Since the early 20th century, scientific pioneers have pushed for ecological and mathematical understandings of disease: specifically, the dynamics within a population that explain how outbreaks begin and end, and the possibility of disease transmission. Quammen uses his study of malaria to examine the history of health threats and scientific responses to them. Quammen also highlights the dangers of infectious disease work in his discussion of Ebola. Years of patient research eventually suggest that the virus routinely lives in bats, although not conclusively. Ebola’s source turns out to be far more elusive than Hendra’s, as its outbreaks are relatively brief and often occur in remote villages. Ebola routinely sickens primates, and exposure to primates is what tends to infect humans. Many of Quammen’s protagonists are scientists, virologists, or veterinarians with a background in infectious disease and public health, and his Hendra narrative includes a scientist who identified the reservoir so that outbreaks could be understood, if not contained.Įbola takes Quammen to Africa, where he meets both naturalists and doctors. Hendra virus lives routinely in its “reservoir host” of bats, but when it enters horses, the virus multiplies easily and can spread to people.
Quammen opens his narrative with a mysterious virus, Hendra, that sickened horses and a few people in Australia in 1994. He routinely intersperses these health mysteries with accounts of his own travels and personal meetings with experts so that he can meet zoonotic diseases in their environments, with the lurking threat that one will cause a pandemic.
Quammen’s main subject is zoonotic disease: diseases that humans acquire from animals. In Spillover, Quammen’s narrative alternates between the outbreak and eventual discovery of recent emerging diseases, and the scientific discoveries of the past that made such advancements possible.
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