. >> next a panel on pandemics featuring karen masterson and sonia shah who wrote "pandemic: tracking contagions, from cholera to ebola and beyond". >> welcome, everyone, can you hear me? i am from the uva center for global health and i am delighted to be moderating this panel with two outstanding journalist and authors who are currently living in baltimore and came down to share their stories with us. we are going to be on a tight schedule which i am responsible for keeping. we will look forward to about 15-20 minute presentation from each author and then ample time for questions. i would like to remind/request that everyone silence their cellphone. i would also like to especially since i am so excited about this panel and all of the other events i would like to remind everyone that the virginia festival of the book is pleased to keep most events free. if you would like to help with that, please consider a donation. my third request is to please evaluate this session as the festival is always working to improving its offerings. finally, we will have books for sale here and in local b

so now we're going to welcome karen masterson, the author of "the malaria project," and i am going to switch with you, sonia, so i can imagine the pc. [laughter] [inaudible conversations] >> i'm a mac user as well. [inaudible conversations] >> okay. so i came to global health issues and microbes by accident. i was actually a political reporter. i was an environmental reporter before that for the "philadelphia inquirer". but i was looking for something completely different, and i stumbled upon some records that talked about how our researchers during world war ii infected state hospital patients with malaria so they could test new drugs on them. and i, this was shocking to me, and i couldn't find a whole lot of historical treatment of this. and as i kept pulling threads and searching through boxes in the archives, i realized i was in uncharted territory and that i had to tell this story. i didn't know much about world war ii or malaria, didn't know much about bioethics. but i got up to speed because this was a fascinating story that i wanted to tell. i actually wanted these slides to b