it's a pleasure to have you here and a pleasure to be hosting sonia shah and hear her discuss her book, "pandemic: tracking contagions, from cholera to ebola and beyond." if you have any noisemaking devices, if you could take a moment and just silence them now. sonia will read for about half an hour and then take as many of your questions we can fit into 20 minutes and then sign books afterwards. we encourage questions, but need you to use actually the one microphone that's here on the right by the pillar, so that everyone can be involved in the conversation and also for our c-span audience. after the event is over, great help if you fold up your chair and place it against a bookshelf, and it will be time for the book signing, and the books are for sale where you walked in. sonia shah is an investigative author whose work has appeared in "the new york times," "the wall street journal," "scientific american," among others. her books include "crude, the story of oil," "body hunters, testing new drugs on the world's poorest patients" and "the fever, how malaria has ruled human kind for 50

when sonia shah was first described, 20% of people would get sick and if they get sick they get a fever, a little headache, some itching, some red i and they will get better. very quickly it became clear this was a problem for pregnant women but now we know even for adults because of laserlike focus on neuronal cells, this is a neurologic illness that causes weakness and even in a healthy person zika virus can cause brain inflammation of the coverings around your brain. even in what we think of as normal healthy adults who are not pregnant this virus is a problem. this virus shouldn't be a problem, okay? the virus is spread by his type of mosquito that is not new to us, the same mosquito that spreads yellow fever that causes 30,000 deaths a year, the same mosquito that spreads dengue. if we were having this conversation 5 years ago we would be talking about this large dengue outbreak that is occurring in south america, and think about 30,000 deaths a year, something around that, the same mosquito that causes a virus that was in the news to her 3 years ago, that want to seem to cause any

i'm sonia shah, and author of a book called "pandemic" which is about how microbes cause epidemics in the past and future in all these books will be for sale by barnes & noble and will be signed aftery this session at signing table h. of you guys can, joint us for more discussion there, too. first before we start i'd like to ask if anyone here actually is aua microbiologist? we have four. we can make anything up. [laughing] you guys correct us if you see nothing a wrong. i think it's a really interesting time to talk about microbiology because of there's been a paradigm shift in recent years. if you think back since the late 19th century at least, we have thought about microbes mostly as the malevolent intruders who we sort of have to target with surgical precision with military might. i kind of call that approach microbial xenophobia. and it made sense back then in the beginning because the first microbes we can actually detect were the ones that would grow in a dish and a lab, and those were often the ones that were responsible for fairly dramatic diseases like tuberculosis and anth

it's a pleasure to have you here and a pleasure to be hosting sonia shah and hear her discuss herk,