Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

about the public perception that this disease is extraordinarily bloody, Rollin interrupted me genially to say: “—which is bullshit.” When I mentioned the descriptions in Preston’s book, Rollin mockingly said, “They melt, splash on the wall,” and gave a frustrated shrug. Mr. Preston could write what he pleased, Rollin added, so long as the product was labeled fiction. “But if you say it’s a true story, you have to speak to the true story, and he didn’t. Because it was much more exciting to have blood everywhere and scaring everywhere.” A few patients do bleed to death, Rollin said, but “they don’t explode, and they don’t melt.” In fact, he said, 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. They die of other causes, such as respiratory distress and shutdown