‘Spillover,’ by David Quammen, on How Animals Infect Humans

The following is an excerpt from a book review in the New York Times:


The New York Times
Wednesday, October 03, 2012

‘Spillover,’ by David Quammen, on How Animals Infect Humans

By DWIGHT GARNER

SPILLOVER

Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

By David Quammen

587 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $28.95.

Linguists have a good eye for where language has been, but it’s rarely easy to see into its future. In his powerful and discomfiting new book, “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic,” the science writer David Quammen cites a dismal word we’ll be getting used to in the coming decades, whether we like it or not: zoonosis.

A zoonosis in an animal infection that, through a simple twist of fate, becomes transmissible to humans. Maybe that twist is a needle prick, or contact with an exotic animal or hiking downwind of the wrong farm.

“It’s a mildly technical term,” he admits, but probably not for long. “It’s a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the 21st century.”

Ebola and bubonic plague are zoonoses. So are, he writes, in a list that peals off the tongue like a distraught Allen Ginsberg poem or an outstanding list of death metal band names, “monkeypox, bovine tuberculosis, Lyme disease, West Nile fever, Marburg virus disease, rabies, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, anthrax, Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever, ocular larva migrans, scrub typhus, Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, Kyasanur forest disease, and a strange new affliction called Nipah encephalitis, which has killed pigs and pig farmers in Malaysia.”

AIDS, he adds, that destroyer of 30 million people, is of zoonotic origin.

In “Spillover” Mr. Quammen investigates many of these diseases, some more than others. He describes the baffled horror of initial outbreaks and then tracks calmly backward. He talks to virologists, doctors, field biologists and survivors about how the animal-to-human infection came to pass. He hopscotches the globe like a journalistic Jason Bourne. Often there aren’t doctors left to be interviewed. The medical personnel who first came into contact with sick patients are frequently dead.

Among these diseases, the devils we know are bad enough. Mr. Quammen also thinks determinedly about what he calls the NBO’s — the Next Big Ones. “Will the Next Big One come out of a rain forest or a market in southern China?” he asks. “Will the Next Big One kill” 30 million or 40 million people? He makes you dread that sneeze at the back of the bus.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.