Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

I have asked not just Webster but also many other eminent disease scientists, including some of the world’s experts on Ebola, on SARS, on bat-borne viruses generally, on the HIVs, and on viral evolution, the same two-part question: (1) Will a new disease emerge, in the near future, sufficiently virulent and transmissible to cause a pandemic on the scale of AIDS or the 1918 flu, killing tens of millions of people? and (2) If so, what does it look like and whence does it come? Their answers to the first part have ranged from Maybe to Probably. Their answers to the second have focused on RNA viruses, especially those for which the reservoir host is some kind of primate. None of them has disputed the premise, by the way, that if there is a Next Big One it will be zoonotic.