Shah’s fourth book released.
AB Wire
Award-winning Indian American journalist and writer Sonia Shah has warned that epidemiologists are bracing themselves for a mind-boggling epidemic in the near future, the ‘Big One’ that could sicken a billion people and kill tens of millions of people.
In an interview to ‘Fresh Air’ segment of NPR, Shah, whose fourth book ‘Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond’ was released today, February 23, citing a 2006 survey, said, “the majority of … pandemic experts of all kinds, felt that a pandemic that would sicken a billion people, kill 165 million people and cost the global economy about $3 trillion would occur sometime in the next two generations.”
Shah discusses the history and science of contagious diseases in her new book. She notes that humans put themselves at risk by encroaching on wildlife habitats.
“About 60 percent of our new pathogens come from the bodies of animals,” she says. She added in her NPR interview that international travel is also a factor in the spread of disease.
“Air travel shapes our epidemics in such a powerful way that scientists can actually predict where and when an epidemic will strike next just by measuring the number of direct flights between infected and uninfected cities,” she says.
“Our relationship to disease and pandemics is really … part of our relationship to the natural world,” she says. “It’s a risk we have to live with.”
Shah says to prevent pathogens, rather than curing them, would be to crub it at the point of origin.
“… we know there’s certain places that have higher risk of pathogens emerging, and we can do kind of active surveillance in those places by mapping the microbes that are there, by surveilling people or animals who are more likely to spread or to have spill-overs of microbes into their bodies. … We have more advanced detection capacity now with genetic analysis and other kinds of ways that we can see where these invisible microbes are spreading and changing,” she said in the NPR interview.
She says that most of our pathogens come from animals.
“From bats, we got Ebola; from monkeys we got HIV, malaria, most likely Zika, as well; from birds we got avian influenzas, all other influenzas as well, West Nile virus, etc. So it’s when we invade wildlife habitat or when we disrupt it in ways that brings people and animals into close contact, that their microbes start to spill over and adapt to our bodies,” she said.
Shah spoke also about the Zika virus.
“…So in the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s when we had Zika virus in the forests of Africa, it was carried by a forest mosquito and that mosquito very rarely bit humans, it mostly bit animals, which is why we didn’t have a lot of Zika virus in people, at least it’s one reason why.
“What we’re seeing now is Zika virus has crossed over into a mosquito called Aedes aegypti, and this is a mosquito that has expanded its range over recent years as we have urbanized. It specializes in living in human cities. It loves garbage, it can breed in a drop of water in a bottle cap … and it only bites humans.
“So once we had Zika virus coming into Aedes aegypti, this highly urbanized mosquito, that’s when we started having this explosive spread. Of course, it traveled from Asia. It came out of Africa. It came into Malaysia, and then probably into the Philippines, Micronesia and French Polynesia. And that was the sort of slow spread, but then the rapid expansion happened when it came from French Polynesia into Brazil, and that was almost certainly through a flight, either people from French Polynesia coming to Brazil for the World Cup or possibly an international canoe race. But whatever it was, it was on a flight that it came over, and from there it’s able to access these huge, highly urbanized populations and have no immunity, and that’s what created the epidemic.”
She had this to say about Lyme disease: “Lyme disease is caused by a bacteria that lives in rodents and is spread by ticks. Now in the intact northeastern forest where Lyme disease first emerged, there used to be a diversity of different woodland animals there, like chipmunks and opossums as well as deer and mice and other things, but as we spread our suburbs into the northeastern forest and we kind of broke up that forest into little patchworks, we got rid of a lot of that diversity. We lost chipmunks, we lost opossums, and it turns out that those animals actually control tick populations. The typical opossum destroys about 6,000 ticks a week through grooming, but the typical white-footed mouse, which is what we do have left in those patchwork forests, a typical mouse destroys maybe 50 ticks a week. So the fewer opossums you have and the more mice you have, the more ticks you have and the more likely it becomes that this tick-borne pathogen will spill over into humans. And that’s exactly what happened with Lyme disease and now with many other tick-borne illnesses as well.”
Previously, Shah edited two books: ‘Between Fear and Hope; and ‘Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire’. She authored three other books: ‘Crude: The Story of Oil’; ‘The Body Hunters’ and the critically acclaimed ‘The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years’.
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting noted that Shah’s TED.com talk received over 1 million views and her book, ‘The Fever’ received praise from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time and others.
“In this absorbing, complex, and ominous look at the dangers posed by pathogens in our daily lives, science journalist Shah (The Fever) cautions that there are no easy solutions,” wrote Publishers Weekly. “Shah’s warning is certainly troubling, and this important medical and social history is worthy of attention—and action.”
Shah, who was born in New York City to Indian immigrants, and growing up, shuttled between the northeastern United States where her parents practiced medicine and Mumbai and Bangalore, where her extended working-class family lived, according to Wikipedia.
She holds a BA in journalism, philosophy, and neuroscience from Oberlin College, and lives with molecular ecologist Mark Bulmer and their two sons Zakir and Kush.