'Spillover,' by David Quammen
Spillover Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic By David Quammen (Norton; 587 pages; $28.95)
In 2008, a Dutch woman on a guided trek through Uganda climbed gamely down into a remote, sunken cave - a cave better known for the few indolent pythons underfoot than for the tens of thousands of bats that teemed overhead. For several minutes, she and her party peered into the darkness and breathed the hot, pungent air, as they gingerly stepped across rocks slick with bat guano.
It was 13 days later, back home in the Netherlands, when the woman felt the first flush of illness; soon, her fever climbed, her organs failed, she went into a coma. Her shocking death was traced to a pathogen called Marburg virus: a rare (so far!) infection related to Ebola and harbored in African fruit bats.
David Quammen's "Spillover" catalogs the terrible and growing list of diseases that pass to humans from animals, and it isn't only misguided tourists who meet disaster in his grim tale. Australian parrot brokers catch psittacosis from their cockatoos. Bangladeshi climbers of date palm trees frequented by fruit bats contract Nipah virus. Neighbors of goat farms in the Netherlands come down with "Q fever."
Historically, and most consequentially to the human race, African bush meat hunters at some point became infected with a virus from the apes they butchered - progenitor strains of what we now know as HIV. "Everything comes from somewhere," Quammen reminds us. And most of humankind's emerging infectious diseases come from animal populations.
"Spillover" - so called because of the way the infections it describes spill over from one species into another - surveys the diseases that have erupted out of the animal world into humans over the last century or so, and in the process it tells numerous gripping tales of scientific derring-do.
We see public health officials investigating deadly epidemics in the Congo basin, veterinarians venturing into caves full of diseased bats, virologists wearing space suits to work in laboratories where the world's most dangerous pathogens are studied.
As he relates these stories, Quammen demonstrates that this struggle is essentially an evolutionary one, between predator and prey - with the microbe serving as the hunter and the human being as the hunted - and that it takes place in the context of a complex global ecology.
We are all connected, Quammen shows us, not only to each other but also to the bats of Australia roosting in suburban trees, the rhesus macaques being shipped to laboratories around the globe, to the mosquitoes alighting on Malaysian rice farmers. As a mutual substrate for emerging infection, Quammen shows us, "we are all in this together."
"Spillover" has abundant thrills typical of the pandemic nonfiction genre. As after reading Laurie Garrett's "The Coming Plague," Gina Kolata's "Flu" and Richard Preston's "The Hot Zone," readers may be tempted to put on protective equipment before boarding a crowded plane - or, more pertinently, before entering a bat cave.
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'Spillover,' by David Quammen