Download Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic PDF

Rating: (202 reviews) Author: David Quammen ISBN : 9780393346619 New from $10.04 Format: PDF

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“Science writing as detective story at its best.” —Jennifer Ouellette, Scientific American

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Scientific American Best Book of the Year, and a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Ebola, SARS, Hendra, AIDS, and countless other deadly viruses all have one thing in common: the bugs that transmit these diseases all originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. In this gripping account, David Quammen takes the reader along on this astonishing quest to learn how, where from, and why these diseases emerge and asks the terrifying question: What might the next big one be?

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
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• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (September 9, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393346617
• ISBN-13: 978-0393346619
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Download Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic PDF

The jargon of diseases can be boring, tedious. There are a lot of acronyms and big words. Worse, we often don't know as much as we'd like -- and usually we aren't very certain of what we do know. Telling a good story given those constraints is hard. But Spillover repeatedly provides gripping stories that still impart a good understanding of what we know about zoonotic (animal-origin) diseases. Even better, the author ties disparate stories together to describe some general trend and possible causes for seemingly new infectious diseases. But I don't want to summarize the conclusions: I want you to go read it. You won't be bored and you'll learn a lot (most definitely even if you've read books like The Hot Zone or the Coming Plague).

Some other notes:
* The author has a less human-centric attitude and a lot of sympathy for the animals, like horses or apes, who sometimes are actually the first animal a disease spills over into only to later infect humans.
* He has a wry tone. When noting the euthanasia of a large number of monkeys (even ones likely not infected with a disease), he notes no humans were euthanized despite equal exposure.
* He provides full references. Some of those papers are quite readable by a non-expert such as this review ([...]) of the importance of bats as reservoirs for infectious diseases.
* The stories are often told from the perspective of the scientists trying to figure out what the heck is really going on. The author is also not afraid to explain when scientists just don't know -- and how they might figure it out more.
* The author went on several field collections where he might have been exposed to a disease being investigated.