Sonia Shah

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COVID-19 Pandemic

February 6, 2020 /
“Animals infecting humans is scary. It’s worse when we infect them back,” by Sonia Shah, New York Times magazine, January 19, 2022

READ: My story on Covid-19 in animals in the New York Times magazine

WATCH: A clip of me talking pandemics on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Sonia on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, February 15, 2021 episode, “The Next Pandemic”

WATCH: My interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, “It’s time to tell a new story about coronavirus–our lives depend on it.”

LISTEN: My interview on the Nicole Sandler Show, “Life and Covid Times with Sonia Shah“

LISTEN: My interview on “Letters and Politics” on KPFA, “The history of development and contagious disease“

WATCH: My interview on Rising Up with Sonali, “Toward a new understanding of disease and infections” on KPFK

READ: My cover story in The Nation, “It’s time to tell a new story about coronavirus–our lives depend on it.”

WATCH: My interview with Vox, featured in “How humans are making pandemics more likely“

WATCH: My conversation about pandemics, past and present, on CNN with Fareed Zakaria

WATCH: My Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Webinar on Migrations and Contagions

WATCH: My address to the German Green Party Council on environmental disruption and pandemics (starts at 3:14)

READ: My article, “Mass Consumption Is What Ails Us,” Foreign Affairs

LISTEN: My interview with Marco Werman on PRI’s The World, “What does it mean when people say we’re due for a pandemic?”

WATCH: My TED Connects talk on how to make pandemics like COVID-19 optional, not inevitable, April 1, 2020

WATCH: My interview with Senator Bernie Sanders on his coronavirus roundtable livestream, March 30, 2020

WATCH: My conversation with international activists on Transnational Institute’s webinar, “Building an Internationalist Response to COVID19“

READ: My Q&A with Sigal Samuel, “Our environmental practices make pandemics like the coronavirus more likely,” Vox, March 31, 2020

READ: My article, “How Trump Is Going to Get Away with a Pandemic,” The Nation, March 31, 2020

LISTEN: My interview for “When We Talk About Animals” podcast, on how animal microbes become human pandemics

WATCH: My interview with Marc Steiner, “Covid-19, Ebola, and SARS were all unleashed by humans,” Real News Network

WATCH: My interview, “Pandemics are entirely preventable,” on NBC LX

LISTEN: My interview, “When viruses become pandemics,” on the Le Monde Diplomatique podcast

READ: My contribution to “Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How,” POLITICO magazine

WATCH: My interview, “How the climate crisis is making the spread of infectious diseases like coronavirus more common,” Democracy Now!

READ: My story, “Think exotic animals are to blame for the coronavirus? Think again.” From The Nation magazine. Reprinted by Le Monde Diplomatique in French, Spanish, and Portuguese. 

READ: My article, “The pandemic of xenophobia and scapegoating,” in TIME magazine

READ: My Q&A on the origins of pandemics with the Times of India

LISTEN: my interview on the problem of scapegoating during epidemics with WNYC’s “The Takeaway“

LISTEN: my interview on the What if? podcast (starts at 22:06)

READ: my comments on where novel pathogens come from, on Global Health Now’s “Coronavirus Expert Reality Check“

READ: The Coronavirus in Context: a Q&A with Sonia Shah, author of PANDEMIC, from Direct Relief

Talking Zika on CNN with Fareed Zakaria

January 31, 2016 /

Zika virus infection has been linked to a birth defect called microcephaly

Top officials such as NIAID’s Anthony Fauci have warned that the mosquito-borne Zika virus spreading in Latin America is a “pandemic in progress.” I think he’s right, although it may not be the kind of pandemic that movies like Contagion bring to mind. Rather than rising death rates, this pandemic could cause falling birth rates. I talked about why that is with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, for his show “GPS.” Stay tuned for a link to the segment!

Talking malaria on Al Jazeera

January 19, 2016 /

Al Jazeera published a fascinating in-depth story on India’s malaria epidemic–and its chronic underreporting–and invited a few people to talk about the story with one of the reporters, Ankita Rao, on its show “The Stream.” I Skyped in. Video of the show is below, as is the Twitter conversation that followed.

Screenshot 2016-01-19 07.51.11

 

 

Tina Rosenberg’s patronizing op-ed

December 8, 2014 /

There’s a lot of commentary about poverty, development, and medicine out there that is low quality, patronizing, and off-the-mark. I generally try to avoid it and not spend too much time worrying about it. But this New York Times op-ed by Tina Rosenberg just really bugged me.

Screenshot 2014-12-08 12.49.09

She starts by noting that “we” often think of depression as a “First-World problem.”

Screenshot 2014-12-08 12.52.35

Do “we” really? I don’t.

Then she says that depression is actually “just as widespread” in poor countries, “if not more so.”

Again–really? What’s the evidence for this claim? (Clue: “If not more so” is a giveaway–there is no evidence.)

Then, instead of backing up this wishy-washy claim that there may be more depression in poor countries compared to rich ones, she says that this could be true because in poor countries, there is “a good deal more to be depressed about.”

Screenshot 2014-12-08 12.53.59Seriously? This is, of course, a variation of the colonialist fantasy that all of “us” are enlightened and happy and all of “them” are miserable savages. It’s patently untrue. And it also implies that  depression stems from “things to be depressed about,” which it doesn’t. There are people who have everything and suffer depression, and those who have little who don’t.  Basically, she’s saying that all people in all poor countries should  be more depressed, because their lives are more depressing to the likes of her.

Pointing out that mental health care should be part of basic health care, she then points out the dearth of psychiatrists in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Screenshot 2014-12-08 12.56.41

That is indeed hard to believe, if you think that Western allopathic medicine is the only kind of medicine there is. But just because these societies do not practice Western-style psychiatry does not in any way mean that her implication–they have no traditional or alternative medical traditions of their own that address mental health–is true. Many societies may even (gasp!) deal with mental health problems better than Western psychiatry does. I don’t know. Tina Rosenberg doesn’t say. She just relies on the colonialist trope instead: “we” have all the best resources and those poor miserable savages have nothing. Recall, too that psychiatry is a relatively new in discipline and one with a highly checkered past. Just a few decades ago, practices that we would today consider barbaric were run-of-the-mill psychiatry.

It’s too bad because the essay is about an important subject. Read it for yourself and see what you think.

Plenary address at ABRCMS 2014, San Antonio, TX

November 16, 2014 /

What an amazing crowd at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students! I gave a plenary about how poverty and deforestation can lead to emerging diseases like Ebola and the politics and science of the troublesome endemic diseases they can become, such as malaria. The audience, of several thousand, was wonderfully receptive and enthusiastic. I wish I’d had more time to take questions afterward! Here’s some Twitter feedback from the crowd.

Thanks to all for a lovely experience.

TEDMED talk on the origins of new diseases

September 11, 2014 /

This September I gave the opening talk at this year’s TEDMED conference, which was held simultaneously in Washington, DC and San Francisco, CA. It was an intense and exciting experience. (One highlight for me was meeting the comedian Tig Notaro–we shared a table at a book signing.) The talk previewed ideas in my new book, Cholera’s Child: Tracking the Next Pandemic.

Some tweeted highlights below.

 

 

 

Thanks tweeps!

Speaking at TEDMED in September

June 27, 2014 /

Screenshot 2014-06-27 07.22.43

Very pleased to report that this September I’ll be speaking at the 2014 TEDMED conference. My talk, on the unexpected origins of new diseases, arises out of four years of research and reporting for my new book, forthcoming from Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux in October 2015. I’ll be the opening speaker! Even better: two of my favorites, physician/novelists Abraham Verghese and comedian Tig Notaro, are also speaking at the conference.

Best of all? My son Z is skipping school to come with me.

Investigating Lyme disease in New York

May 2, 2014 /

Tick Talk: An investigative project on Lyme disease

Tick Talk: An investigative project on Lyme disease

Over the past 14 weeks, I’ve been working with a group of talented young journalism students and writers at SUNY New Paltz, as the 2014 Ottaway Visiting Professor of Journalism. The New Paltz campus lies at the epicenter of the nation’s growing Lyme disease epidemic, which now afflicts 300,000 Americans every year, making it the country’s most common vector-borne disease. New York state accounts for nearly a third of the nation’s Lyme disease cases, and Ulster County, where New Paltz is located, is the eighth most Lyme-infested county in the nation.

We’ve launched a website called Tick Talk that explores the scientific, political, economic, and cultural impact this cryptic disease has had. Check it out here! You can read my article, “Lyme Disease: a Harbinger of the World to Come?,” which gives an overview of our main findings here.

 

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Contact me at soniashahwrites at gmail dot com Photo in header by Glenford Nunez.

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