Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

by David Quammen

Say you’re a parent with young children, living here in your Millbrook dream house on three acres of beautiful lawn and shrubbery—what do you want for protection against Lyme disease? There might be a whole range of desperate options. Pesticide spraying by the county? Deer eradication by the state? Thousands of mousetraps (not Shermans but the lethal kind), deployed in the forest and baited with cheese, snapping away like brushfire? Do you pave your yard and ring it with an oil-filled moat? Do you put flea-and-tick collars on your kids’ ankles before they go out to play? No, none of those. “I would feel a lot more comfortable,” Ostfeld answered, “if I knew that the landscape would support healthy populations of owls, foxes, hawks, weasels, squirrels of various kinds—the components of the community that could regulate mouse populations.” In other words, biological diversity. This was his offhand way of expressing the most notable conclusion that has emerged from twenty years of research: Risk of Lyme disease seems to go up as the roster of native animals, in a given area, goes down. Why? Probably because of the differences in reservoir competence between mice and shrews (both with high competence) and almost all other vertebrate hosts (low competence) that may share habitat with them. The effect of the most competent reservoirs is diluted by the presence, when there is such presence, of less-competent alternatives. In forest patches containing a full cast of ecological play...

How to contain Lyme disease