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Podcast: New Books In Public Health
Episode: Pardis Sabeti and Lara Salahi, "Outbreak Culture: The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic, With a New Preface and Epilogue" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Description: As we saw with the Ebola outbreak--and the disastrous early handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic--a lack of preparedness, delays, and system-wide problems with the distribution of critical medical supplies can have deadly consequences. Yet after every outbreak, the systems put in place to coordinate emergency responses are generally dismantled.One of America's top biomedical researchers, Dr. Pardis Sabeti, and her Pulitzer Prize-winning collaborator, Lara Salahi, argue that these problems are built into the ecosystem of our emergency responses. With an understanding of the path of disease and insight into political psychology, they show how secrecy, competition...