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

by David Quammen

Plasmodium knowlesi malaria, they wrote, is not a new emergent infection of humans. It has been getting into people for some while but it was overlooked. Three kinds of Asian primate serve as its reservoir hosts: the long-tailed macaque, the pig-tailed macaque, and the banded leaf monkey. Other monkeys, still unidentified, might be harboring the parasite too. Transmission from monkey to monkey (and from monkey to human) occurs by way of mosquitoes belonging to one group of closely related species, Anopheles leucosphyrus and its cousins, including Anopheles latens in Borneo. Anopheles latens is a forest-dwelling mosquito accustomed to biting macaques, but it will bite humans too, if presented with the necessity and the opportunity. As humans have increasingly entered the Bornean forests—killing and displacing macaques, cutting timber, setting fires, creating massive oil-palm plantations and small family farm plots, presenting themselves as an alternative host—both the necessity and the opportunity have increased. (Borneo has been deforested at a high rate within recent decades, to the point that its forest coverage is now less than 50 percent; meanwhile the island’s human population has grown to about 16 million.

Greed shall bring us down