Also consider the ABC TV movie "Fatal Contact" Bird Flu in America" (2005) by David Pearce.
Thursday, October 23, 2014
David Quammen's "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic" follows on Garret's book in the 90s
Author: David Quammen
Title: "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human
Pandemic"
Publication: W.W. Norton. 2012, ISBN 978-0-393-06680-7, 588
pages, indexed, 9 long chapters, 115 short sections.
Amazon link here.
Quammen, well known for non-fiction for National Geographic,
has provided a detailed historical examination of almost all major infectious
disease capable of causing pandemics.
One of the most obvious reactions is the variability of the
way infectious disease works and plays out.
Epidemiology principles are similar for viruses, bacteria, fungi or
protists. Many but not all infectious
agents have reservoirs in animal hosts, and some are brought to humans by
insects. Others arrive at the human body through cultural practices in hunting
and preparing food, or sometimes having poultry or animals in close proximity to
households. Diseases spread in a variety
of ways, but the three main patterns are airborne, direct blood or body fluid
contact on any surface or in extremely close contact, and sexual contact or
other very deep contact such as with intravenous needles.
Quammen discusses many agents that are relatively obscure,
starting with Hendra in horses in Australia. But in time he gets to the
important and well known epidemics. He
gives a detailed history of SARS, in Singapore and southeast Asia, where
contact tracing did get it under control.
It isn’t long before he gets into the mathematics of epidemiology, with
a touch of differential equations.
In chapter 6, he discusses how viral infections work and why
RNA viruses mutate more rapidly than DNA viruses. Among RNA viruses, retroviruses behave very
differently because of the use of reverse transcriptase and the use of the
nucleus of the cell to create more copies.
The book predates the current outbreak of Ebola in West
Africa, and the recent cases in the United States (in Dallas, and as of today,
New York City). The author gives two
detailed case histories of Marburg (Europeans who explored caves in Uganda
frequented by bats) one of whom survived only to lose her hair, to have it grow
back gray afterwards.
There has been controversy in the media about speculation as
to whether Ebola could become more contagious (it doesn’t naturally go to the
respiratory tract), or whether the incubation period is longer than supposed,
and maybe even asymptotically indefinite. I see that Quammen has a new short
book “Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus”, published Oct.
20, 2014, which I have just ordered. (It’s
on Kindle, too.)
But the most interesting part of the book is the history of
HIV (“The Chimp and the River”), which splits into the history of several
viruses. There was a virus called
HTLV-1, which causes leukemia, known before HTLV-III which became called
HIV. The author traces the original
infection of man by primates in Africa, in the area known as the Congo, back in
1908. The virus slowly percolated,
causing immune dysfunction that would not be noticed at first in a society with
so many diseases. But when hypodermics
were introduced (and reused because of cost), infection probably increased
rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s. Quammen
maintains that infection was probably propagated then my mostly heterosexual
sex. Although transmission from women to
men was not as efficient as from men to women (or to other men in anal
intercourse), it was probably sufficient to sustain the epidemic (according to
his calculus homework, anyway) in Africa.
I’ve often related the scary history of the politics of AIDS
in Texas in the early 1980s, especially before HIV was identified and a test
could be developed. Some members of the
religious right (the “Dallas Doctors Against AIDS”) tried to introduce some
very draconian anti-gay legislation in 1983, claiming that gay men, as a closed
group practicing anal intercourse, “amplified” the presence of the (then)
putative virus to the point that I might mutate and threaten the general
population. Quammen’s book shows that
the history of viruses, especially slow viruses like HIV, is so pervasive that
this idea is just nonsense.
Quammen’s penultimate chapter does deal with influenza,
particular swine and bird flu, and the issue of whether avian influenza would
ever become efficiently transmitted from human to human.
Quammen’s verbal description of life in Africa is often
quite detailed and colorful.
The book is a logical sequel to Laurie Garrett's "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance" (1995, Penguin) and even Robert Preston's "The Hot Zone" (1994).
Also consider the ABC TV movie "Fatal Contact" Bird Flu in America" (2005) by David Pearce.
Also consider the ABC TV movie "Fatal Contact" Bird Flu in America" (2005) by David Pearce.
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