Laurie Garrett

Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health on the Council on Foreign Relations, has been tracking outbreaks of previously unknown or rare viruses and bacteria for the past two decades. Recently, she was one of only three scientific consultants for the Steven Soderbergh feature film Contagion, about the effects of a global pandemic. She wrote her first bestselling book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance in 1994, while splitting her time between the Harvard School of Public Health and the New York newspaper Newsday. Garrett published Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health in 2000 after spending years studying the insufficient responses of public health organizations around the globe. This summer, Garrett’s third book, I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks, was published by Amazon as an e-book.