Where Will the Next Pandemic Come From?

The Pulitzer Center promotes in-depth engagement with global affairs through its sponsorship of quality international journalism across all media platforms and an innovative program of outreach and education.

Over the past 50 years, over 300 infectious diseases have newly emerged or re-emerged in new territory where they’ve never been seen before—from Ebola to cholera and avian influenza—and according to a recent survey, 90 percent of epidemiologists believe one of them will cause a deadly, disruptive pandemic sometime in the next two generations. But which one? And how?

In conjunction with the release of prize-winning author Sonia Shah’s PANDEMIC: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016), the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and The New York Academy of Medicine present “Where Will the Next Pandemic Come From?”

This event will explore the history and future of emerging diseases, and the social, political, and scientific drivers that turn these new pathogens into pandemics.

Moderator Sonia Shah is a science journalist and prize-winning author. Her writing on science, politics, and human rights has appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and elsewhere. She received support from the Pulitzer Center for her reporting on cholera outbreaks in New York and Haiti.

The panel includes Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based organization that conducts research and outreach on global health; Carl Gierstorfer, a Pulitzer Center-supported journalist and filmmaker with a background in biology; W. Ian Lipkin, Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University; and Amy Maxmen, a Pulitzer Center-supported journalist who covers disease, science policy, and evolution among other topics.