Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

The most recent big one is AIDS, of which the eventual total bigness (the scope of its harm, the breadth of its reach) cannot even be predicted. About 30 million deaths, 34 million living people now infected, with no end in sight. Polio was a big one, at least in America, where it achieved special notoriety by crippling a man who would become president despite it. Polio also, during its worst years, struck hundreds of thousands of children and paralyzed or killed many, captured public attention like headlights freezing a deer, and brought drastic changes to the way large-scale medical research is financed and conducted. The biggest of the big ones during the twentieth century was the 1918–1919 influenza. Before that, on the North American continent, the big one for native peoples was smallpox, arriving from Spain about 1520 with the expedition that helped Cortez conquer Mexico. Back in Europe, two centuries earlier, it was the Black Death, probably attributable to bubonic plague.