Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

Webster himself played a crucial role in responding to that scary subtype when it first emerged. A three-year-old boy died in Hong Kong of influenza, in May 1997, and a swab sample from his windpipe yielded virus. The lab scientists in Hong Kong didn’t recognize that virus. Some of the boy’s sample went to the CDC, but no one there got around to characterizing it. Then a Dutch scientist on a visit to Hong Kong was given a bit of the virus, and he went home and worked on it immediately. Hmm, mijn God. The Dutchman informed his international colleagues that it looked like an H5. A bird flu. “And we all said, ‘no, impossible,’ ” Webster recalled. “Since H5 doesn’t affect humans. We thought it was a mistake.” It wasn’t. What seemed so alarming is that this was the first documented case of a purely avian influenza virus—containing no human-flu genes brought in by reassortment—to cause killer respiratory illness in a person. Three more cases turned up in November, at which point Webster himself jumped on a plane for Hong Kong.