How We Create Pandemics with Smithsonian Curator Sabrina Sholts (Watch Party)

Attend the live virtual watch party at the library! (Not able to make it to the library? Click here to register to watch on your own.) 

How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs with Smithsonian Curator Sabrina Sholts

Join us for this enlightening presentation with Smithsonian curator Sabrina Sholts as she talks about how the very fact of being human increases our pandemic risks—and gives us the power to save ourselves. 

Weaving together a wealth of personal experiences, scientific findings, and historical stories, Sholts brings dramatic and much-needed clarity to one of the most profound challenges we face as a species. Though the COVID-19 pandemic looms large in Sholts's account, it is, in fact, just one of the many infectious disease events explored in The Human Disease. With its expansive, evolutionary perspective, the book explains how humanity will continue to face new pandemics because humans cause them, by the ways that we are and the things that we do. By recognizing our risks, Sholts suggests, we can take actions to reduce them. When the next pandemic happens, and how bad it becomes, are largely within our highly capable human hands—and will be determined by what we do with our extraordinary human brains.

Click here to find Sabrina's book in our catalog.

Sponsored by the Urbandale Public Library Foundation and brought to you in partnership with the Library Speakers Consortium.