A group of health officials gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss infectious disease learn that forty-seven people at an internment camp in Indonesia have died from acute hemorrhagic fever.

This is how Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright, begins his new novel that in many ways, predicts the pandemic we're currently experiencing. He joins us to talk about it. 

Before we get to the fiction of pandemic, we speak with an epidemiologist about the reality of our current pandemic. 

GUESTS: 

• Michael Mina is an assistant professor of epidemiology and faculty member at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. (@michaelmina_lab)
• Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker. His book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2007. His most recent book is The End of October, a novel about a pandemic. (@lawrence_wright)

Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.