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Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic QUOTES

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic QUOTES

1 " Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

2 " Each outbreak, by this view, represents a local event primarily explicable by a larger cause—the arrival of the wave. The main proponent of the wave idea is Peter D. Walsh, an American ecologist who has worked often in Central Africa and specializes in mathematical theory about ecological facts. “I think it’s spreading from host to host in a reservoir host, "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

3 " Sir Peter Medawar, an eminent British biologist who received a Nobel Prize the same year as Macfarlane Burnet, defined a virus as “a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

4 " disappointment, in science, is sometimes a gateway to insight. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

5 " People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We’re all in this together. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

6 " When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

7 " Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918–1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of domesticated animals (a duck in southern China, a sow in Iowa?) emerged to kill as many as 50 million people before receding into obscurity. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

8 " Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims (as Hendra does) or a few hundred (Ebola) in this place or that, and then disappearing for years. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

9 " Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut’s infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early novel Cat’s Cradle. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

10 " Identifying the new virus was only step one in solving the immediate mystery of Hendra, let alone understanding the disease in a wider context. Step two would involve tracking that virus to its hiding place. Where did it exist when it wasn’t killing horses and people? Step three would entail asking a further cluster of questions: How did the virus emerge from its secret refuge, and why here, and why now? "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

11 " In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

12 " increases of the infectivity rate may lead to large epidemics.” This quiet warning has echoed loudly ever since. It’s a cardinal truth, over which public health officials obsess each year during influenza season. Another implication was that epidemics don’t end because all the susceptible individuals are either dead or recovered. They end because susceptible individuals are no longer sufficiently dense within the population. W. H. Hamer had said so in 1906, remember? Ross had made the same point in 1916. But the paper by Kermack and McKendrick turned it into a working principle of mathematical epidemiology. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

13 " The main problem facing a parasite over the long term, Burnet noted, is the issue of transmission: how to spread its offspring from one individual host to another. Various methods and traits have developed toward that simple end, ranging from massive replication, airborne dispersal, environmentally resistant life-history stages (like the small form of C. burnetii), direct transfer in blood and other bodily fluids, behavioral influence on the host (as exerted by the rabies virus, for instance, causing infected animals to bite), passage through intermediate or amplifier hosts, and the use of insect and arachnid vectors as means of transportation and injection. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

14 " This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great lengths of time, to produce structures, tactics, and transformations of majestic intricacy. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

15 " Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial. They stand as reminders that not every bad, stubborn, new bug is a virus. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

16 " Numbers can be an important aspect of understanding infectious disease. Take measles. At first glance, it might seem nonmathematical. It’s caused by a paramyxovirus "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

17 " It comes and it goes. But epidemiologists have recognized that, with measles virus, as with other pathogens, there’s a critical minimum size of the host population, below which it can’t persist indefinitely as an endemic, circulating infection. This is known as the critical community size (CCS), an important parameter in disease dynamics. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

18 " Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern—rising to a high case count, fading away, rising again after a certain interval "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

19 " Continuation of the outbreak depended on the likelihood of encounters between people who were infectious and people who could be infected. This idea became known as the “mass action principle.” It was all about math. The same year, 1906, a Scottish physician named John Brownlee proposed an alternate view, contrary to Hamer’s. Brownlee worked as a clinician and hospital administrator "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

20 " R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemic. It came from George MacDonald. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic