Bøger af Sonia Shah

"[A] tour-de-force." --The New York Times "The Fever is a vivid and compelling history with a message that's entirely relevant today." --Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth ExtinctionRenowned science journalist Sonia Shah explores the surprising history of a disease that has haunted humanity since long before the pandemics of our own time. In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names--and opened their pocketbooks--in hopes of curing the disease. Still, at a time when the newly emergent COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the high cost of public health failures into stark relief, why aren't we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we've known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly one million of them? In The Fever, prizewinning journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer these questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its effect on human history. Over the centuries, she finds, we've placed our hopes in a panoply of drugs and technologies, only to find them dashed. From the settling of the New World to the construction of the Panama Canal, through wars and the advances of the Industrial Revolution, Shah tracks malaria's jagged ascent and the tragedies in its wake, revealing a parasite every bit as persistent as the insects that carry it. Combining lucid prose and original reporting from Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, India, and elsewhere, The Fever captures the curiously fascinating, utterly devastating history of one of humanity's most dogged foes--yielding essential lessons for our own time.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize | A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice"[A] grounded, bracingly intelligent study." -NaturePrizewinning science journalist Sonia Shah presents a startling examination of the pandemics that have ravaged humanity-and how history prepares us to confront the most serious acute global health emergency of our time. Now with a new preface written in response to COVID-19.Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either emerged or reemerged, appearing in places where they've never before been seen. Years before the sudden arrival of COVID-19, ninety percent of epidemiologists predicted that one of them would cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. It might be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant superbug, or something completely new, like the novel virus the world is confronting today. While it was impossible to predict the emergence of SARS-CoV-2-and it remains impossible to predict which pathogen will cause the next global outbreak-by unraveling the stories of pandemics past we can begin to better understand our own future, and to prepare for what it holds in store.In Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond, Sonia Shah interweaves history, original reportage, and personal narrative to explore the origins of epidemics, drawing parallels between cholera-one of history's most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens-and the new diseases that stalk humankind today. She tracks each stage of cholera's dramatic journey, from its emergence in the South Asian hinterlands as a harmless microbe to its rapid dispersal across the nineteenth-century world, all the way to its latest beachhead in Haiti. Along the way she reports on the pathogens now following in cholera's footsteps, from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers coming out of China's wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi, and the suburban backyards of the East Coast.Delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the world's deadliest diseases, Pandemic is a work of epidemiological history like no other, with urgent lessons for our own time."Shah proves a disquieting Virgil, guiding us through the hells ruled by [infectious diseases] . . . The power of Shah's account lies in her ability to track simultaneously the multiple dimensions of the public-health crises we are facing." -Chicago Tribune

Hailed by John le Carr as an act of courage on the part of its author and singled out for praise by the leading medical journals in the United States and the United Kingdom, The Body Hunters uncovers the real-life story behind le Carrs acclaimed novel The Constant Gardener and the feature film based on it."e;A trenchant expos . . . meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence"e; (Publishers Weekly), Sonia Shahs riveting journalistic account shines a much-needed spotlight on a disturbing new global trend. Drawing on years of original research and reporting in Africa and Asia, Shah examines how the multinational pharmaceutical industry, in its quest to develop lucrative drugs, has begun exporting its clinical research trials to the developing world, where ethical oversight is minimal and desperate patients abound. As the New England Journal of Medicine notes, it is critical that those engaged in drug development, clinical research and its oversight, research ethics, and policy know about these stories, which tell of an impossible choice being faced by many of the worlds poorest patientsbe experimented upon or die for lack of medicine.