Quotes from Sonia Shah

In the nineteenth century, cholera struck the most modern, prosperous cities in the world, killing rich and poor alike, from Paris and London to New York City and New Orleans. In 1836, it felled King Charles X in Italy; in 1849, President James Polk in New Orleans; in 1893, the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg.

Globally, 12 percent of bird species, 23 percent of mammals, and 32 percent of amphibians are at risk of extinction. Since 1970, global populations of these creatures have declined by nearly 30 percent. Just how these losses will shift the distribution of microbes between and across species, pushing some over the threshold, remains to be seen.53

the global bonfire of fossil fuels will heighten the likelihood of pandemics on its own, in a way that is likely to be even more consequential than all of its contributing factors put together.

Early notice makes possible all kinds of more efficient containment and mitigation. We could prevent some epidemics and more effectively prepare to withstand others. But even if such a global surveillance system can be built, it will work only if it translates into people actually using the information to do something about it.

Many experts believe that a cholera-like pandemic looms. In a survey by the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, 90 percent of epidemiologists said that a pandemic that will sicken 1 billion, kill up to 165 million, and trigger a global recession that could cost up to $3 trillion would occur sometime in the next two generations.

Living in Virginia required suffering what residents called a "seasoning"—that is, "two or three small fits of a feaver and ague," as one settler wrote in 1687.20

the virtual elimination of infectious diseases as a significant factor in social life," the virologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet wrote in 1951.2 "To write about infectious disease," he added in 1962, "is almost to write of something that has passed into history.

Using more traditional methods of tallying assaults, the statistics showed that Border Patrol agents did not experience the highest assault rate among law enforcement officers. They experienced the lowest. The death rate among Border Patrol agents was about one-third that of the nation's law enforcement officers who policed residents.

a single opossum, through grooming, destroyed nearly six thousand ticks a week.

As avian diversity declined in the United States, specialist species like woodpeckers and rails disappeared, while generalist species like American robins and crows boomed. (Populations of American robins have grown by 50 to 100 percent over the past twenty-five years.)48 This reordering of the composition of the local bird population steadily increased the chances that the virus would reach a high enough concentration to spill over into humans.

But what does it mean, the plague? It's life, that's all. —Albert Camus

Particular variants in our pathogen-recognition genes, which protected us from ancient epidemics, correlate with a range of autoimmune disorders, from diabetes and multiple sclerosis to lupus.27