Take a photo of a barcode or cover
colleen_parks 's review for:
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
by David Quammen
Fantastic book. This was my 2nd read and it holds up amazingly well. And there's so much information that it barely felt like a reread. The SARS CoV section really stood out this time (obviously, with covid-19 and all). Highly recommend reading this.
First review.
I really enjoyed this. It's a well-told account of recent outbreaks of zoonotic viruses (viruses transmitted to humans from other animals, e.g., Ebola) and the scientific progress that's been made recently to understand them. This is much more informative and less sensational than the Hot Zone--if you read that as a thriller, you owe it to yourself to read this much more accurate account of spillovers. This was written before the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, so the info on Ebola is probably already a little old.
My only quibble with the book is the editing. The book has a story structure, so we go back and forth between characters, places, and times which keeps things moving along. It reads like a thriller in some parts (similar to the Hot Zone). But it gets weighed down in other parts; at 400 pages in I was sick of getting the back stories of the scientists making the important new discoveries and I was mystified at the fictional story he provides of the first human case of HIV (it's several pages). Nonetheless, I found it engrossing and recommend it.
There's also an interesting Frontline piece on why it took so long to get the 2014 Ebola outbreak under control (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/outbreak/).
First review.
I really enjoyed this. It's a well-told account of recent outbreaks of zoonotic viruses (viruses transmitted to humans from other animals, e.g., Ebola) and the scientific progress that's been made recently to understand them. This is much more informative and less sensational than the Hot Zone--if you read that as a thriller, you owe it to yourself to read this much more accurate account of spillovers. This was written before the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, so the info on Ebola is probably already a little old.
My only quibble with the book is the editing. The book has a story structure, so we go back and forth between characters, places, and times which keeps things moving along. It reads like a thriller in some parts (similar to the Hot Zone). But it gets weighed down in other parts; at 400 pages in I was sick of getting the back stories of the scientists making the important new discoveries and I was mystified at the fictional story he provides of the first human case of HIV (it's several pages). Nonetheless, I found it engrossing and recommend it.
There's also an interesting Frontline piece on why it took so long to get the 2014 Ebola outbreak under control (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/outbreak/).