What do you think?
Rate this book
The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, from Our Bodies to Our Beliefs
How the very fact of being human makes us vulnerable to pandemics—and gives us the power to save ourselves.
The COVID-19 pandemic won’t be our last—because what makes us vulnerable to pandemics also makes us human. That is the uncomfortable but all-too-timely message of The Human Disease , which travels through history and around the globe to examine how and why pandemics are an inescapable threat of our own making. Drawing on dozens of disciplines—from medicine, epidemiology, and microbiology to anthropology, sociology, ecology, and neuroscience—as well as a unique expertise in public education about pandemic risks, biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts identifies the human traits and tendencies that double as pandemic liabilities, from the anatomy that defines us to the misperceptions that divide us.
Weaving together a wealth of personal experiences, scientific findings, and historical stories, Sholts brings dramatic and much-needed clarity to one of the most profound challenges we face as a species. Though the COVID-19 pandemic looms large in Sholts’s account, it is, in fact, just one of the many infectious disease events explored in The Human Disease . With its expansive, evolutionary perspective, the book explains how humanity will continue to face new pandemics because humans cause them , by the ways that we are and the things that we do. By recognizing our risks, Sholts suggests, we can take actions to reduce them. When the next pandemic happens, and how bad it becomes, are largely within our highly capable human hands—and will be determined by what we do with our extraordinary human brains.
The COVID-19 pandemic won’t be our last—because what makes us vulnerable to pandemics also makes us human. That is the uncomfortable but all-too-timely message of The Human Disease , which travels through history and around the globe to examine how and why pandemics are an inescapable threat of our own making. Drawing on dozens of disciplines—from medicine, epidemiology, and microbiology to anthropology, sociology, ecology, and neuroscience—as well as a unique expertise in public education about pandemic risks, biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts identifies the human traits and tendencies that double as pandemic liabilities, from the anatomy that defines us to the misperceptions that divide us.
Weaving together a wealth of personal experiences, scientific findings, and historical stories, Sholts brings dramatic and much-needed clarity to one of the most profound challenges we face as a species. Though the COVID-19 pandemic looms large in Sholts’s account, it is, in fact, just one of the many infectious disease events explored in The Human Disease . With its expansive, evolutionary perspective, the book explains how humanity will continue to face new pandemics because humans cause them , by the ways that we are and the things that we do. By recognizing our risks, Sholts suggests, we can take actions to reduce them. When the next pandemic happens, and how bad it becomes, are largely within our highly capable human hands—and will be determined by what we do with our extraordinary human brains.
- GenresNonfictionScience
352 pages, Hardcover
Published April 9, 2024
8 people are currently reading
116 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 26, 2024
This is a reasonable collection of information about COVID and other pandemics. However, the title is misleading. The book is mainly about the response to pandemics, not "how we create pandemics."
Nerd addendum:
The author is a proponent of One Health and so she does cover some aspects of how we make deadly pandemics happen (e.g. industrial farming). I was really hoping for more depth on all that. At one point for example, she discusses how some people disagree with the conventional wisdom that wild birds are the source of highly pathogenic bird flu, but then her reference for that is a newspaper article. This seems weak, especially considering that the blurbs promise a "scientist's scrutiny" and that the book's final conclusion is literally "Cite your sources."
Since she is focusing on reactions to pandemics, it also seemed fishy that she didn't deal with Cohn's book, which debunks the myth about automatic xenophobic ostracism in the wake of epidemics.
Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS
Nerd addendum:
The author is a proponent of One Health and so she does cover some aspects of how we make deadly pandemics happen (e.g. industrial farming). I was really hoping for more depth on all that. At one point for example, she discusses how some people disagree with the conventional wisdom that wild birds are the source of highly pathogenic bird flu, but then her reference for that is a newspaper article. This seems weak, especially considering that the blurbs promise a "scientist's scrutiny" and that the book's final conclusion is literally "Cite your sources."
Since she is focusing on reactions to pandemics, it also seemed fishy that she didn't deal with Cohn's book, which debunks the myth about automatic xenophobic ostracism in the wake of epidemics.
Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS
April 30, 2024
This book is written by a curator at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. She developed and opened an exhibit on pandemics *just before* before COVID-19. Ironically, the exhibit on pandemics was closed because of a pandemic.
Will history continue to repeat itself? I really hope we can learn from scapegoating countries (“Spanish flu”, “China flu”), people (patient zero and later gay men during the AIDS crisis, Chinese and Asian Americans), and disinformation.
Every human can play a role in spreading disease. Some things we can modify, like our behavior. Some things we can’t change (our biological characteristics). Some things require extra sensitivity (our beliefs).
This book is timely and very readable. Despite the grim subject, it has a message of hope and guidance the reader can carry with them long into the future.
Will history continue to repeat itself? I really hope we can learn from scapegoating countries (“Spanish flu”, “China flu”), people (patient zero and later gay men during the AIDS crisis, Chinese and Asian Americans), and disinformation.
Every human can play a role in spreading disease. Some things we can modify, like our behavior. Some things we can’t change (our biological characteristics). Some things require extra sensitivity (our beliefs).
This book is timely and very readable. Despite the grim subject, it has a message of hope and guidance the reader can carry with them long into the future.
December 6, 2025
the Belief aspect is especially interesting because it just shows that humans are so imperfect and are so easily influenced by little thoughts in their brains. these are things you need Public Health professionals for and not something pure science and epidemiology can solve
February 9, 2025
Very well researched and thought provoking about world health.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews