Sonia Shah to Present at Global Speaker Series on March 5, 2019

Sonia Shah is an American investigative journalist and author noted for her articles on corporate power - especially with respect to agriculture, oil and pharmaceutical industries - and on gender equality with specific reference to issues that affect developing countries. Shah was born in 1969 in New York City to Indian immigrants. Growing up, she shuttled between the northeastern United States where her parents practiced medicine in Mumbai and Bangalore, India, where her extended working-class family lived, developing a lifelong interest in inequality between and within societies. Her most recent novel Pandemic 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. Over 300 infectious diseases have newly emerged or re-emerged in new territory over the past 50 years, and many epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a disruptive, deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. To reveal how that might happen, 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. By delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the world’s deadliest diseases, Pandemic reveals what the next contagion might look like—and what we can do to prevent it.
 
As part of Newark Academy’s Global Speaker Series, Shah will speak to the entire school in Rose Auditorium from 9:20-10:20 a.m. before breakout sessions in Kaltenbacher Hall from 10:25 a.m.-12 p.m. on March 5, 2019.
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