Alex De Waal joins PTO to talk about his new book, New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease. We discussed the history of pandemic disease control, from the cholera outbreaks of the 19th century to HIV/AIDS and the Covid19 crisis. We chatted why the war on disease narrative is so unhelpful, how colonial era vaccination programmes spread HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, and why the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918-19 is so little discussed and written about, despite its extraordinary death toll.