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.