流行病的故事 – Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah

过去数十年来，我们拥抱着工业化与全球化带来的全新生活方式，也比以往任何时候 更能感受到流行病的存在。然而，我们对流行病的认知充斥着误解、轻视或恐惧。

在《流行病的故事》中，屡获大奖的科普作家索尼娅·沙阿向我们展现了关于流行病鲜为人知的真相，深刻揭示了暗藏在每次疫情背后的气候、社会、文化等因素。流行病侵害着人类健康，有时甚至令国家陷入危机。但另一方面，它也改变了人类的进化轨迹，塑造了人类的行为与文明。

人类与流行病之间的较量将持续存在。在后疫情时代，我们更需要借助科学与历史的力量，全球紧密合作，为未来可能出现的流行病风险做好准备。

Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origin 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.

More than 300 infectious diseases have emerged or reemerged in new territory during the past 50 years, and 90 percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a disruptive, deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations.

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 19th-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.

By delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the world’s deadliest diseases, Pandemic reveals what the next epidemic might look like – and what we can do to prevent it.

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