Sonia Shah lecture covers people and microbes on the move

Shah presents the first guest lecture at the College since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

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Sonia Shah speaks on the human origins on pandemics. Photo by Tom Amico for the Muhlenberg Communications Department.

Award winning journalist and author Sonia Shah took the podium in Moyer Hall last Wednesday, Sept. 22, to deliver a compelling lecture on the transmission and prevention of viruses. Shah is a well-known author in science and politics and has written multiple books including “Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola, Beyond” and “The Fever.” Her writing on science and politics has been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Scientific American, with appearances on CNN, Radiolab, and TedTalk. 

“There’s this sense that it’s not a question of if—it’s a question of when the next pandemic will happen,” explained Shah during the opening of her lecture. “We need to be prepared for that. We need to stockpile vaccines, build up our public health infrastructure, build surplus capacity in our hospitals.” 

Shah challenged this ideology, saying that instead of being prepared for the next pandemic, we should prevent the pandemic altogether. Our actions, she asserted, are the origin of microbial spread. “[Pandemics] are very much manufactured by our social, our political and our economic relations with each other and with nature and the environment. So, we have a lot of agency in how pandemics happen,” said Shah. “Why pandemics are happening on a broad scale is driven by humans invading wildlife habitat on a scale unprecedented in human history. The species that remain have to squeeze in and those places are more frequently in contact with where we live and pathogens take advantage of that.”

“There’s this sense that it’s not a question of if—it’s a question of when the next pandemic will happen”

Shah concluded that the spread of disease from wild animals does not occur only in far off places, but rather right here in North America. The loss of biodiversity leads to the rapid spread of pathogens and therefore pandemics across the world. Shah mentioned the West Nile virus as an example. Mosquitos bit infected birds and transmitted the West Nile virus to humans in 1999 in New York City.

“Microbes have been moving from other species into humans for millennia, but the pace is quickening now,” said Shah. “People are living in slum conditions, creating prime conditions for pathogens.”

“A majority of livestock live in the animal equivalent of a slum as well. These animals are living where they are breathing on each other and being exposed to each other’s waste, creating great amplification opportunities for novel pathogens. These pathogens thrive amongst livestock and replicate and mutate and become much more variant.”

Due to the large amount of livestock, Shah reasoned that the substantial amounts of waste produced cause sanitary crises across the globe, with bacteria like E. coli polluting drinking water and soil, furthering the spread of disease. Microbes can also be spread through our global economy, specifically by plane, through the transportation of both goods and people. 

Shah switched perspectives to discuss our response to pandemics and our role in the fight against microbes.

“Microbes have been moving from other species into humans for millennia, but the pace is quickening now…People are living in slum conditions, creating prime conditions for pathogens.”

This uniting of people has the unintended consequence of fueling divisions. This is especially true at  the southern border, with immigrants not being allowed into the United States due to the pandemic.

“To survive this, we need to let people move just like we let wild species move, that is the solution to all this change around us,” said Shah on the topic of division. “While we’re pointing fingers at each other, the microbes are continuing their journey.”

The lecture had a remarkable turnout and was well-received by students. “It was really exciting to be able to attend a guest lecture again in person after a year and a half on Zoom,” said Sarah Koenig ‘23. “It was nice to be in a room with other people and listen to them asking questions.”

Shivani Iyer ‘23 concurred, noting that, “While for many of us we think of COVID-19 instantly when we hear the word pandemic, Shah reminded us through her talk of the historical implications of past pandemics and what we could have learned in preparation for the one we currently are in.” 

“Our response is shaped by the stories we tell,” she explained. The narrative currently being pushed out is that “[We] are the passive and unsuspecting victims of this alien invasion, COVID-19, with our weapons being drugs and vaccines,” but Shah ended her lecture on an empowering note that humans cannot be passive. Instead, we must be active in preparation for the next pandemic.

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