The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris

"[A] riveting, vivid history of modern disease outbreaks..." —The Observer

"Some of the scenes in Mark Honigsbaum's The Pandemic Century were so vivid they had me drafting movie treatments in my head....Whether familiar or forgotten, parrot fever or Ebola, he finds striking similarities among them. And those similarities ought to make us worried about the next outbreak. If history is any guide, things may not go well." —New York Times

"Lively, gruesome, and masterful....Honigsbaum mixes superb medical history with vivid portraits of the worldwide reactions to each [pandemic] event." —Kirkus (Starred Review)

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From pneumonic plague in LA and parrot fever in Argentina to the more recent AIDS, SARS and Ebola epidemics, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated outbreaks and scares. Like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its place.

The Pandemic Century exposes the limits of science against nature, and how these crises are shaped by humans as much as microbes.