The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

The socio-historical context of The Coming Plague is centered on the state of public health in the mid-1990s. With academic training in the biological sciences and a professional career as a public health reporter, Garrett has a deep background in the cultural and scientific issues involved in public health debates at the time. In the 1990s, the issue of emerging diseases was at the forefront of cultural awareness in a way that was not true either of the decades immediately before or immediately after. The rising tide of the AIDS epidemic had produced an intense focus on public health issues in the 1990s, jarring the Western world from a comfortable sense of assurance that medical progress was making continual strides in disease management. Geopolitical events in the 1990s constituted a lull that enabled greater public engagement on issues like disease control, whereas the news cycle in the 1970s and 1980s had been dominated by geopolitical storylines like the Vietnam War and the Cold War. After the 1990s, geopolitical news would come to dominate again after the experience of 9/11 ushered in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would not be until a quarter-century after The Coming Plague’s publication that issues of disease management would again dominate global public awareness.