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. 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. Alright, maybe he isn’t a diviner maybe he merely pays attention to the scientists around him.

He appears to have predicted the 2014 Ebola outbreak and ability to country jump years before it happened. I do think SARS was scary as a healthcare provider because it seemed to circumvent standard isolation and had a high fatality rate.ĭavid Quammen is prescient. I thought the topic might give me heebie-jeebies, but it mostly didn't, except when it comes to traveling to China, Bangladesh or West Africa. And check out the comments below from 2016. Don't say David Quammen didn't tell you so. It’s also the elegantly told tale of a quest, through time and landscape, for a new understanding of how our world works-and how we can survive within it.Ģ020 Update: Well, here we go, 2020 Covid pandemic. The result is more than a clarion work of reportage. And it asks questions more urgent now than ever before: From what innocent creature, in what remote landscape, will the Next Big One emerge? Are pandemics independent misfortunes, or linked? Are they merely happening to us, or are we somehow causing them? What can be done? Quammen traces the origins of Ebola, Marburg, SARS, avian influenza, Lyme disease, and other bizarre cases of spillover, including the grim, unexpected story of how AIDS began from a single Cameroonian chimpanzee. Spillover delivers the science, the history, the mystery, and the human anguish of disease outbreaks as gripping drama. He found surprises in the latest research, alarm among public health officials, and deep concern in the eyes of researchers. He interviewed survivors and gathered stories of the dead. For five years he followed scientists to a rooftop in Bangladesh, a forest in the Congo, a Chinese rat farm, and a suburban woodland in New York, and through high-biosecurity laboratories. Prior to the emergence of our latest health crisis, renowned science writer David Quammen was traveling the globe to better understand spillover’s devastating potential. This phenomenon-in which a new pathogen comes to humans from wildlife-is known as spillover, and it may not be long before it happens again. The source of the previously unknown virus? Bats. In 2020, the novel coronavirus gripped the world in a global pandemic and led to the death of hundreds of thousands.

Animal infections and the next human pandemic