Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

the often-used term “Ebola hemorrhagic fever” is itself a misnomer for Ebola virus disease, because more than half the patients don’t bleed at all.

white-footed mice to be the most competent of reservoirs for the Lyme disease spirochete.

More acorns, more mice, more infected ticks, more Lyme.

Risk of Lyme disease seems to go up as the roster of native animals, in a given area, goes down.

a virion is not a cell.

RNA viruses mutate profligately.

RNA viruses therefore evolve quicker than perhaps any other class of organism on Earth.

The first rule of a successful parasite is Don’t kill your host.

What matters more than whether a virus kills its host is when.

Don’t burn your bridges until after you’ve crossed them.

natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors—is that it doesn’t have purposes. It only has results.

One in every four species of mammal is a bat.

Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers.

the AIDS pandemic is traceable to a single contingent event. That this event involved a bloody interaction between one chimpanzee and one human.

Their data and analysis indicated that just a single migration of the virus—one infected person or one container of plasma—accounted for bringing AIDS to America.

“Some of these viruses,” he warned, citing coronaviruses in particular, “should be considered as serious threats to human health.

written in 2012...