Sonia Shah

In her new book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, Shah discusses the history and science of contagious diseases. She notes that humans put themselves at risk by encroaching on wildlife habitats. "About 60 percent of our new pathogens come from the bodies of animals," she says.

If public health officials know how to prevent malaria, the mosquito-borne pathogen that kills more than a million people each year, why isn't more being done to eradicate the infectious disease? That's the question journalist Sonia Shah decided to answer in her book, The Fever, which examines why malaria continues to spread around the globe.