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Jump to navigationJump to searchSpillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen (view source)
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{{infoboxinfobox1
|title=Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
|author=David Quammen
|publisher=Vintage
|date=August 2013
|summary=On the impact which zoonoses have had, continue to have, and may have on human beings.
|cover=0099522853
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|aznus=0099522853
}}
''We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies.'' This is a salient fact taken away from David Quammen’s ''Spillover''. The entire book is a most trenchant eye-opener to just how much of an impact animal infections have on people; approximately 60% of human infectious diseases are ''zoonoses'', 'animal [infections] transmissible to humans'.
Just how distinct is a zoonosis from a non-zoonosis? The exploration of this question which I find most fascinating is that of HIV; molecular phylogeny generally shows that if one goes far back enough, what may affect only one species today might actually have made the leap from one animal to another further back in time. The human immunodeficiency virus – which was first written about in ''Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report'', then went through a series of name changes – is being shown to have more definitive roots in SIV, the equivalent which affects other primates. The widely circulated Cut-Hunter explanation (in which it is supposed that a hunter somewhere in Central Africa killed an infected chimpanzee, and may have cut himself) represents a small part of the story, according to some. The observed twelve subtypes of HIV even suggest to some that there were ''at least'' twelve spillovers of HIV into human beings!
What drives an endemic to cross the Rubicon and go global? The question is partially answered by QuanmenQuammen, who states that two crises promote the growth of zoonoses: ''The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical.'' The extensive globalisation, the inimical invasion of nature (by means of measures such as deforestation, or increased hunting for game) and the slight blind spot humans suffer from, when it comes to just how interconnected various forms of life is, can lead to some rather disastrous consequences. How might this be prevented? That is still rather unclear, I’m afraid.
Stretching into the past, and reaching into the future, Quammen has done a splendid job at illuminating the tale of zoonoses and writing of the animals, unsuspecting societies and tenacious researchers involved. It points to the possibility that a zoonosis would be included in the chain of the Next Big Ones, succeeding the bubonic plague, smallpox, 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, and HIV/AIDS. More importantly, while Quammen doesn’t state that we humans are exclusively responsible for the crossing over of animal diseases, one is as a reader reminded yet again of just how unisolated we are from nature.
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