Best-seller ‘Spillover’ intersects with research

“Spillover” author David Quammen and a Chinese scientist search a bat cave for the coronavirus that causes SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. (Photo courtesy of D. Quammen)

PULLMAN, Wash. – Award-winning science journalist David Quammen and researchers at Washington State University’s Paul G. Allen School for Global Animal Health share a common interest: Zoonoses, or diseases that spread between animals and humans.

 

The difference is that Quammen writes about them – as in his recent New York Times best-selling book, “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic” (W.W. Norton & Co.) – while WSU researchers investigate the microbes that cause them.

 

For instance, in “Spillover,” Quammen explores how the deadly Nipah virus has resulted in a dozen outbreaks in South Asia since it jumped from fruit bats to pigs to humans in Malaysia in 1999. Meanwhile, at WSU, researcher Hector Aquilar-Carreno studies an inactivated form of Nipah, hoping his discoveries will blunt the threat of a disease known to inflict horrific damage to the body and brain.

 

Readers of “Spillover” are forewarned: Hold on to your Indiana Jones hat. Part scientific detection, part adventure travelogue, Quammen’s book does more than investigate disturbing diseases that have spilled over from animals to humans.

 

It carries readers to places where spills originated, including bat caves, swamps, rain forests and crowded streets where animals are sold for meat. Closer to home, the author explores the grassy, wooded landscapes of Connecticut where Lyme disease was first identified.
 
“Zoonotic pathogens can hide,” he states. “That’s what makes them so interesting, so complicated and so problematic.”

Lyme disease, Ebola, West Nile, influenza – zoonotic diseases slip in and out of headlines but the microbes that cause them persist, sometimes quietly until something happens that allows them to erupt into humanity, writes Quammen. Changes in land use and farming practices, deforestation and wild animal trafficking all contribute, as does modern transportation, he says.

 

In a recent telephone interview from his home in Montana, Quammen said if humans want to understand what drives emerging infectious diseases, then we need to understand the animals from where the microbes emerge.
 

This makes the role of veterinary specialists increasingly important, he said.

 

“As the world’s human population surges past the 7 billion mark, increasingly we’re encroaching on natural animal habitats and disrupting the ecological order of things,” he said. “This means that we’re bringing animal pathogens closer to human populations than ever. It only makes sense that scientists working on the front lines include experts in animal health and biology.”

“Spillover” is less about the threat of future pandemics and more an affirmation of our planet’s ecological interconnectedness, said Quammen. And yet he weaves a cautionary warning of how the consequences of this human-animal tango are increasingly impacting public health and economies.

Guy Palmer, director of WSU’s Allen School. (Photo by Linda Weiford, WSU News)

Take the Nipah virus, for example. In Malaysia’s debut outbreak, deforestation forced exotic fruit bats to neighboring farms where their virus-infected urine, saliva and droppings landed in animal feed. The pigs got infected. Then, humans in close contact with the pigs got sick – some slipping into comas and dying.

 

From an economic perspective, “more than a million pigs were culled to stop the infection from spreading. It was an enormous blow to the country’s pig farmers,” Quammen said.

 

In an office beneath two floors of orderly research labs at WSU’s Allen Center for Global Animal Health, director and Regents professor Guy Palmer weighed in on Quammen’s book.

 

“He offers readers a view that’s exciting, but rational, of zoonotic diseases and the challenges they pose to science,” said Palmer. “His most important message is that disease emergence is a natural occurrence of interactions with multiple species, the environment and evolution. There’s nothing artificial about it.”

 

There’s no question, zoonotic diseases are scary stuff. Readers of “Spillover” may be tempted to don protective garb aboard crowded planes and inside bat caves.

 

“There’s no need to think that AIDS will be unique as a recent global disaster emerging from animals,” Quammen writes.

 

Even so, as he and Palmer point out, considering how often spillovers occur on the planet, scientists from a multitude of disciplines have done a remarkable job of controlling them – medical doctors, virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists and, yes, veterinary specialists.
 
“Will there be another infectious disease that has a major impact on public health? Absolutely,” said Palmer. “Will it be catastrophic in terms of human deaths? We don’t know. But chances are we’ll have a hand in reducing its ability to inflict harm – upon people and animals alike.”