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danstaines 's review for:
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
by David Quammen
I came to this book on via the frequently excellent NPR radio programme “Radio Lab”, which made use of David Quammen’s writings on the origins of HIV, and haven’t been disappointed. “Spillover” is engaging yet thorough, covering a vast range of different material on how bacteria, viruses and other disease-causing organisms can make the leap from animal to human hosts, often with devastating results. The introductory section on the Hendra horse virus is as gripping as any thriller, and I personally found the section on the emergence of P. knowlesi as a human pathogen fascinating.
Quammen’s style is informal to the point of flippancy (which manages to stay just on the right side of irritating), but he manages to tackle some fairly technical topics with aplomb, covering genomic analysis and phylogeny to mathematical models of disease. My only quibble here was his introduction of Anderson & May’s model of host-parasite interactions with a formula that only seemed to be there to point at as some particularly scary entity that you shouldn’t worry about not understanding. This seems somewhat perverse - leaving out formulae is just fine for a general audience, but if you introduce one, its seems counterproductive not to at least explain what the terms are and how they relate to one another so the reader can see how this fits with the narrative. Quammen also spends a lot of time introducing the professionals involved in tracking the spread of the zoonoses he discusses - generally one can only welcome these as showing scientists and medics as something more than movie stereotypes, though his tendency to give little two sentence pen portraits of the demeanour and clothing of the different individuals wears thin on occasion.
My only major disappointment was the twenty pages taken for a completely speculative and rather spurious imagining of the first individuals involved in HIV’s “spillover” from chimpanzee to human. His extensive description of the lives of the “Cut Hunter” and the “Navigator” sits rather oddly with the rest of the book, which takes a much more rigorous and detailed approach to its subject, even going so far as to gently chide Richard Preston’s exaggerated description of the symptoms of Ebola in his best-seller “The Hot Zone”. Whilst a little speculation is fine to spur the imagination, this section felt as if it had been pasted in from another book entirely..
However, much of my criticisms is nit-picking on my part, and shouldn’t dissuade you from reading this wholly excellent piece of science journalism.
Quammen’s style is informal to the point of flippancy (which manages to stay just on the right side of irritating), but he manages to tackle some fairly technical topics with aplomb, covering genomic analysis and phylogeny to mathematical models of disease. My only quibble here was his introduction of Anderson & May’s model of host-parasite interactions with a formula that only seemed to be there to point at as some particularly scary entity that you shouldn’t worry about not understanding. This seems somewhat perverse - leaving out formulae is just fine for a general audience, but if you introduce one, its seems counterproductive not to at least explain what the terms are and how they relate to one another so the reader can see how this fits with the narrative. Quammen also spends a lot of time introducing the professionals involved in tracking the spread of the zoonoses he discusses - generally one can only welcome these as showing scientists and medics as something more than movie stereotypes, though his tendency to give little two sentence pen portraits of the demeanour and clothing of the different individuals wears thin on occasion.
My only major disappointment was the twenty pages taken for a completely speculative and rather spurious imagining of the first individuals involved in HIV’s “spillover” from chimpanzee to human. His extensive description of the lives of the “Cut Hunter” and the “Navigator” sits rather oddly with the rest of the book, which takes a much more rigorous and detailed approach to its subject, even going so far as to gently chide Richard Preston’s exaggerated description of the symptoms of Ebola in his best-seller “The Hot Zone”. Whilst a little speculation is fine to spur the imagination, this section felt as if it had been pasted in from another book entirely..
However, much of my criticisms is nit-picking on my part, and shouldn’t dissuade you from reading this wholly excellent piece of science journalism.