Review by Choice Review
Science journalist/author Quammen (The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, CH, Jun'07, 44-5638; Monster of God, CH, Feb'04, 41-3448) delivers an intriguing narrative describing zoonotic diseases that result when pathogens "jump" from animals to humans. The text is rich with personal field experiences, vivid commentary on the search for reservoir hosts, and descriptions of ecological disruptions that play a role in the transmission of these diseases. Nine chapters engage the reader in a journey that is compelling, gripping, and informative without being sensational. The author understands complex scientific research and interprets research findings in a perceptive and measured way. This is a well-researched, insightful book that provides a framework for understanding the interplay of biological, cultural, and ecological forces that contribute to "spillover" diseases. The clear, powerful text presents a unique opportunity for a wide readership to understand the science behind many of the exotic epidemics. Numerous notes and bibliographic citations; user-friendly index. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty, general readers, and public health officials. D. C. Anderson Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
WHAT a confounding summer it was. At agricultural fairs across the country, people gathered for the simple pleasure of devouring deepfried Mars bars were coming down with a once-placid pig virus, a variant of H3N2 influenza. Over 300 cases have been confirmed so far, with at least one death. In Texas and elsewhere, pharmacy shelves are shorn of mosquito repellent thanks to the most serious outbreak of a mosquito-borne bird virus - West Nile - the country has ever seen. In Massachusetts, high school football games are being canceled for fear of yet another animal microbe, Eastern equine encephalitis virus, currently stalking the state's residents. That is to say, David Quammen's meaty, sprawling new book, "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic," arrives not a moment too soon. Animal microbes are on the loose. Historically, some 60 percent of the infections that plague humankind, from influenza to H.I.V. and bubonic plague, originated in the bodies of other animals. (To be fair, like any decent fight, the exchanges go the other way too.) But nowadays, Quammen writes, we are "tearing ecosystems apart," and animals and humans are rubbing shoulders in novel, unexpected ways. The steady drip of animal microbes spilling over into people quickens. But for those ready to stock up on dehydrated meals and hide out in the basement, not to worry: most of the animal microbes portrayed here are unlikely to race across the earth felling millions, despite the book's suggestive subtitle. "Spillover" hardly touches on such pandemic-worthy animal pathogens as avian flu or multi-drug-resistant bacteria. What the book more fully describes is the unfolding convergence between veterinary science and human medicine, and how veterinary-minded medical experts discover and track diseases that spread across species. "Spillover" is less public health warning than ecological affirmation: these crossovers force us to uphold "the old Darwinian truth (the darkest of his truths, well known and persistently forgotten) that humanity is a kind of animal" - with a shared fate on the planet. "People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses," Quammen writes. "We're all in this together." Much of the book details Quammen's prodigious, globe-trotting adventures with microbe hunters in the field, trapping bats in southern China and hysterical monkeys in Bangladesh. Over the course of some 500 pages, Quammen takes us to Australia, where a virus called Hendra has spilled over from bats into horses and from there into people, and to central Africa, where he learns of mass deaths of gorillas potentially connected to a spillover of Ebola virus. In Borneo, he shares a biryani lunch with Balbir Singh, an epidemiologist who investigates the spread of monkey malaria into people. In China, he feasts on the stinky durian fruit ("tastes like vanilla custard and smells like the underwear of someone you don't want to know") and helps trap local bats, which in 2003 infected civet cats and then people with the virus that causes SARS. In upstate New York, he helps capture the white-footed mice that harbor the agent that causes Lyme disease. In Cameroon, he traces the putative path of H.I.V.-1, the principal form of the virus, and its first human victims. A vivid and erudite nature writer, Quammen is even better as a cheeky and incisive chronicler of the scientific method. He describes a scientist's archive of dried blood samples as "DNA jerky," a genetic sequence as a "choking expletive" and protective gear for fieldwork as "gleaming white footie pajamas." His leisurely, discursive style, which worked so well in his books on biogeography and top predators, can feel a bit incongruous given the urgency of his topic, though. Dramatic narrations of outbreaks and scientific investigations - replete with regularly scheduled cliffhangers - turn out to be inconclusive, debunked or tangential to the central themes of the book. Whole paragraphs are taken up with lists of minutiae, like one that enumerates the gear he takes on a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, including "seven stackable white plastic chairs" and "medical gloves." Quammen doesn't mind repeating himself (he admits it outright, and yes, repeatedly) and can't resist detours into side obsessions, like taxonomy. But even when his writing is not entirely germane, it's almost always fun and morbidly entertaining. In one of the most powerful passages in the book, Quammen describes a population boom of tent caterpillars that occurred in his town in western Montana in 1993. The caterpillars had "materialized like a plague out of Exodus," he writes. "On those cool June nights, we could stand beneath a great tree and still hear the gentle crackle, like distant brush fire, of their excrement cascading down through the leaves." Then, as abruptly as they'd appeared, they vanished. He later learns that it was a pathogenic virus that led to the tent caterpillars' collapse. Are we humans, he wonders, due for the same fate? Like the tent caterpillars, we too are "grotesquely abundant" on the planet, and our numbers continue to rise. "We are an outbreak," he writes, and prime fodder for a deadly, populationcrashing pandemic, the "Next Big One" (or "N.B.O." in Quammen's parlance). Scary stuff. And yet, while it's true that every time an animal microbe finds its way into a human it gets another opportunity to mutate and adapt to the human body, it's also true that most of the spillover microbes described here remain firmly tethered to their host animals, or have only limited abilities to spread between humans. And as Quammen points out, pathogens can't just rampage unconstrained. To survive, they must balance their disease-causing activities inside the body with their need for that same body to carry them into their next victim, whether it's by coughing, having sex or contaminating the drinking water. Get that balance between transmission and virulence wrong, and even the most infectious micro-organism will die out, never to be heard from again. That's why Ebola is limited in its pandemic potential. So was SARS, which wreaked its havoc by exploiting air travel, before it too burned itself out. There's a lot more that could be said on this topic, but Quammen seems reluctant to bog down his exuberant storytelling with too much of that pointy-headed technical stuff. "Mathematics to me is like a language I don't speak though I admire its literature in translation," he writes. He often delves into an important aspect of the relevant science, but after impressing us with its technical complexity, he backs off for a side story or a biographical sketch, ending with something along the lines of "nobody really knows" or "it's complicated," as if he would rather dazzle us with the difficulty of the science than help us comprehend it. He practically apologizes for having to describe fundamental concepts like the basic reproduction rate, or "R0" (the number of new infections caused by an initial case), critical community size (the number of susceptible individuals required to sustain transmission of an infectious disease) and the high mutation rate of RNA viruses. C'mon. Kate Winslet explained R0 in Steven Soderbergh's film "Contagion" in 20 seconds. As "Spillover" so richly details, we're talking about the potential end of the human race here. We can take it. Quammen's globe-trotting adventures include trapping bats in China and hysterical monkeys in Bangladesh. Sonia Shah is a science writer and the author of "The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 21, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Exemplary science writer Quammen schools us in the fascinating if alarming facts about zoonotic diseases, animal infections that sicken humans, such as rabies, Ebola, influenza, and West Nile. Zoonoses can escalate rapidly into global pandemics when human-to-human transmission occurs, and Quammen wants us to understand disease dynamics and exactly what's at stake. Drawing on the truly dramatic history of virology, he profiles brave and stubborn viral sleuths and recounts his own hair-raising field adventures, including helping capture large fruit bats in Bangladesh. Along the way, Quammen explains how devilishly difficult it is to trace the origins of a zoonosis and explicates the hidden process by which pathogens spill over from their respective reservoir hosts (water fowl, mosquitoes, pigs, bats, monkeys) and infect humans. We contract Lyme disease after it's spread by black-legged ticks and white-footed mice, not white-tailed deer as commonly believed. The SARS epidemic involves China's wild flavor trend and the eating of civets. Quammen's revelatory, far-reaching investigation into AIDS begins in 1908 with a bloody encounter between a hunter and a chimpanzee in Cameroon. Zoonotic diseases are now on the rise due to our increasing population, deforestation, fragmented ecosystems, and factory farming. Quammen spent six years on this vital, in-depth tour de force in the hope that knowledge will engender preparedness. An essential work.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Quammen (The Song of the Dodo) is a masterful writer who adroitly blends science and journalism, speculation and fact, as well as horror and humor in his latest tour de force. He traverses the globe exploring cases in which animal-borne diseases somehow jump to humans, often with devastating consequences. This cross-species transmission of disease--the "spillover" of the book's title--has happened for the 200,000 years modern humans have been present on the earth, but the frequency and consequences of such events have been increasing dramatically in recent years. According to Quammen, diseases of this sort are responsible for "the death of more than 29 million people since 1981." And, as he explains so well, these diseases "represent the unintended results of things we are doing." Environmental destruction, burgeoning human populations, increased mobility, and extremely different patterns of food production are all part of his story. Quammen is adept at describing the epidemiology, anthropology, and molecular biology of SARS, AIDS, Ebola, and a host of other frightening maladies. His profiles of researchers, both in the lab and in the field, are every bit as compelling as are his descriptions of those unlucky enough to catch one of these dreadful diseases. This is a frightening but critically important book for anyone interested in learning about the prospects of the world's next major pandemic. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Zoonoses, most simply described as diseases transmitted from animals to humans, include exotic horrors like Ebola and far more common ailments such as influenza, HIV, and Lyme disease. Vividly describing the work of field biologists and laboratory scientists, Quammen (The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution) takes readers on a series of journeys, including tracking gorillas in the jungles of Gabon and catching bats on the roof of a Bangladeshi warehouse. The researchers he interviews note that as human populations continue to grow, they will inevitably move into habitats with unfamiliar, dangerous microorganisms, and as international travel becomes more popular and more efficient, those microorganisms can be transmitted faster and farther than ever before. -VERDICT For a shorter, more humorous consideration of some of the same issues (and diseases), consider The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases That Jump from Animals to Humans by David Waltner-Toews. Quammen's is a compelling and quietly alarming book; recommended for readers interested in biology, medicine, or veterinary science. [See Prepub Alert, 4/16/12.]-Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Nature writer and intrepid traveler Quammen (The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, 2006, etc.) sums up in one absorbing volume what we know about some of the world's scariest scourges: Ebola, AIDS, pandemic influenza--and what we can do to thwart the "NBO," the Next Big One. The author discusses zoonoses, infectious diseases that originate in animals and spread to humans. The technical term is "spillover." It's likely that all infections began as spillovers. Some, like Ebola and lesser-known viral diseases (Nipah, Hendra, Marburg), are highly transmissible and virulent, but so far have been limited to sporadic outbreaks. They persist because they are endemic in a reservoir population through a process of mutual adaptation. Finding that reservoir holds the key to control and prevention and gives Quammen's accounts the thrill of the chase and the derring-do of field research in rain forests and jungles and even teeming Asian cities where monkeys run wild. The author chronicles his travels around the world, including a stop in a bat cave in Uganda with scientists who found evidence that bats were the source of Marburg and other zoonoses, but not AIDS. Quammen's AIDS narrative traces the origin of HIV to chimpanzee-human transmission around 1908, probably through blood-borne transmission involved in the killing of the animal for food. Over the decades, with changing sexual mores, an ever-increasing world population and global travel, the stage was set for a takeoff. Quammen concludes with a timely discussion of bird flu, which has yet to achieve human-to-human transmission but, thanks to the rapid mutation rate and gene exchanges typical of RNA viruses, could be the NBO. You can't predict, say the experts; what you can do is be alert, establish worldwide field stations to monitor and test and take precautions. A wonderful, eye-opening account of humans versus disease that deserves to share the shelf with such classics as Microbe Hunters and Rats, Lice and History.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
