The next great pandemic: What will it look like and where will it come from?

This was originally published on Global Health TV on August 23, 2016.

A few years ago, in a survey by epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, 90 percent of epidemiologists said that a pandemic that will sicken 1 billion, kill up to 165 million and trigger a global recession that could cost up to $3 billion would come in the next two generations. Currently, we’re living through three pandemics — HIV, Zika and cholera. What will the next pandemic look like and where will it come from?

Those are some of the questions science journalist Sonia Shah attempted to answer in an event marking the centennial of the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and in her book “Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond,” published earlier this year. The book should be required reading for anyone interested in the future of global health.

Shah spent six years trying to figure out how microbes turn into pandemic-causing pathogens. She looked at the history of pandemics, particularly cholera because it’s one of our most efficient pandemic-causing pathogens. She went to places where new pathogens are emerging to try to figure out what are the political and social drivers that push these microbes into human populations.

Brazil struggles to contain damage of mosquito that transmits Zika virus

Dr. Sylvia Lordello of Saúde Criança speaks to a group of parents about Zika.

This was originally published by Global Health TV on March 31, 2016.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — A group of about 20 poor parents (mostly women) from the slums gathered this month in the offices of Saúde Criança (“child health” in Portuguese), a social enterprise that works with impoverished children and their families in a holistic way. After a meditation, they got down to the main point of the meeting — the Zika virus and how to avoid it.

These poor young mothers are prime candidates for Zika. Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that transmits Zika, will suck anyone’s blood — rich or poor. But they thrive in the densely populated favelas of Rio and other Brazilian cities where few people have screened windows and where even mosquito repellant may be a luxury. Many people have water cisterns on their roofs, usually not covered, which makes an ideal breeding ground for Aedes aegypti.

Dr. Sylvia Lordello, a medical doctor on staff at Saúde Criança, told the parents that prevention starts at home and reviewed a series of steps that could be taken to make their homes less hospitable to mosquitoes, such as covering their cisterns and not leaving water in the plates under house plants.

“If the whole country fights Zika, the mosquito cannot win,” Dr. Lordello told the parents. “Zika is not stronger than the country.”