Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen
science exposition at its best - authoritative, balanced and a page turner
Spillover is science exposition at its best. Quammen introduces zoonotic diseases, those that travel to humans from other animals, in plain and accurate language, explaining their discovery, ecology, transmission and impacts. At over 500 pages, it's a longish book but Quammen uses exotic field trips, interviews, research and forensic analysis to give the reader a feel for the work of the range of professionals who tackle it. Having traced the outbreak of Equine Influenza in Australia, I was gratified by the insight with which Quammen identified the salient facts, related the human impact of the outbreak, sized up with dry humour the gap between self interest and credibility of some of the players, and, most importantly, threw into stark relief the ecological causes and health consequences of the outbreak. This is the most balanced and thorough update on zoonoses since The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett in 1995.
Quammen jumps about in time, but the priority he asserts in presenting the common features of zoonoses, their risk, their animal reservoirs and their evolutionary history, makes sense and his warm writing style facilitates this approach. The wild reservoir for Ebola has not been proven, but the story is more complete for malaria, HIV and the flu viruses. This makes for a fascinating build up to the chapter "It Depends" where boom-bust ecology is applied to the human population, and Quammen tries The Analogy on a range of experts. Kirkreview will be reviewing Quammen's earlier work.