"An epidemic changes your life, even if you are not ill" – say Kalpish Ratna¹ in yet another interesting book describing the Zika virus disease outbreak that rocked the Americas in early 2015. Epidemics are important not just because of the suffering they cause, but also due to the fear that they incite in people, sometimes distant from the centre of the disease outbreak. Epidemics are not just biomedical and epidemiological phenomena. An epidemic has strong social, political, economic, historical and cultural influences. Kalpish Ratna begin their book with the recent reporting of Zika virus in three patients in May 2017 in India, and its socio-cultural implications in the country.