Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic QUOTES

21 " An amplifier host is a creature in which a virus or other pathogen replicates—and from which it spews—with extraordinary abundance. Some aspect of the host’s physiology, or its immune system, or its particular history of interaction with the bug, or who knows what, accounts for this especially hospitable role. "

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

22 " Horses aren’t native to Australia. They are exotic, first brought there by European settlers barely more than two centuries ago. Hendra is probably an old virus, according to the runic evidence of its genome, as read by molecular evolutionists. "

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

23 " If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city—more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions—it might have escaped containment and burned through a "

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

24 " problem peaked in 1952 with an outbreak that killed more than three thousand victims, many of them children, and left twenty-one thousand at least partially paralyzed. Soon afterward, vaccines developed by Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, and a virologist named Hilary Koprowski (about whose controversial career, more later) came into wide use, eventually eliminating poliomyelitis throughout most of the world. In 1988, WHO and several partner institutions "

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

25 " Their most telling improvement involved a fundamental parameter: population size of the hosts. "

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

26 " One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills—maybe even the cough—precede the major discharge of virus toward other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS cases to be recognized, hospitalized, and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren’t emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode—not just lucky but salvational. "

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

27 " The first rule of a successful parasite? Myxoma’s success in Australia suggests something different from that nugget of conventional wisdom I mentioned above. It’s not Don’t kill your host. It’s Don’t burn your bridges until after you’ve crossed them. "

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

28 " One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills—maybe even the cough—precede the major discharge of virus toward other people. "

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

29 " When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death. "

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

30 " The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren’t emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode— "

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

31 " Influenza is caused by three types of viruses, of which the most worrisome and widespread is influenza A. Viruses of that type all share certain genetic traits: a single-stranded RNA genome, which is partitioned into eight segments, which serve as templates for eleven different proteins. In other words, they have eight discrete stretches of RNA coding, linked together like eight railroad cars, with eleven different deliverable cargoes. The eleven deliverables are the molecules that comprise the structure and functional machinery of the virus. They are what the genes make. Two of those molecules become spiky protuberances from the outer surface of the viral envelope: hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Those two, recognizable by an immune system, and crucial for penetrating and exiting cells of a host, give the various subtypes of influenza A their definitive labels: H5N1, H1N1, and so on. The term “H5N1” indicates a virus featuring subtype 5 of the hemagglutinin protein combined with subtype 1 of the neuraminidase protein. Sixteen different kinds of hemagglutinin, plus nine kinds of neuraminidase, have been detected in the natural world. Hemagglutinin is the key that unlocks a cell membrane so that the virus can get in, and neuraminidase is the key for getting back out. Okay so far? Having absorbed this simple paragraph, you understand more about influenza than 99.9 percent of the people on Earth. Pat yourself on the back and get a flu shot in November. At "

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

32 " 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. "

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

33 " With influenza and many other diseases the order is reversed, high infectivity preceding symptoms by a matter of days. A perverse pattern: the danger, then the warning. That probably helped account for the scale of worldwide misery and death during the 1918–1919 influenza: high infectivity among cases before they experienced the most obvious and debilitating stages of illness. "

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

34 " a mutation in that strain might have made it especially aggressive, efficient, transmissible, and fierce. "

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

35 " It wasn’t a petty squabble. It was a big squabble, in which pettiness played no small part. "

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

36 " The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast—above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill—has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now. "

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

37 " To study its effect on a living, struggling human body, he meant. To do that, you would need the right combination of hospital facilities, BSL-4 facilities, dedicated and expert professionals, and circumstances. You couldn’t do it during the next outbreak at a mission clinic in an African village. You would need to bring Ebola virus into captivity—into a research situation, under highly controlled scrutiny—and not just in the form of frozen samples. You would need to study a raging infection inside somebody’s body. That isn’t easy to arrange. He added: “We haven’t had an Ebola patient yet in the US.” But for everything that happens, there is a first time. "

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

38 " Humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health. "

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

39 " not just Machupo but also Marburg (1967), Lassa (1969), Ebola (1976, with Karl Johnson again prominently involved), HIV-1 (inferred in 1981, first isolated in 1983), HIV-2 (1986), Sin Nombre (1993), Hendra (1994), avian flu (1997), Nipah (1998), West Nile (1999), SARS (2003), and the much feared but anticlimactic swine flu of 2009. "

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

40 " weighing only five grams (about the same as two dimes), "

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