The current epidemic of avian influenza has killed over 58 million birds in the U.S. Klebher Vasquez/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images It's also the elegantly told tale of a quest, through time and landscape, for a new understanding of how our world works-and how we can survive within it.Wild birds like pelicans and ducks are getting infected with – and dying from – a new strain of avian influenza and have spread it to farm animals around the world. The result is more than a clarion work of reportage. And it asks questions more urgent now than ever before: From what innocent creature, in what remote landscape, will the Next Big One emerge? Are pandemics independent misfortunes, or linked? Are they merely happening to us, or are we somehow causing them? What can be done? Quammen traces the origins of Ebola, Marburg, SARS, avian influenza, Lyme disease, and other bizarre cases of spillover, including the grim, unexpected story of how AIDS began from a single Cameroonian chimpanzee. Spillover delivers the science, the history, the mystery, and the human anguish of disease outbreaks as gripping drama. It's also the elegantly told tale of a quest, through time and landscape, for a new understanding of how our world works-and how we can survive within it.
He found surprises in the latest research, alarm among public health officials, and deep concern in the eyes of researchers. He interviewed survivors and gathered stories of the dead. For five years he followed scientists to a rooftop in Bangladesh, a forest in the Congo, a Chinese rat farm, and a suburban woodland in New York, and through high-biosecurity laboratories. Prior to the emergence of our latest health crisis, renowned science writer David Quammen was traveling the globe to better understand spillover's devastating potential. This phenomenon-in which a new pathogen comes to humans from wildlife-is known as spillover, and it may not be long before it happens again.
The source of the previously unknown virus? Bats. In 2020, the novel coronavirus gripped the world in a global pandemic and led to the death of hundreds of thousands.
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