Mark Honigsbaum book talk – pandemics

In 1918-19 the Spanish influenza pandemic claimed the lives of up to 100 million people – as much as five percent of the world’s population. Ever since, 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.

On the 100th anniversary of the Spanish flu, Mark Honigsbaum, author of The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris, reflects on the experience of this and other infectious disease disasters. From the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles, to the 1930 “parrot fever” pandemic that struck Washington D.C. and Baltimore particularly hard, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms.

Mark is a medical historian, journalist and author specialising in the history and science of infectious disease. He will talk about the process of writing a book as well as his research on these historical events. These epidemics and pandemics are a reminder that, like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always out there in nature waiting to strike. But most of all they are reminder of the limits of scientific knowledge and the role that human behavior and technologies play in the emergence and spread of microbial diseases.