Pandemic is a terrible risk, but not in the way you think

Preventing disease factories – trench-like warfare conditions, crowded hospitals, enormous refugee camps – is our best protection. While alarmists among us wait for the plague to pounce out of the jungle, it is far more likely to come from inside us, our disease factories and our social world.

This is from an essay in Aeon, an online magazine that consistently tops my monthly list for the most thought-provoking and provocative writing on the web. Pandemic is regularly listed as a potential existential threat, and a major consequence of globalization.  Increasingly I see it as more of a natural extension of poverty, poor public health infrastructure and policy, and low levels of technology and social media saturation in local cultures.