Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

Around the same time, officials at WHO headquarters in Geneva issued a global alert about these cases of unusual pulmonary illness in Vietnam and China. (Canada and the Philippines weren’t mentioned because this was just before their involvement was recognized.) In Vietnam, said the statement, an outbreak had begun with a single patient (the one Carlo Urbani examined) who was “hospitalized for treatment of severe, acute respiratory syndrome of unknown origin.” The little comma after “severe” reflects the fact that those three adjectives and one noun hadn’t yet been codified into a name. Several days later, as the pattern of hopscotching outbreaks continued to unfold, WHO issued another public statement of alarm. This one, framed as an emergency travel advisory, marked the transformation of a descriptive phrase into a label. “During the past week,” it said, “WHO has received reports of more than 150 new suspected cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an atypical pneumonia for which cause has not yet been determined.”