Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

better care and be isolated from other patients. There she developed a rash and conjunctivitis; she hemorrhaged. She was put into an induced coma, a move dictated by the need to dose her more aggressively with antiviral medicine. Before she lost consciousness, though not long before, Jaap went back into the isolation room, kissed his wife, and said to her, “Well, we’ll see you in a few days.” Blood samples, sent to a lab in Hamburg, confirmed the diagnosis: Marburg. She worsened. As her organs shut down, she lacked for oxygen to the brain, she suffered cerebral edema, and before long Astrid Joosten was declared brain-dead. “They kept her alive for a few more hours, until the family arrived,” Jaap told me. “Then they pulled the plug out and she died within a few minutes.”