Award-winning US natural history writer David Quammen tracks dangerous new infections to their source in animals and asks what we can do to stop a new pandemic spreading across the face of the earth. His travels have taken him from Southern China to the Congo, Bangladesh and Australia – where he investigated the death of horses from a fever at a Brisbane stables and the subsequent death of a trainer. He shows how globalisation means that diseases transmitted from animals to humans that were once contained now have the potential to cause a catastrophe.

Quammen, who travels from the US to be with us, is a winner of the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and author of five other natural history titles, including the BP Natural World Book Prize-winning The Song of the Dodo.

Sponsored by Liaison.