Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen | Goodreads
Want to Read
Rate this book
1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
Preview
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
by
David Quammen (Goodreads Author)
4.32 · Rating details · 9,239 ratings · 1,009 reviews
“Science writing as detective story at its best.” —Jennifer Ouellette, Scientific American
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Scientific American Best Book of the Year, and a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Ebola, SARS, Hendra, AIDS, and countless other deadly viruses all have one thing in common: the bugs that transmit these diseases all originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. In this gripping account, David Quammen takes the reader along on this astonishing quest to learn how, where from, and why these diseases emerge and asks the terrifying question: What might the next big one be? (less)
Paperback, 592 pages
Published September 9th 2013 by W. W. Norton Company (first published September 24th 2012)
Original Title
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
ISBN
0393346617 (ISBN13: 9780393346619)
Edition Language
English
URL
http://www.davidquammen.com/spillover
Literary Awards
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for General Nonfiction (2012), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Nonfiction (Shortlist) (2013), Royal Society of Biology General Book Prize (2013)
Dec 02, 2014carol. rated it it was amazing
Recommends it for: fans of diseases, outbreaks, animals, public health, travel
Shelves: non-fiction, science, animals-and-people, medical
Well, here we go, 2020 Covid pandemic. Don't say David Quammen didn't tell you so.
https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2015/...
David Quammen is prescient. He appears to have predicted the 2014 Ebola outbreak and ability to country jump years before it happened. Alright, maybe he isn’t a diviner; maybe he merely pays attention to the scientists around him. After all, there’s a reason he is has been given an Academy Award in Literature and is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic explores the science behind human pandemics, and is a culmination of decades-long interest in animals, biology and travel. It is also an intelligent, thoughtful, and occasionally humorous book about the intersection between humans, disease, public health and the animal kingdom.
"Made no mistake; they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical."
The writing is excellent and well-researched, with a list of citations for each chapter. While clearly well versed in biological concepts and the professional scientific field, Quammen writes with an eye to description, creating a liveliness in his stories. When I looked up his biography, it was with no real surprise that I learned he studied William Faulkner on a Rhodes scholarship–like Faulkner, he clearly has a deep love and respect for the natural world. The writing conveys complicated biological concepts in a way that captures the essence without oversimplifying, leaving both the novice and the more knowledgeable reader satisfied. If I have one complaint, it is that the humor present in his short stories isn’t as present; a fitting approach for the somberness of the subject, but I miss it nonetheless. Most of the humor here acknowledges journalistic license but a fair amount relates to the research process:
"If you read the recent scientific literature of disease ecology, which is highly mathematical, and which I do not recommend unless you are deeply interested or troubled with insomnia, you find the basic reproduction rate everywhere."
What takes this book a step beyond the ordinary is that Quammen goes to where the science happens. Interviewing scientists in person, their anecdotes give the research the human touch, and are both instructive and amazing. I found myself deeply wishing my career had taken a different track–but I’m not courageous enough to be a field scientist. The scientists who are looking for the Ebola reservoir are particularly adventuresome: when they collect samples, they do their exploring in full haz-mat gear, including a personal respirator, which leads to interesting challenges. As Quammen summarizes:
"Wait a minute, lemme get this straight: You're in a cave in Uganda, surrounded by Marburg [virus] and rabies and black forest cobras, wading through a slurry of dead bats, getting hit in the face by live ones...the walls are alive with thirsty ticks, and you can hardly breathe, and you can hardly see, and... you've got time to be claustrophobic?'
'Uganda is not famous for its mine rescue teams,' [Amman] said."
Dude. Skydiving and cliff-jumping are for wimps. Trying being a field scientist studying disease.
Just fantastic stuff. If you were ever in doubt about why to get an influenza shot, the information is right here. And why you should be very, very careful about what you eat, particularly game and bushmeat.
**********************************************************
Specific chapter summaries and key points continued at the blog--- just follow under the asterisks
https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2015/... (less)
flag211 likes · Like · 82 comments · see review
Mar 17, 2020Jeffrey Keeten rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: post-apocalyptic, science, nonfiction
”’Spillover’ is the term used by disease ecologists to denote the moment when a pathogen passes from members of one species, as host, into members of another.”
How does that happen?
”All it required was a mango or water apple tree, laden with ripe fruit, overhanging a pigsty. An infected bat feeds on a water apple, discarding the pulp, which is besmeared with virus; the pulp drops down among the pigs; one pig snarfs it up and gets a good dose of virus; the virus replicates in that pig and passes to others; soon the whole herd is infected and human handlers begin to fall sick.”
Besmeared, doesn’t that give a visual?
So what are we dealing with?
”A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. There are more such diseases than you might expect. AIDS is one. Influenza is a whole category of others. Pondering them as a group tends to reaffirm the old Darwinian truth (the darkest of his truths, well known and persistently forgotten) that humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health. Pondering them individually provides a salubrious reminder that everything, including pestilence, comes from somewhere.”
The thing that I keep thinking about is that coronavirus or Covid-19, because we need to give it a name to distinguish it from all the future coronavirus outbreaks, is just a dress rehearsal for a much bigger theatrical event. From what I’m hearing from health care officials, we are not well prepared. We don’t even have enough masks for health care workers. Did we think it was not going to come here? Did we think it was just a China thing and that air travel wasn’t going to drop it like a rotting fruit basket in every human inhabited region of the world? The symptoms are like getting a cold or the flu; by the time someone knows they have it, they may have infected hundreds of people. ”’Viruses have no locomotion,’ according to the eminent virologist Stephen S. Morse, ‘yet many of them have traveled around the world.’ They can’t run, they can’t walk, they can’t swim, they can’t crawl. They ride.”
The problem with finding a cure is that Covid-19 is an animal infection that has spilled over to humans. Diseases, like polio, that originate in humans are easier to cure. If we eradicate it in humans through inoculations, it disappears. With viruses that spillover from other species, there is what is called a reserve host, such as bats, rats, pigs, or birds, that will incubate the virus, keep it alive, and mutate it. Eradication is impossible.
David Quammen takes us around the world to all the hot spots or, as Richard Preston calls them, the hot zones. You want some vivid, scary writing about Ebola deaths? Pick up Preston’s book. Quammen was interested in traveling to these places to discover how hosting worked with diseases and the exhaustive, frustrating, investigative work that scientists have to do to find these reservoir host creatures. It is dangerous work where a pinprick can kill.
So why are we such a juicy host for invasion by a virus? ”It’s not that they target us especially. It’s that we are so obtrusively, abundantly available. ‘If you look at the world from the point of view of a hungry virus,’ the historian William H. McNeill has noted, ‘or even a bacterium--we offer a magnificent feeding ground with all our billions of human bodies, where, in the recent past, there were only half as many people. In some 25 or 27 years, we have doubled in number. A marvelous target for any organism that can adapt itself to invading us.’”
I might add, at the rate that we are killing off other species of wildlife, aren’t we forcing viruses to spillover to survive?
Quammen provides another stark view of the growth of the human population. ”We are prodigious, we are unprecedented. We are phenomenal. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like this degree. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are the outbreak.”
As I’ve said numerous times in other reviews, the greatest threat to human existence is overpopulation. We don’t need more people. In fact, we need fewer people. Job growth will not keep pace with population increases. We have more value when there are fewer of us. Not to mention, food production will struggle to keep up with rampant population growth, and fresh water will not be able to keep pace either. It makes me think about deer populations when I was growing up on a farm. Whenever they had an explosion in numbers that threatened the ecosystem, an infection would spring up and reduce their numbers. Is the cosmos, at some point, going to decide we need to be reduced?
Quammen’s goal with this book is not to scare people, though he understands that will be a natural reaction to his knee-knocking, inspiring descriptions of the various virus outbreaks that have already happened. He wants us to feel informed, so that we will be more careful and respect the danger of these viruses. We have been lucky so far, and there is no other way to describe it. Combinations of scientists and doctors have reacted quickly to outbreaks around the world, but even they will say they aren’t sure how and why they were able to get ahead of the contagion. Quammen is among the number of scientists who are not wondering if a major pandemic will happen, but when.
My takeaways from this read.
I will no longer be an exotic eater. Whenever I have traveled anywhere in the world, I’ve always been an adventurous eater. Quammen’s descriptions of the live, wild animal markets in China was more than enough to keep me from being curious about what a masked faced civet tastes like or porcupine or an exotic snake. The animals in these markets are treated horribly, and the unsanitary conditions create a perfect environment for producing a spillover.
I am greatly reducing my plane travel. Not out of fear of contagion, but out of respect for the planet. I will say, though, that plane travel will be the modern conveyance that will be the carrier of our destruction. Planes can move people all over the world before they even know they are sick. Quammen mentions that scientists have received pressure to edit from their essays assertions about the dangers of a pandemic traveling by plane. We’ve seen it happen!!!
I will no longer shake people’s hands. I love the historical significance of what a handshake means. By presenting a naked hand, men were showing they were unarmed and meant no harm. Even without a pandemic, how many colds and flus are passed through a handshake? Maybe it is time to dispense with handshakes and replace it with a nod of the head. I certainly don’t want to be responsible for unintentionally making other people sick...potentially terminally sick.
I like the energy of crowds, but as I’ve gotten older, I feel more uncomfortable in large groups of people, and so it will be no great loss for me to avoid crowded events.
I will drive as little as possible. One of the reports in recent days that has made me smile was hearing about the clearing of pollution over cities where people have been asked to stay home. Think if we made a conscious effort, all the time, to reduce our driving time every week. Personally, I’m going to make an effort to condense my errands into one day and as brief an amount of time every week as I can. Let’s give the oil companies a cut in profits.
Times like these are a good time for self-reflection.
Quammen is a vivid and compelling writer who doesn’t indulge himself in hyperbole. He sticks with the facts and gives the reader context without glazing their eyes over. I learned about several viruses that I’ve never heard about and shivered whenever demon viruses I am very familiar with, like Ebola, SARS, or MERS, are mentioned. Oh, and he also mentions another virus. ”The team had electron microscope images of round viral particles, each particle encircled by a corona of knobs.” There’s the current devil we are dealing with.
I want to close the review with an example of Quammen’s ability to make a reader feel like she has been there with his evocative writing.
”Before I knew it, I was helping Lisa Jones-Engel and Gregory Engel trap Macaque monkeys at a shrine in northeastern Bangladesh. We had come to a city called Sylhet, along the banks of the Surma River, an area where the Bangladesh lowlands begin to wrinkle up into hills. The hills rise northward into mountains, beyond which lie Assam, Bhutan, and Tibet. Sylhet is a district capital, home to a half million people and an indeterminate number of other primates. Its streets are flooded with traffic that somehow manages to move despite a near-total absence of stoplights. Hundreds of green motorbike taxis, powered by natural gas, and thousands of brightly decorated bicycle rickshaws, powered by long-suffering men with skinny brown legs, jockey for position alongside the bashed-up busses and creeping cars. In early morning, two-wheeled push carts also roll through the streets, moving vegetables to market. At the bigger intersections loom shopping complexes and upscale hotels behind gleaming glass. It’s a thriving city, one of the richest in this poor country, thanks much to investment and spending by emigrant families, with roots here, who have thrived in Great Britain. They often return home, or at least send money back. Many of the curry shops in London, a man told me, are run by expat Bangladeshis from Sylhet.”
Be smart. Be respectful. Be safe.
Take a moment and watch this short video from Professor Hugh Montgomery about the coronavirus. Thank you, Michael Perkins, for sending this to me. Please share this video with the young people you know who may feel impervious to the flu and don’t fully grasp the greater ramifications. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg7Rn...
Here is also a short informative video from David Quammen discussing the purpose of this book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgsqf...
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten and an Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/jeffreykeeten/ (less)
flag191 likes · Like · 72 comments · see review
Mar 14, 2020Sci-(Fi) Nerd Mario rated it it was amazing
Shelves: 0-biology
I guess I wont ever take a duck, bat, or cute little monkey as a pet after reading this book. Ok, the ape would be pretty illegal too.
A similar question I kept continually asking myself while reading this: Could it once spread to pets like dogs and cats and back to humans again who infect a bird that infects a bat that is eaten by a wild dog who bites a human etc. Isnt that an endless circle with possible catastrophes around each corner, even without human intervention such as antibiotic ...more
flag159 likes · Like · see review
Aug 17, 2018Petra-X rated it it was amazing
Shelves: animals-ethology, travel-adventure-countries, medicine-science, reviewed, 2018-100-reviews
This book is a very detailed look at zoonoses, diseases that cross from animals to people. If it hadn't been quite so detailed, it would have been a 10 star. What I have learned:
1. There are three sorts of host. There is the reservoir host that the disease resides inand may or may not cause disease. Then there is the amplification host where if the original host infects it, or if a vector (like fleas that carry it) does, it will the disease-causing pathogen will multiply to very large numbers. Then there is us! We are often the final host.
2. The biggest natural reservoirs of zoonotic diseases are bats. Especially fruit bats and flying foxes. If you touched a rock that an infected bat did, ate some fruit one shit on, or got bit by the dog that the bat got first, you are at risk. Avoid bats at all cost. Very large numbers of vectors are fleas, mosquitos, flies, lice and ticks.
Now it may seem like bats are more dangerous than other creatures because so many carry diseases but it's not necessarily so. 25% of all mammal species are bats, and it's not known if the same percentage of zoonoses as other mammal groups or if they really are dangerous. Bats breed and live in huge numbers and no one minds if they are caught and their blood sampled or even killed for necropsies. Doing that to, say, large numbers of lions, monkeys, elephants or other much-loved mammals is another issue entirely. But they might be as zoonotic pathogen-ridden as bats, we just don't know. So if you like bats (I do) they should be our friends from a distance.
2. Lyme Disease. If you like rambling in the woods where this is present, choose a year when there haven't been many acorns and go to a big wood rather than a little copse. In little copses there may not be many mammals but there will probably be the white-footed mouse which is a reservoir of the disease. In a good acorn year it will breed like crazy, unchecked. In a bad acorn year, there will be less of them and in a big wood there are many predators for whom they are a major food source. Fleas breed on these mice who are not very good at grooming them away. The suck bite the deer as they need the blood to breed (much as mosquitos do on us), but are not really relevant in Lyme Disease as just one deer could supply enough blood for millions of ticks to suck on. It is keeping down the sweet little mice that keeps down Lyme Disease in an area.
3. Zoonoses are in general pretty rare, there are only 150 known ones and they don't cause major epidemics these days although they do cause small, limited but extremely newsworthy outbreaks like Ebola, rabies and dengue. Bubonic plague, the Black Death, is a zoonotic disease that was perhaps the worst disease the world has ever faced. But these days, antibiotics cure it quickly.
I've had dengue. There is no treatment for it and it isn't nicknamed bone break disease for nothing. I moved house with it. Easiest move in my life. I just lay there while all around me packed and moved, then they lifted the mattress into the van and transported me to my new house. By the time i was well enough to walk to the bathroom by myself, everything was spick and span. It was about ten days start to finish. Very nasty.
Very interesting book, I had to skim bits at times because it was as detailed and repetitive as a text book although, mostly, considerably less dry. I learned a lot and for that it's definitely a 5 star read.
____________
Notes on reading the book. (view spoiler) (less)
flag148 likes · Like · see review
Oct 01, 2012Tony rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: science-nature, top-10-2012
You have to understand. I have my phobias. So it makes for awkward social encounters. Like: “Mommy,” said the little girl in the elevator, “Why is that man holding his breath the whole way down from the 16th floor?” I have been known to say things like, “Will you please stop sneezing in the direction of my beer?” I went to a doctor’s office a few years ago. Nothing ultimately serious, but possibly so, so that I went for the quickly scheduled appointment even though I was already nursing a bad cold. He wouldn’t have to touch my face, I safely predicted. It was a doctor I had never seen before, and after the usual 15-minute wait in solitary, he came in to the examination room with a game show-host smile and extended his hand, like, you know, we were soon to become new best friends. So I put up my hands defensively and said, “Sorry, but I have a cold and it’s better not to shake hands.” I figured, as a doctor, he would appreciate my candor and consideration for him and the many patients to follow. Well, he kept his hand out for a minute, as if I had slapped him, clearly thinking about what I had said. Then, with a busy officiousness, he strode to the sink and vigorously washed his hands with some anti-bacterial goo. This gave me pause. Why was he washing his hands after I declined shaking his hand and not before he offered it?
I share this because the last thing I really need is to read a book about Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. Like going to see an obvious Horror movie, I know I will be scared. Yet, we plunk down our money, watch the predictable script and wait for the creepy Pavlovian organ music to raise the hair on the back of our necks. So, scare me shitless, David Quammen. I gots to know.
It is not until page 511 of this 520-page book that Quammen raises the question that he is often asked by those learning he is writing such a book: “Are we all gonna die?” And the answer is: Yes, we’re all gonna die. Yes. We are all gonna pay taxes and we are all gonna die. Most of us, though, will probably die of something more mundane than a new virus lately emerged from a duck or a chimpanzee or a bat.
Most, but not all of us.
This is a book about zoonosis, animal infections transmissible to humans. AIDS is one. Rabies. Ebola. Marburg. Influenza. Beware the animal reservoir. That would be the animal that ‘hosts’ the virus, safely unto itself, but potentially lethal when it jumps, when there’s a Spillover to humans. So don’t nosh on raw monkey or ape bushmeat, no matter how prized that delicacy is in the culture you’re visiting. Don’t place your pigsty under the mango tree. And don’t under any circumstances drink the palm sap. If you happen to crawl into an African cave, you know, for the experience of being underground with stale air, no natural light, thousands of bats peeing on you from above and a few cobras slinking through your feet, all without a biohazard suit, do not under any circumstances reach down for balance and touch the bat guano with your bare hand. Trust me, bad shit happens.
I learned more reading this book than I did in two semesters of indifferently-attended college biology classes. Not that I can articulate the difference between microbiology and molecular biology, or other things unnecessary to get through the day. But how about this? Of all the mammals in the world – every dog, every deer, every kittycat – every freaking mammal, one in four is a bat. That’s: 1) a lot of bats ; and 2) a bad thing. Also, if you go to the Dominican Republic or some other exotic island and one of the locals comes along the beach to put a macaque on your head for a cute picture to send home to the family, resist the tourist urge. You may be bringing home something more than a Kodak moment.
Quammen has found the right level of transmission to get these notions of science and math across to an idiot like me. And, even if I failed him, I was nevertheless entertained.
Here is the way to start a chapter:
In late February, 2003, SARS got on a plane in Hong Kong and went to Toronto. But soon we are learning more about bats, three species in particular carrying SARS-like virus: the big-eared horseshoe bat, the least horseshoe bat, and Pearson’s Horseshoe bat. Waxing smart-alecky, Quammen quips, “If you ever notice these animals on the menu of a restaurant in Southern China, you might want to choose the noodles instead.
But I like smart-alecky.
So I was scared, entertained and enlightened. Sometimes a single sentence would send me happily to both a dictionary and Google, such as this description of his first meeting with a researcher in Guangzhou: I suppose the durian should have been my first signal that he was a temerarious eater.
One last, lingering piece of advice I will share:
If your husband catches an ebolavirus, give him food and water and love and prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best—and, if he dies, don’t clean out his bowels by hand. Better to step back, blow a kiss, and burn the hut.
Wise words. Which I pass along, like a reservoir host, as a public service.
(less)
flag113 likes · Like · 20 comments · see review
May 24, 2015Hannah Greendale rated it it was amazing
Shelves: favorites, science, non-fiction
Click here to watch a video featuring this book on my channel, From Beginning to Bookend.
flag100 likes · Like · comment · see review
Jan 29, 2015HBalikov rated it it was amazing
"A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. There are more such diseases than you might expect. AIDS is one. Influenza is a whole category of others. Pondering them as a group tends to reaffirm the old Darwinian truth (the darkest of his truths, well known and persistently forgotten) that humanity IS a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals; in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health." This is what David Quammen preaches in Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. Some have already given him credit for predicting the recent Ebola outbreak. If this sounds unappealing, it's my fault. Quammen is a researcher who writes with style and substance. He isn't the type who stays in his cubicle reviewing journals and online information. He is out in the field with his buddies and compatriots giving us a front line perspective on this serious issue.
To say this was an eye-opener for me probably understates its impact. I now think I know that every disease must have a reservoir. Smallpox basically resides in humans and is transmitted only among humans. Other diseases have either living or non-living reservoirs. Tetanus comes from a bacterium that resides in the soil. Cholera comes from a bacterium that resides in contaminated water. "A disease must have a portal of exit from the reservoir and a portal of entry into the host. This is how diseases are spread and new cases of infection occur. Examples of portals of exit are respiratory, the digestive tract, urinary, skin," etc. "Diseases can spread by three different, modes of transmission: contact transmission, vehicle transmission, and vector transmission." Let's remember the title of this book. Quammen is focused on "animal infections and the next human pandemic." A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that has spread through human populations across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or even worldwide.
Quammen points out (and I am surprised as usual) that zoonosis isn't rare. In fact, "about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us...Ebola...bubonic plague...Spanish influenza...bovine tuberculosis, Lyme disease, West Nile fever...rabies, hanta virus pulmonary syndrome, antharx"...etc.
A lot of this book reads like a mystery. Some one or some thing has died unexpectedly and there is no immediate explanation for it. Quammen takes us along on these investigations. I came to like and respect this writer. He admires good science and points out with disdain efforts that fall short. His writing is intimate, filled with humor (often dark), and engaging.
"Most people aren't familiar with the word 'zoonotic,' but they have heard of SARS, they have heard of West Nile virus, they have heard of bird flu. They know someone who has suffered through Lyme disease and someone else who has died of AIDS. They have heard of Ebola, and they know that it's a very terrifying thing (though they may confuse it with E. coli, the bacterium that can kill you if you eat the wrong spinach). They are concerned. They are vaguely aware. But they don't have the time or the interest to consider a lot of scientific detail. I can say from experience that some people, if they hear you're writing a book about such things---about scary emerging diseases, about killer viruses, about pandemics---want you to cut to the chase. So they ask: 'Are we all gonna die?" I have made it my little policy to say yes."
Quammen is on the lookout for the "Next Big One." Some say his discussion of Ebola gives him a lot of "street cred." He states that few disagree that that Next Big One will be zoonotic. So it behooves us to understand what he is talking about. It's a longish book, but you can get a lot out of a little at a time.
I will leave you with a sample of how he passes on advice: " If your husband catches an ebola virus, give him food and water and love and maybe prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best — and, if he dies, don’t clean out his bowels by hand. Better to step back, blow a kiss and burn the hut.”
Given the reviews by my GR friends (including Greta, Max, carol, Jeanette, Hannah) and our current COVID-19 crisis, I thought a re-read would be beneficial. Was it ever! It was definitely worth reviewing zoonosis, pandemics, human behavior, and measures that can be taken. Quammen definitely deserves 5* ---and--- Do NOT Touch Your Face! (less)
flag80 likes · Like · 24 comments · see review
Feb 26, 2020Greta rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Recommends it for: Dr. Pol, VP Pence
Shelves: owned-in-english, ebook, 500-plus-pages, pop-science
Dr. Jan Pol is a practicing veterinarian in rural Michigan and the star of the National Geographic TV Series The incredible Dr. Pol.
He is also guilty of not meeting required minimum standards of veterinary care, and negligence. He doesnt carry out surgery in a sterile environment, wear surgical gloves, a gown, a mask, and a cap during surgery.
I watched a few episodes and was appalled by what I saw, for instance during an assisted calving. He was probing with his bare arms in a cows birth ...more
flag75 likes · Like · 30 comments · see review
May 01, 2018Max rated it really liked it
Shelves: biology
Quamman explores zoonotic diseases, infectious diseases caused by pathogens that spillover from animals to man. The pathogen may be a virus, bacteria or parasite. Zoonotic diseases include well known ones like Ebola, Lyme disease, SARS, and AIDS, lesser known ones like Hendra virus, Marburg virus and Q fever, and ones just being recognized as zoonotic such as some forms of malaria. Zoonotic diseases require a reservoir animal, an animal that sustains the virus without serious complications. ...more
flag66 likes · Like · 31 comments · see review
Oct 10, 2012Russ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Full disclosure first, I'm a fan of this type of non-fiction. Laurie Garret - The Coming Plague, Richard Preston - The Hot Zone, Randy Shilts - And the Band Played On... the list goes on and on. I love this stuff. But having said that, this is truly the best thing I've ever read on the subject of infectious agents spilling over from their host species into humans. Brilliant, readable and absolutely spell-binding, Quammen's description of mutation, illness and the effect of human encroachment into different environments turns science into art. Without a doubt this guy knows his stuff and how to write about it. Highly recommended! (less)
flag40 likes · Like · 2 comments · see review
Aug 18, 2012Linda rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: first-reads
Disclamer: I received this book from the Goodreads First Reads Giveaway program.
I'm very grateful that I did. I happen to be a physician, specializing in Public Health and Preventive Medicine. I work in an environment where epidemiology underlies everything I do. Therefore, I feel that I can give an especially educated evaluation of this book.
The first thing I would like to comment on is the cover. It's an eye-catching blurred photograph of a screaming mandrill. Everywhere I carried the book (which is everywhere at work; I could not put it down) people looked at it and asked me what I was reading. Beautiful and suitable, the artwork sets the stage for the gripping narratives contained within.
This is a book written for the intellectually curious. Quammen, as a journalist, understands that some of the material covered in this book can be esoteric for those not trained in the subject. He explains complex subjects clearly, and this is the important part, does not condescend or dumb it down. This makes the content accessible to everyone who may be interested, and the material is fascinating.
As a public health physician, I thought I was fairly well-informed on the subject of zoonoses. I was delighted to find that this book is chock full of new, up-to-date information, and I had never even heard of some of the diseases he discussed. For example, I had though the reservoir for SARS was the civet cat. I had no idea that it was...well, you have to read the book. This book is as gripping and suspenseful as any thriller or mystery, and more terrifying, to boot, since this is non-fiction. As I am typing this, Hanta virus is affecting visitors to Yosemite National Park, Ebola is breaking out in Uganda and The Congo, and who knows what other mystery illnesses have yet to be identified and are lurking for the opportunity to breakout into the greater population.
David Quammen has a delightfully sardonic sense of humor, and as he spins his tales, backed with a tremendous amount of field work on his part, one feels as if they are right there in the field with him and the researchers collecting bat piss (yes, really) or strolling the Hong Kong markets, or munching on Bamboo Rat hot-pot (apparently mild and sweet, quite tasty).
I found myself reading the book like a good, no, excellent, novel. Normally with non-fiction, I pick it up and put it down in spurts. This book is so engrossing, though, that I found myself even walking down the street from the train station to work while reading this (a substantial hardcover, mind you). Quite a few of my co-workers want to read it, particularly the epidemiologists and physicians, but please don't hold back if you haven't got the background. This book is written so as to be accessible to anyone who has the interest. Everyone should be interested. The next big outbreak is inevitable because of human manipulation of climate, habitat and overcrowded conditions and intrusions into the wild, bringing us more and more in contact with potential pathogens. This book is a sobering look at the changing conditions in the world and how they leave us very, very vulnerable. This is easily the most frightening book I have read in a long, long time. Thank you, David for the work of love that produced this.
Note for Goodreads: the page count is wrong; please correct it. The correct page number is 520 pages of text, plus a long reference section. (less)
flag36 likes · Like · 3 comments · see review
Oct 09, 2013Michael Perkins rated it it was amazing
“Spillover” is the term used by disease ecologists to denote the moment when a pathogen passes from members of one species, as host, into members of another.
This Coronavirus is what the book "Spillover" calls zoonotic. In this case, the Chinese peasant farmers literally live with their animals which are carriers of these exotic viruses that they are immune to, but pass on to humans who are not immune. The viruses incubate and mutate in the humans and are transmittable to other humans. Apparently this new one, Covid-19, is easily transmittable, but it's different enough from others we have seen that it takes awhile to figure it out. Old remedies and vaccines don't work. Our increased trade and business with China in recent decades has meant that numerous potential carriers from the U.S. are constantly flying back and forth and bringing the virus to our shores. It's no surprise that the West Coast has the most cases.
https://www.who.int/health-topics/cor...
===========
I'm a doctor's kid. My father told me more than once that when he was 10 years old (1927) he read a book titled "Microbe Hunters" by Paul de Kruif that inspired him to become a medical doctor. In spite of the Great Depression and WW II, he achieved his goal. Another book he passed on to me was "Rats, Lice, and History" by Hans Zinsser. I did not become an MD myself, but have retained my father's interest in epidemiology (which also extends to an interest in genetics and cancer). I am re-reading this book now and will report back with any fresh insights.
The author quotes Zinsser....
“Here, as in bacterial disease, there is a lively interchange of parasites between man and the animal world.” Zinsser was a panoramic thinker as well as an acutely trained microbiologist. Eight decades ago he sensed that viruses, only lately discovered, might be among the most nefarious of zoonoses."
Among zoonotic diseases are 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.
This form of interspecies leap is common, not rare; about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us. Ecological disturbance causes such diseases to emerge. Such was the case with gold miners in Gabon (and their families— these camps were essentially villages) by their very presence, their needs for food, shelter, and fuel, had caused disturbance to the forest canopy and the creatures that lived in it. The miners ate Ebola-infected chimpanzees and gorillas and spread the disease to other humans.
=========
When and where did it start, this modern era of emerging zoonotic diseases? A good candidate would be the emergence of Machupo virus among Bolivian villagers between 1959 and 1963. Symptoms included fever and chills, nausea and vomiting, body aches, nosebleeds, and bleeding gums. It became known as El Tifu Negro (the Black Typhus, for the color of vomit and stool).
If you assembled a short list of the highlights and high anxieties of that saga within recent decades, it could include not just Machupo but also Marburg (1967), Lassa (1969), Ebola (1976), HIV-1 (inferred in 1981, first isolated in 1983), HIV-2 (1986), Sin Nombre (1993), Hendra (1994), avian flu (1997), Nipah (1998), West Nile (1999), and SARS (2003). Swine flu-H1N1 (2009) did not prove as deadly as feared.
A person might construe this list as a sequence of dire but unrelated events— independent misfortunes that have happened to us, to humans, for one unfathomable reason and another. Seen that way, Machupo and the HIVs and SARS and the others are “acts of God” in in the figurative (or literal) sense, grievous mishaps of a kind with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and meteor impacts, which can be lamented and ameliorated but not avoided. That’s a passive, almost stoical way of viewing them. It’s also the wrong way.
Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.
Students of virology now speak of the “virosphere,” a vast realm of organisms that probably dwarfs every other group. Now the disruption of natural ecosystems seems more and more to be unloosing such microbes into a wider world. Many viruses, for instance, inhabit the forests of Central Africa, each parasitic upon a kind of bacterium or animal or fungus or protist or plant. Viruses can only replicate inside the living cells of some other organism. Commonly they inhabit one kind of animal or plant, with whom their relations are intimate, ancient, and often (but not always) commensal. That is to say, dependent but benign. But now the disruption of natural ecosystems seems more and more to be unloosing such microbes into a wider world.
Viruses, especially those of a certain sort— those whose genomes consist of RNA rather than DNA, leaving them more prone to mutation— are highly and rapidly adaptive. All these factors have yielded not just novel infections and dramatic little outbreaks, but also new epidemics and pandemics.
=================
"To be clear, SARS-CoV-2 is not the flu. It causes a disease with different symptoms, spreads and kills more readily, and belongs to a completely different family of viruses."
Short video explaining the course of the disease.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOJqH...
================
Here's how the coronavirus can spread exponentially---namely how one person infecting another can multiply out of control----at a much faster rate than what the expert here calls the "normal flu".....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg7Rn...
==================
"If you’re a thriving population, living at high density but exposed to new bugs, it’s just a matter of time until the Next Big One (NBO) arrives."
Examples of NBO from the book....
AIDS: about 30 million deaths, 34 million living people now infected, with no end in sight.
Polio in America
The 1918–1919 influenza--the first H1N1 pandemic--"which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of domesticated animals (a duck in southern China, a sow in Iowa?) emerged to kill as many as 50 million people before receding into obscurity."
Smallpox in the Americas arriving from Spain in 1520
The Black Death: 1347-1352, killing 30% of the people who lived in Europe (attributable to bubonic plague)
==========
READ THIS: important update from a Professor of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (3/15/2020)
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-... (less)
flag31 likes · Like · see review
Sep 28, 2013David rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Recommended to David by: Tony
Shelves: science, biology, ecology, evolution
A "spillover" occurs when a microbe crosses over from an animal to humans, as an infectious disease. David Quammen describes many examples of this: SARS, ebola, HIV, influenza, marburg and hendra.
Each chapter is a detective story--scientists, veterinarians and medical researchers are detectives searching for the source of a disease. The source is usually a reservoir--an animal that carries the microbe, but is not usually harmed by the microbe.
And--now here's the best part--Quammen is not a ...more
flag30 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Nov 09, 2018Anna rated it it was amazing
Recommended to Anna by: carol.
Shelves: favourites, science, 2018-aty-in-52-books, favourites-in-2018
This is informative, interesting and entertaining. Parts of it read as a detective story, as the author describes the quest to identify pathogens, and the routes that can lead those pathogens to cause human disease. The approach encompasses the ecological as well as the evolutionary factors that lead to zoonotic diseases.
As I read, I took copious quotes from every chapter. As David Quammen says it much better than I can, I am going to copy some of them here. I will use spoiler tags for my summary notes about what the reservoir host etc. are for viruses, so if you want to read it for yourself, it will come as a surprise.
The passages in italics are tidbits that show the author’s sometimes sarcastic humour which made the book even more enjoyable.
I Pale Horse (Hendra virus) (view spoiler)
A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. There are more such diseases than you might expect. AIDS is one. Influenza is a whole category of others...This form of interspecies leap is common, not rare; about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us.
Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.
II Thirteen Gorillas (Ebola) (view spoiler)
Like other zoonotic viruses, ebolaviruses have probably adapted to living tranquilly within their reservoir (or reservoirs), replicating steadily but not abundantly and causing little or no trouble. Spilling over into humans, they encounter a new environment, a new set of circumstances, often causing fatal devastation. And one human can infect another, through direct contact with bodily fluids or other sources of virus. But the chain of ebolavirus infection, at least so far, has never continued through many successive cases, great distances, or long stretches of time. Some scientists use the term “dead-end host,” as distinct from “reservoir host,” to describe humanity’s role in the lives and adventures of ebolaviruses.
Advisory: If your husband catches an ebolavirus, give him food and water and love and maybe prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best—and, if he dies, don’t clean out his bowels by hand. Better to step back, blow a kiss, and burn the hut.
III Everything Comes from Somewhere (Malaria)
Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern—rising to a high case count, fading away, rising again after a certain interval of time. What seemed curious was that the interval between outbreaks remained, for a given disease, so constant. The logic of such cycles, Hamer suspected, was that an outbreak declined whenever there weren’t enough susceptible (nonimmune) people left in the population to fuel it, and that another outbreak began as soon as new births had supplied a sufficient number of new victims. Furthermore, it wasn’t the sheer number of susceptible individuals that was crucial, but the density of susceptibles multiplied by the density of infectious people. In other words, contact between those two groups is what mattered.
The four (kinds of malaria) known for targeting humans are transmitted from person to person by Anopheles mosquitoes. These four parasites possess wondrously complicated life histories, encompassing multiple metamorphoses and different forms in series: an asexual stage known as the sporozoite, which enters the human skin during a mosquito bite and migrates to the human liver; another asexual stage known as the merozoite, which emerges from the liver and reproduces in red blood cells; a stage known as the trophozoite, feeding and growing inside the blood cells, each of which fattens as a schizont and then bursts, releasing more merozoites to further multiply in the blood, and causing a spike of fever; a sexual stage known as the gametocyte, differentiated into male and female versions, which emerge from a later round of infected red blood cells, enter the bloodstream en masse, and are taken up within a blood meal by the next mosquito; a fertilized sexual stage known as the ookinete, which lodges in the gut lining of the mosquito, each ookinete ripening into a sort of egg sac filled with sporozoites; and then come the sporozoites again, bursting out of the egg sac and migrating to the mosquito’s salivary glands, where they lurk, ready to surge down the mosquito’s proboscis into another host. If you’ve followed all that, at a quick reading, you have a future in biology.
This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great lengths of time, to produce structures, tactics, and transformations of majestic intricacy. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.
IV Dinner at the Rat Farm (SARS) (view spoiler)
The very name coined during that early period, SARS, reflects the fact that this thing was known only by its effects, its impacts, like the footprints of a large, invisible beast. Ebola is a virus. Hendra is a virus. Nipah is a virus. SARS is a syndrome.
A superspreader is a patient who, for one reason or another, directly infects far more people than does the typical infected patient.
One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills—maybe even the cough—precede the major discharge of virus toward other people..This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode—not just lucky but salvational."
V The Deer, the Parrot, and the Kid Next Door (Q fever, Psittacosis, Lyme disease)
Q fever, or “abattoir’s fever”. It wasn’t a virus, though in some measure it behaved like one. It was a bacterium, but unlike most other bacteria.
First of all, it’s an intracellular bacterium, meaning that it reproduces within cells of its host—as does a virus, though by dissimilar mechanisms—not out in the bloodstream or the gut, where it could be more easily targeted by immune response. Furthermore, it exists in two forms of bacterial particle, one large and one small, each with different characteristics suited to different phases of its life history. The large form replicates prolifically inside host cells and then transmogrifies to the small form, which is tougher and more stable. The small form, almost like a spore, is packaged for survival in the external environment.
Psittacosis. “Parrot fever” a culprit had been identified. It was a small bacterium with some unusual properties, seemingly similar to the agent that causes typhus (Rickettsia prowazekii) and therefore given the name Rickettsia psittaci. (Renamed later Chlamydophila psittaci.)
“If the young cockatoo, after capture, is kept under good conditions,” he and his coauthor wrote, “it remains healthy and presents no danger to human beings.” Likewise, the wild bird populations might carry a high prevalence of infection but suffer little impact in terms of damaged health or mortality. “When, on the other hand, birds are crowded into small spaces, with inadequate food and sunlight, their latent infection is lit up.” The bacterium multiplies and “is excreted in large amounts.” It floats out of the cages along with downy feathers, powdered dung, and dust. It rides the air like a Mosaic plague. People inhale it and become ill.
Lyme disease Part of what makes it problematic is that the life history of Borrelia burgdorferi is very complex, involving much more than ticks and people.
Related to the unchanging fact of noninheritability is a variable that Ostfeld and others call “reservoir competence.” This is the measure of likelihood that a given host animal, if it’s already infected, will transmit the infection to a feeding tick. Reservoir competence varies from species to species, most likely depending on differences in the strength of immune response against the pathogen. If the immune response is weak and the blood teems with spirochetes, that species will serve as a highly “competent” reservoir of B. burgdorferi, transmitting infection to most ticks that bite it. If the immune response is strong and effective, damping down the level of blood-borne spirochetes, that species will be a relatively less competent reservoir. Studies by Ostfeld’s group, involving captive animals and the ticks feeding on them, showed white-footed mice to be the most competent of reservoirs for the Lyme disease spirochete. Chipmunks were a distant second in reservoir competence, with shrews close behind them.
VI Going viral
Expert opinion even divides on the conundrum of whether viruses are alive. If they aren’t, then at the very least they’re mechanistic shortcuts on the principle of life itself. They parasitize. They compete. They attack, they evade. They struggle. They obey the same basic imperatives as all living creatures—to survive, to multiply, to perpetuate their lineage—and they do it using intricate strategies shaped by Darwinian natural selection. They evolve. The viruses on Earth today are well fit for what they do because only the fittest have survived.
R0 = βN/(α + b + v)
In English: The evolutionary success of a bug is directly related to its rate of transmission through the host population and inversely but intricately related to its lethality, the rate of recovery from it, and the normal death rate from all other causes. (The clunky imprecision of that sentence is why ecologists prefer math.) So the first rule of a successful parasite is slightly more complicated than Don’t kill your host. It’s more complicated even than Don’t burn your bridges until after you’ve crossed them. The first rule of a successful parasite is βN/(α + b + v).
And why are RNA genomes so small? Because their self-replication is so fraught with inaccuracies that, given more information to replicate, they would accumulate more errors and cease to function at all. It’s sort of a chicken-and-egg problem, he said. RNA viruses are limited to small genomes because their mutation rates are so high, and their mutation rates are so high because they’re limited to small genomes. In fact, there’s a fancy name for that bind: Eigen’s paradox.
VII Celestial Hosts
From where do these viruses jump? They jump from animals in which they have long abided, found safety, and occasionally gotten stuck. They jump, that is, from their reservoir hosts.
And which animals are those? Some kinds are more deeply implicated than others as reservoirs of the zoonotic viruses that jump into humans. Hantaviruses jump from rodents. Lassa too jumps from rodents. Yellow fever virus jumps from monkeys. Monkeypox, despite its name, seems to jump mainly from squirrels. Herpes B jumps from macaques. The influenzas jump from wild birds into domestic poultry and then into people, sometimes after a transformative stopover in pigs. Measles may originally have jumped into us from domesticated sheep and goats. HIV-1 has jumped our way from chimpanzees. So there’s a certain diversity of origins. But a large fraction of all the scary new viruses I’ve mentioned so far, as well as others I haven’t mentioned, come jumping at us from bats.
Epstein was talking, in an understated way, about the two distinct but interconnected dimensions of zoonotic transfer: ecology and evolution. Habitat disturbance, bushmeat hunting, the exposure of humans to unfamiliar viruses that lurk in animal hosts—that’s ecology. Those things happen between humans and other kinds of organism, and are viewed in the moment. Rates of replication and mutation of an RNA virus, differential success for different strains of the virus, adaptation of the virus to a new host—that’s evolution. It happens within a population of some organism, as the population responds to its environment over time. Among the most important things to remember about evolution—and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors—is that it doesn’t have purposes. It only has results. To believe otherwise is to embrace a teleological fallacy that carries emotive appeal (“the revenge of the rain forest”) but misleads. This is what Jon Epstein was getting at. Don’t imagine that these viruses have a deliberate strategy, he said. Don’t think that they bear some malign onus against humans. “It’s all about opportunity.” They don’t come after us. In one way or another, we go to them.
VIII The chimp and the river (AIDS, HIV-1, HIV-2, SIV)
As the new century began, AIDS researchers pondered this roster of different viral lineages: seven groups of HIV-2 and three groups of HIV-1. The seven groups of HIV-2, distinct as they were from one another, all resembled SIVsm, the virus endemic in sooty mangabeys. (So did the later addition, group H.) The three kinds of HIV-1 all resembled SIVcpz, from chimps. (The eventual fourth kind, group P, is most closely related to SIV from gorillas.) Now here’s the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers.
In other words, HIV hasn’t happened to humanity just once. It has happened at least a dozen times—a dozen that we know of, and probably many more times in earlier history. Therefore it wasn’t a highly improbable event. It wasn’t a singular piece of vastly unlikely bad luck, striking humankind with devastating results—like a comet come knuckleballing across the infinitude of space to smack planet Earth and extinguish the dinosaurs. No. The arrival of HIV in human bloodstreams was, on the contrary, part of a small trend. Due to the nature of our interactions with African primates, it seems to occur pretty often.
Throughout the rest of the world you see AIDS-education materials crying out: Practice safe sex! Wear a condom! Don’t reuse needles! Here the message was: Don’t eat apes!
IX It depends (Influenza) (view spoiler)
Influenza is caused by three types of viruses, of which the most worrisome and widespread is influenza A. Viruses of that type all share certain genetic traits: a single-stranded RNA genome, which is partitioned into eight segments, which serve as templates for eleven different proteins.
Two of those molecules become spiky protuberances from the outer surface of the viral envelope: hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Those two, recognizable by an immune system, and crucial for penetrating and exiting cells of a host, give the various subtypes of influenza A their definitive labels: H5N1, H1N1, and so on. The term “H5N1” indicates a virus featuring subtype 5 of the hemagglutinin protein combined with subtype 1 of the neuraminidase protein. Sixteen different kinds of hemagglutinin, plus nine kinds of neuraminidase, have been detected in the natural world. Hemagglutinin is the key that unlocks a cell membrane so that the virus can get in, and neuraminidase is the key for getting back out. Okay so far? Having absorbed this simple paragraph, you understand more about influenza than 99.9 percent of the people on Earth. Pat yourself on the back and get a flu shot in November.
One of the things that makes influenza so problematic, Webster said, is its propensity to change. He explained. First of all there’s the high rate of mutation, as in any RNA virus. No quality control as it replicates, he said, echoing what I’d heard from Eddie Holmes. Continual copying errors at the level of individual letters of code. But that’s not the half of it. Even more important is the reassortment. (“Reassortment” means the accidental swapping of entire genomic segments between virions of two different subtypes. It’s similar to recombination, as occurs sometimes between crossed chromosomes in dividing cells, except that reassortment is somewhat more facile and orderly. It happens often among influenza viruses because the segmentation allows their RNA to snap apart neatly at the points of demarcation between genes: those eight railroad cars in a switching yard.) Sixteen available kinds of hemagglutinin, Webster reminded me. Nine kinds of neuraminidase. “You can do the arithmetic,” he said. (I did: 144 possible pairings.) The changes are random and most yield bad combinations, making the virus less viable. But random changes do constitute variation, and variation is the exploration of possibilities. It’s the raw material of natural selection, adaptation, evolution. That’s why influenza is such a protean sort of bug, always full of surprises, full of newness, full of menace: so much mutation and reassortment.
The steady incidence of mutations yields incremental change in how the virus looks and behaves. Ergo you need another flu shot every autumn: This year’s version of flu is different enough from last year’s. Reassortment yields big changes. Such major innovations by reassortment, introducing new subtypes, which may be infectious but unfamiliar to the human population, are what generally lead to pandemics.
If you have read through my admittedly long review, or just scrolled through, I have a few words of advice:
Don’t go into a bat cave without a hazmat suit.
Don’t feed the monkeys in shrines, generally keep your distance from them.
Don’t eat apes.
Practice safe sex, and take your yearly flu shot. (less)
flag29 likes · Like · 53 comments · see review
Mar 06, 2020Whitney rated it it was amazing
Overall: This book is an absolute masterpiece. Epic in scope, brilliant in how it is all connected, very relevant to today, and extremely eye opening and illuminating. Not an easy read but absolutely worth it! 10/10
Summary:
When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis.
Much of this story is detailing Quammen's adventures and research following various ...more
flag21 likes · Like · 7 comments · see review
Dec 04, 2012Parker F rated it liked it · review of another edition
This book was an exciting and informative tour of zoonotic diseases, but the fragmented style diminished my enjoyment. Quammen practices an annoying form of gonzo journalism in which he needlessly inserts himself into the narrative because he is too lazy to do otherwise.
There are numerous throwaway chapters that are included for no other reason than because Quammen made a trip or did the interview. For instance, many pages are devoted to the unenlightening tale of a scientist who accidentally pricks herself with an Ebola-carrying needle. We learn of this woman's childhood, educational background, family life, the cleanliness of her home, etc. We learn of the boredom of her long quarantine and how she and her friends shared unfunny jokes via email about how her quarantine diet is high calorie. One may think that Quammen is building up to some sort of cliffhanger in which this poor woman ends up showing Ebola symptoms, but it is clear from the start (as he describes his visit to her house and the interview) that this didn't happen. This whole ordeal could have been omitted or replaced with one sentence, but Quammen must feel that every interview he conducts deserves many pages of text. (After a few minutes of reflection, I now realize the author's intent with this Ebola-quarantine section. He is de-sensationalizing Ebola by telling a tale of potential laboratory-borne infection completely lacking any excitement or exploding bodies, in stark contrast to THE HOT ZONE.)
While these aren't direct quotes, the book is strewn with needless editorializing along the lines of "I think the guy who first discovered the cause of malaria is one cool dude," and there are way too many one word sentences like "Boring" or "Neato." Seriously.
Worst of all, near the end of the book Quammen takes a novelistic turn and tells an entirely fictional account of a patient zero carrying AIDS from the jungle of central Africa into the city. While this perhaps is demonstrating a plausible scenario for the first cases of human to human transmission of the virus, the level of trivial detail is infuriating. Should we applaud Quammen for so humanizing his fictional character and eagerly await the publication of his first novel? Or should we be upset that so many pages of a 700 page book are wasted on an Introduction-to-Creative-Writing-quality novella?
Nonetheless, most of the book is enthralling. But I dread the approaching day in which all journalistic nonfiction will be told in this short-attention-span, MTV-News-inspired format. (less)
flag19 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Dec 07, 2012Rebecca rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: nature, science-tech, reviewed-for-nudge, current-events
(4.5) This exposé of zoonoses (diseases passed from animals to humans) is top-notch scientific journalism: pacey, well-structured and entirely gripping. Although it’s a rather sobering topic, this is not scare-mongering for the sake of it; indeed, Quammen frankly concludes that we are much more likely to die of heart disease or fatal car crashes: “Yes, we are all gonna die. Yes. We are all gonna pay taxes and we are all gonna die. Most of us, though, will probably die of something much more mundane than a new virus lately emerged from a duck or a chimpanzee or a bat.” Still, you can’t help but wonder: what will be the next major pandemic? When, where and how will it happen; how severe could it be?
(See my full review at Nudge.) (less)
flag21 likes · Like · see review
Nov 20, 2013Clouds rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: science, reviewed, 5-star, read-in-2014, cup-of-tea
Pure class from beginning to end - the best science journalism I've read.
It was completely coincidental that I read this just before the 2014 Ebola outbreak... but that did sort of reinforce why this is essential reading!
Plenty of other goodreads reviews have given superb summaries of the content of the novel, so I'll only touch on that briefly - but here's why I personally loved it:
I originally put this on my long-list as research reading. There's a novel I want to write (one day!) that is set in a an alt-history where humanity was ravaged 18th/19th century by an incredibly contagious but slow killing parasite that crosses from a fictional type of domesticated chimps to mankind.
So... I aced high-school Biology, I've seen Outbreak, I've read the Andromedus Strain and I've played the Plauge Inc app and the Pandemic boardgame - I have a higher than average interest in the mechanics of contagious diseases - but I'm certainly no pro. There were plenty of question marks in my plot regarding how my fictional plague functioned. This book sounded like the perfect, broad spectrum primer for what kinds of diseases had spread from animals, how that worked, and how it could (plausibly enough for spec fic) work.
So that's why it got on my long-list.
Every time I saw a review flash past from a goodreads friend, it was invariably positive.
For the last few years I've been diligently focused on my reading lists - working through all the major sci-fi/fantasy award winners since 1980. It hasn't left a huge amount of space for books which sounded interesting, but weren't award winners. So I created a new reading list called the 'Cup of Tea List' for books that hadn't won awards but sounded like my cup of tea! I picked 10 top books for the list - and this was one of them.
So I eventually got my chance to read it!
And I loved every page.
I love learning new stuff and I thought this was all fascinating and presented in an incredibly accessible way. It's not dumbed-down, but Quammen never talks in the stilted, precise vernacular of the true scientist. He's a damn-fine writer, who happens to really know his science.
At the end of every chapter I wanted to report it all back to my wife. She's kind of squeamish about sickness, so she didn't totally appreciate that, but even she found it interesting.
I've spoken about it so glowingly every since I finished it, that I've loaned it out twice already. If a friend's looking to borrow a book and they have any science leanings at all, I'm there, "dear friend, have you by chance read Spillover yet? No? Let me find where I've put it..."
In football (soccer) rhetoric, there's a running joke that club managers don't have the broadest vocabularies, and a good player is often described as "a top lad". If he's an exceptional player he might be a "a top, top lad" - with each subsequent, more emphatic "top" being reserved for the elite, the world-beaters, etc. With this in mind, I say that Spillover is a top, top, top read, and it'll only set you back a fiver.
Don't wait as long as I did - get yourself a copy now, then lend it to friends!
After this I read: Falling Free (less)
flag15 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Nov 14, 2012Elizabeth rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: non-fiction, journalism, nature-science, pandemic
Is it possible to "really like" a book like this? I think I may have shortchanged this book with the three star rating. Hmmm.
But I digress.
It is official- I now know too much. Most of us have probably spent some amount of time thinking about a pandemic. How could we not? Reading this book will not ease said fears. It is unsettling to read how easy it is for an infection to *spillover* (sorry) from animal to human. This book reveals just how easy it is and gives you enough information to scare the daylights out of you.
Enjoy. (less)
flag13 likes · Like · 2 comments · see review
Mar 24, 2020Lauren rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: science, animals, disease-illness
I find solace in knowledge.
In research.
In science.
In realizing (again) that history is a teacher.
Reading a book about pandemics during a pandemic might not work for everyone, but I find comfort in realizing that shit has happened many many times before and it will happen again and again.
I like to remember that we, as humans, are animals, and no matter what we do, we are not infallible.
Our own hubris is and always will be our biggest downfall.
I like to remember that science and research can save lives and change history.
I read David Quammen's SPILLOVER: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, a 500+ page book in a few short days because:
1) It is great writing and hard to put down
2) I've got the time as work is a slow trickle now
3) I craved those reminders, stated above.
Quammen is a first-rate researcher and writer, the book details the emergence and spillover of zoonotic diseases that cross from non-human animals to human animals, many I've heard of, and some I hadn't.
The book opens with a detailed history or the Hendra virus, which attacks both horses and humans that was first studied in Australia in the 90s. Through forensics, and many many samples, this virus, and many other recent viruses have been traced to various species of bats (SARS, Marburg, and Ebola - it's too early in the game for Covid-19, but high probability). Quammen and some bat biologists speculate why these mammals, an ancient and highly diversified group, are the reservoir host for so many viruses. These chapters were amongst my favorite in the book - highly informative and highly readable.
Written in 2012, but pertinent in this very moment, as we're all quarantined in our homes. (less)
flag20 likes · Like · comment · see review
May 27, 2014Nikki rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: non-fiction, science-fact
I found this book fascinating. When I originally got it out of the library, some of my friends were a biiiit concerned that given my GAD was health-focused, this would just make me have a panic attack. I'm happy to report that I was simply happily curious, digging around with great enthusiasm, stopping to google things, etc.
In terms of the level this is at, it's perfectly comprehensible to anyone, I would say. Granted, I do have a background in reading plenty of popular science, an A Level in biology, and various science/medical courses online, but I don't think that puts me much above the layman, really. Where something needs explaining, Quammen does so quite clearly. (Although if you do find this fascinating but a bit dense for you, this course on Coursera might be worth a look the next time it runs. I enjoyed it, anyway.)
So, granted I already find this topic fascinating, but I think this was a good read. It avoided sensationalism, aside from the couple of chapters where Quammen imagined the life of the Cut Hunter from the cut-hunter theory of the origin of HIV, which were a little much for me. That goes beyond adding a bit of human interest into a flight of fancy, which jars with the rest of the book. If you want to think delightedly of Ebola victims as being a sack of liquefied matter, I gather you want to read The Hot Zone (Richard Preston).
It's well-structured, taking us through various different zoonotic pathogens and their implications. The search for the "Next Big One" (the next pandemic) isn't the primary focus, despite the title, and instead Quammen focuses on how the diseases are tracked, particularly how they are tracked to the reservoir species that safely harbour the pathogens until they spill over into other species. It's not hysterical about the fact that there will be another pandemic, but treats it in a matter of fact way. Of course there'll be another pandemic: we're overcrowded, highly connected, highly social, and fairly careless.
I know there are people out there who will be complaining about Quammen's bias when he notes that we are, to a great extent, making the problem worse. We destroy habitats, bring animals into closer contact with us, and thus bring ourselves into closer contact with their pathogens, which may spill over into humans. Not biased, and not hard to understand, just a fact. (less)
flag12 likes · Like · comment · see review
Aug 10, 2014Rossdavidh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: grey
Another book from the guy who's become one of my favorite authors. Most non-fiction books (including Quammen's) can be divided into one of two types: books with many small ideas (e.g. his book of essays, "Biolerplate Rhino"), and books with one big idea. Both have their place, and I have enjoyed both. There is pleasure (and edification) in reading 10 pages (or so) on an idea at a time, then moving on to the next topic. Big things can come from small ideas; not everything has to be a magnum opus.
This book, though, is not a book of many small ideas. This is a book of One Big Idea. Or perhaps, One Big Analogy.
Without trying to pretend that I can do in a few hundred words what takes a writer as accomplished as Quammen over 500 pages, the basic question here is, are we doomed? Not doomed in the general sense (the answer to that is always 'yes'), but from a particular kind of self-inflicted wound.
Quammen has talked elsewhere about the "Planet of Weeds", which is a particularly dispiriting vision of the future in which, besides humans, there are only such organisms as crabgrass, poison ivy, rats, cockroaches, and other such species too adaptable or ornery to be extinguished. Most species, we accidentally extirminate, sometimes despite heroic efforts by a few to save them. These species, we repeatedly fail to extirminate, despite heroic efforts by many to do so. Over time, more and more of Earth is likely to be either humanity; species like wheat, soy, pig, and cow; and the weed species that can prosper despite (or sometimes even because of) our dominance.
There is one kind of life, though, which this vision of the future (not so much apocalyptic as "banal-yptic", which is a word because I say so) says nothing about: the microscopic. In "Spillover", Quammen turns his attention to this.
Many diseases which cause humanity a great deal of trouble in the past (and the present) are found only in humans. These may be extirminated, like smallpox, or not, like malaria, but they are at least in principle solvable problems. If you cure or immunize everyone on Earth, even for a little while, then the problem is gone (unless somebody in a bioweapons lab re-introduces it later).
There are other diseases, though (whether bacterial or viral in origin), that do NOT primarily live in humans. They live in other species, sometimes not even causing illness there, and occasionally spill over into humans. The technical term is "zoonosis".
Imagine that every species is a room. Imagine that inside every one of these rooms is a certain amount of tinder. As long as the walls between rooms are firewalls, and the doors are closed, the potential for a firestorm is limited. I once lived in a dormitory where one room went up in flames, but the fire never spread to anyone else's rooms because the walls were cinderblock and the doors were stout, not especially flammable, and nearly always closed.
Imagine that instead, we punch holes in those cinderblock walls, and people move their belongings from one place to another, leaving piles of paper in the hallway or doorways. Now, once a spark hits tinder in any room, it has a chance of spreading without limit.
As humanity has moved from one ecosystem to another, eating or displacing species after species, spreading them (and their insides, and their bodily fluids, and thus their pathogens) far and wide, it is as if we are punching holes in the cinderblock walls. Will a firestorm result?
One answer would be: HIV was a zoonosis, and it was a very slow-acting one.
Quammen knows better than to leap straight into the HIV story, though. First, we learn about much smaller zoonoses, like Hendra, Ebola, SARS, and bird flu. We learn about what is known by doctors, biologists, and veterinarians, and also how it came to be known, and what is still unknown. We travel with Quammen to labs and offices in Europe and North America, and we also travel with him to the Congo and Australia and Hong Kong. We are treated to a particularly vivid imagining (based on what is known, and guessing at what is unknown) of how HIV made the leap from chimpanzee to human to humanity. We dip lightly into the mathematics of disease infectivity. Then, we are treated to The Analogy, which Quammen is able to phrase far more gracefully than I (which is why I made up the dorm room fire analogy above, instead, so I wouldn't ruin his by botching the re-telling).
In case you haven't figured it out by now, I liked this book. A lot. I put all others aside until it was finished, and afterwards lamented that it was done. It will not make you sleep better, but it will make you think, and like a good horror story or thriller, will entertain despite (or because of) the dark subject matter. You should read it. (less)
flag11 likes · Like · 7 comments · see review
Feb 18, 2020Jeanette rated it liked it
This holds a ton of information that is helpful to hold some specifics re virus infections that proceed to humans. But it's not completely upon the title material.
In fact, the writing is well accomplished. It's often clear and better than some of the highly scientific particulars and nomenclatures of pure science reads (very dry) elsewhere. But as much as I can decide it DID make the reading easier than most material in this genre, it also holds another quality I thought was a considerable distraction from that positive prose form.
Quammen has a kind of tone that's strange to read (it was for me) and quite difficult to describe. It's not Chicken Little on meth (or a hate rant like Gerta Thunberg either) but it's not a logical nor scientific bottom line "norm" either. If I'm overstating that, I'm sorry. But some of this assumption and oversight is just plain wrong when he tends to expand from "one" to "some" to "all". And it some cases it seems to me, that this emotive occludes to some of the very actual world reality of how MOST virus pass into pandemic outcomes. And how they did in the past, as well. Like the 1918 and the other human influenza forms that went lethal since. There are huge portions of this book that read like a memoir and travelogue. It's just not direct to the title at all, immense pages of asides/ tangents.
The history of some of the worst spillovers (like Hendra or other bat vector virus) were the best and most accurate parts- and I am glad I read it for the understanding of how an intermediate "amplify" animal is also usually a HUGE part of the "it depends" serendipity that results in these horrific outcomes. First a small "usual" mammal, then a mid vector animal and then other species- such as monkeys/apes or humans.
It's not a book I would necessarily recommend. His personality and slant, I just feel, is containing quite a bit of "group think" and not enough science. But now I do comprehend more easily the trail through 3 or 4 species this virus morph road can take. (less)
flag10 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Oct 14, 2012Molly rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Thrilled to see that David Quammen had a new science book, I snatched this up. It’s been 15 years since his book "Song of the Dodo” about island biogeography, which remains at the top of my favorite non-fiction.
Can one *enjoy* a book about infectious disease? Anyone who's read Richard Preston's “The Hot Zone” will guiltily admit, yes (interestingly, he takes Preston to task for overplaying descriptions of Ebola infection. “Bleeding out" is not accurate.)
There is inherent narrative drama in the question of when the Next Big One (NBO) will hit and in the epidemiological sleuthing to identify viruses and their host animals when an epidemic breaks. What will turn a local outbreak into a pandemic? Do scientists think there IS a NBO lurking? Quite possibly. And if so, it will assuredly originate in animals, as has almost all human infectious disease. Influenza, SARS, Marburg, Lyme disease - Quammen covers them all and more, and turns up startling facts. For one, the subtitle of his book could just as well be, "From Bats to Humans."
But what put the book over the top in excellence and dramatic page-turning was the penultimate chapter on the origin of AIDS. In some ways the whole book was moving toward this chapter. The origins of HIV can now be pinned to a year (much earlier than you’d think) and a single spillover event; chimp to human. And Quammen makes the poignant and chilling case that lest you wonder why we should care about exotic diseases such as Marbug, consider the exponential trajectory and devastation of AIDS. It too is a zoonotic disease, but one that has moved more slowly than an airborne NBO will surely do.
Despite the theme – lively and buoyant writing. In other words, it’s readable. Quammen remains a master of science journalism.
(less)
