Ep. 30 – Sonia Shah on how animal microbes become human pandemics

“The epidemiologist Larry Brilliant once said, ‘Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional,'” science journalist Sonia Shah recently wrote in The Nation. “But pandemics only remain optional if we have the will to disrupt our politics as readily as we disrupt nature and wildlife. In the end, there is no real mystery about the animal source of pandemics. It’s not some spiky scaled pangolin or furry flying bat. It’s populations of warm-blooded primates: The true animal source is us.” Photo by Glenford Nuñez. 

 In recent weeks, as Covid-19 has killed thousands, brought public life to a standstill and crippled global markets, the pandemic has been called a “black swan,” a term investors use to describe severe events that are unpredictable and extremely rare. But this coronavirus was no black swan to the scientists and journalists — including our guest, investigative journalist Sonia Shah — who were paying attention to the environmental, social, and political conditions that fuel the eruption and spread of infectious diseases. Shah and scientists she writes about have been warning the public for years of the mounting risk of a pandemic like Covid-19 and the ways in which our treatment of animals and our planet can cause unseen, but deadly, consequences. 

It’s now widely known that Covid-19 originated in wild animals before jumping the species barrier to humankind. It’s not alone. Roughly two-thirds of all emerging infectious diseases begin in the bodies of animals, mostly wildlife. Microbes have spilled over from animals to humans for time immemorial. But, as humans dominate the biosphere, the pace at which pathogens are making that jump is getting faster and faster. SARS, Zika, H1N1, Ebola, HIV– and now COVID-19 –can all be traced to how we are interacting with animals and their habitats.  

“From cows, we got measles and tuberculosis; from pigs, pertussis; from ducks, influenza,” Shah writes in Pandemic. “But while animal microbes have been spilling over into humans (and vice versa) for millennia, it’s historically been a rather slow process. Not anymore.” You can buy Pandemic here.

Sonia Shah has spent years diving into the origins of pandemics and the complex interplay between humans, animals, and pathogens. The disease backstories that Shah has investigated are powerful illustrations of the devastating costs of treating human health as independent of animal and planetary health. Shah is the author of five critically acclaimed and prize-winning books on science, medicine, human rights, and international politics. Her work has been aptly called “bracingly intelligent” by Nature and “dazzlingly original” by Naomi Klein. 

Shah’s superb 2017 book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, tells the history of viral infections that have ravaged humanity, drawing parallels between cholera and today’s emerging infectious diseases. Her previous books include The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Mankind for 500,000 Years, The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients, and Crude: The Story of Oil. Her latest book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, comes out in June 2020. It explores the unfolding history and science of human, plant, and animal migration — and predicts its life-saving power in the age of climate change.

“Over the last few years, biologists at the Max Planck Society created a … video using data from eight thousand individual animals, fitted with GPS devices, as they roamed the planet,” Shah writes in her new book, The Next Great Migration. “The visual effect of these collective journeys is mesmerizing. The migrant tracks move across deserts, up and down the coasts of continents, around islands in the Pacific, across oceans, and into the Arctic. Eventually they encase the planet in a delicate filigree of intertwined threads. They are everywhere … [Life] is on the move, today as in the past. For centuries, we’ve suppressed the fact of the migration instinct, demonizing it as a harbinger of terror. We’ve constructed a story about our past, our bodies, and the natural world in which migration is the anomaly. It’s an illusion. And once it falls, the entire world shifts.” You can buy The Next Great Migration here.

Recommended books:

Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

Listen & subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Soundcloud | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts