Spillover: Exploring the Links Between Animal Infections and Human Pandemics

Doctorzero: Unique and valuable presentation of some of planet earths recent viral spillovers from a non physician perspective. Several years old but continues to be a stand out amongst the surge of pandemic nonfiction IMNSHO.

United States on Aug 13, 2023

Leandro Santana de Oliveira: Livro de autoria de David Quammen, escritor reconhecido pelos suas obras sobre ciência, natureza e viagens. Escrito em 2012, mas lido durante a pandemia de Covid-19, é de uma atualidade fenomenal.

Spillover é um termo técnico para doenças que migram de animais para seres humanos. Muito se fala de um aumento de pandemias e do surgimento de novas doenças a partir de preconceitos (étnicos e políticos). Não sou da área de saúde ou ciência, mas lendo o livro fica claro que a destruição de florestas, a falta de alimentos ou do processamento dos alimentos são as causas mais frequentes de novas doenças.

O livro é de fácil leitura e bastante envolvente. O autor visitou in loco boa parte dos locais descritos no livro, portanto, cada capítulo é uma aventura na qual o leitor fica esperando o que vai acontecer e quem será o “culpado” (uma raposa-voadora, um primata superior, um esquilo?). O mais intrigante é que para muitas doenças nem sequer há uma resposta definitiva, como é o caso do Ebola, onde existem suspeitos, mas não condenados.

Destaco especialmente o capítulo referente ao vírus HIV, que tem seu surgimento rastreado ao início do...

Brazil on Jul 13, 2020

Karen Roberts: What a timely piece of writing! This has been on my to read list for awhile, but with the current pandemic it seemed to be the right time to put this one at the top of my list.
“When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis.”
“It is a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the twenty-first century.” How prescient is that?
This leaping is called spillover, and something like 60% of infectious diseases are from spillover. Examples include the bubonic plague, Ebola, and human influenzas are all zoonotic infections. So is COVID19! We tend to forget sometimes that we too are animals, and susceptible to being fertile ground for viral spillover. We are increasingly affected by spillovers because of our actions. We clear forests, logging and road building, we capture bushmeat and butcher it, and eat it, we engage in mineral extraction, and fly all over the globe, thus exposing these emerging viruses to human populations and spreading them quickly.
This book is rich with important topics which I believe we should...

United States on Jun 25, 2020

Nuno: In this book the author aims at explaining how zoonoses arise. He tracks down the history of some of the most famous zoonoses (HIV and SARS, for instance), both from a scientific point of view, and from a social point of view. What I mean with "social point of view" is that David Quammen recalls his encounters with scientists that do active research in the different diseases the author explores, as well as some of his travels in the places where said zoonoses had spilled to their new human hosts.

The scientific facts that this book mostly mentions is the diversity of zoonoses, and the ecological and antropological factors that may influence whether a new zoonosis becomes an epidemic (such as HIV), or if it rather remains circumscribed to a small region (e.g., Ebola). If you are looking for a book explaining how this diseases work from a mechanistic point of view, this book is not for you, although at some points Quammen mentions one or another molecular detail. In any case, one thing that I enjoyed about his explanations is that he does not assume that the reader is unable to understand the most basic scientific facts, but he also does not use jargon that would require you...

Germany on Sep 08, 2018

C.G.: Lecture agréable, pleine de suspense. Sur les grandes épizooties (SIDA, SARS, Ebola, H5N1, etc.): leur origine, leur modes d'actions, leur dispersion depuis leur origine, et surtout leurs causes.
Extrêmement bien documenté, avec des centaines de références d'articles scientifiques (scrupuleusement notés en bibliographie), d'éminentes équipes de recherche dans le monde entier. Des explications scientifiques, très approfondies, et pourtant abordables.
Un travail remarquable et fascinant à lire.

Et vous comprendrez pourquoi aller visiter des grottes en Asie ou ailleurs, lieu de vie de chauve-souris; ou acheter du bois exotique; ou nos fermes ou élevages aviaires industriels; ou encore la tendance "Wild Flavor" en Chine; ou nos voyages en avion et des séjours dans des hotels qui sont de véritables hubs ... ne sont guère recommandables, pour ne pas dire des opportunités pour les virus à ARN, dont le taux de mutation leur permet de s'adapter aux écosystèmes détruits, avant d'effectuer leur spillover. I.e. le saut d'une espèce animale vers Homo sapiens. En attendant le Next Big One ... et il ne s'agit pas du prochain séisme dans la faille de...

France on Jan 07, 2018

Neuron: This is the best book I have read in a long time. It is like a mystery thriller played out in various exotic locations around the world, that simultaneously, gives the reader intriguing and accurate knowledge about various exotic but dangerous pathogens that have the potential to forever change life as we know it. In other words, if you would put the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, a travel diary book by Bill Bryson, and an Agatha Christie thriller in the mixer, you would get something like this. It just doesn't get better than this!

David Quammen's writing is accessible and throughout the book I was amazed by his ability to explaining difficult scientific concepts in a way that makes the reader understand... even crave science. Though I have read many scholarly articles, no single text I can recall have given me such a deep understanding and appreciation for a scientific subject. I have always been fascinated by bacteria and viruses, however this book multiplied my fascination and my appreciation for the scientists that study viruses and other pathogens in humans as well as in other species.

This book is about spillovers (surprise!). A spillover is when a virus or...

United States on May 21, 2013

an engineer: Spillover was reviewed in the FT and has more than lived up to their recommendation. If ever there were a justification for government investment in scientific research this is it at its best. David Quammen describes meetings with scientists and medics across the world, joining them on gruelling research treks through African jungle, visiting the scenes of outbreaks wether they are a Dutch town, Hong Kong or an African village and interviewing them at their high bio-security laboratories in Atlanta and elsewhere. It is a convincing story that will be essential reading for many. His factual accounts of the outbreak , identification and subsequent containment of 'killer diseases' are very readable, becoming just slightly more questionable with a postulated scenario for the origins of HIV. Whist this necessarily fictional account, makes perfect sense with a suggested spillover from a single chimpanzee, at the beginning of the 20th century, there is no account given to how the spread of HIV (which takes a long time to manifest itself) might have been previously contained by the vulnerability of those infected to other diseases, particularly smallpox.(or any explanation as to why...

United Kingdom on Nov 24, 2012

M. Hillmann: Viruses, that conjure dread, jumping species from animal to man and highly infectious from man to man - that is a Spillover or zoonosis. Virulent, often lethal most recent and of limited spread - Marburg (1967), Lassa Fever (1969), Ibola (1971), Avian Flu (1997), Hendra (1994), SARS (2003), West Nile (1999), Swine Flu (2009) . But some are the Big Ones - Spanish Flu killed 20 million in 1918, HIV accounts for 30 million dead and 34 million infected.

Why are they happening now? Where do they come from? How do they jump species? What conditions lead to their spread?

This is not an alarmist, "end of civilisation as we know it" book. It is informed and balanced but compulsive reading like several detective stories in one. It is rich in the personalities and circumstances of how the epidemics occurred, the stories of the people affected and the race to identify the "reservoir " hosts and the carriers. It is first hand and colourful. David Quammen meets the veterinarians, doctors and nurses who are treating , and often infected by, the dying patients. He goes out with the ecologists and the scientists to search for the reservoir species in the Congolese and Malaysian...

United Kingdom on Nov 03, 2012