.</p><p>To reveal how that might happen, Sonia Shah tracks each stage of cholera's dramatic journey from harmless microbe to world-changing pandemic, from its 1817 emergence in the South Asian hinterlands to its rapid dispersal across the nineteenth-century world and its latest beachhead in Haiti. She reports on the pathogens following 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 surgical wards of New Delhi, the slums of Port-au-Prince, and the suburban backyards of the East Coast.</p><p>By delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the world's deadliest diseases,<i>Pandemic</i> reveals what the next epidemic might look like--and what we can do to prevent it.</p>