Laurie Garrett On Lessons From The 1918 Flu

Susan notes: Thanks to TED for making TED Talks downloadable and embeddable, and for providing the biographical information that goes along with them.

In 2007, as the world worried about a possible avian flu epidemic, Laurie Garrett, author of "The Coming Plague," gave this powerful talk to a small TED University audience. Her insights from past pandemics are suddenly more relevant than ever.

Laurie Garrett has made a career of uncovering science and policy news that is almost too depressing to know: emerging and re-emerging diseases, and the world's general inability to deal with them. In the process, she has uncovered gaping lapses in public health and policy.

Garrett is the author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health.

As a science writer for Newsday, Garrett won a Pulitzer, a Peabody and two Polk awards; in 2004, she joined the Council on Foreign Relations as Senior Fellow for Global Health. She is an expert on public health -- and the fascinating ways that health policy affects foreign policy and national security.