animal infections and the next human pandemic

Every species of wild animal living in our diverse ecosystems and our remnants of ecosystems carries viruses. QUAMMEN: Well, it happens by human contact with wild animals. Why does wild-animal-to-human transmission happen? How does it happen? SIMON: We've seen this happen, obviously, in - over the past generation - AIDS, West Nile fever, SARS, Ebola. That was all what sort of a composite of the potential events that scientists were telling me 10 years ago when I was researching my book. The idea that a new virus, a coronavirus, might come to us from a wild animal, probably a bat, maybe in a wet market, oh, for instance, in China, none of that was surprising. I was surprised by how unprepared we were. Good to be with you in this weird and difficult time. David, thanks so much for being with us.ĭAVID QUAMMEN: Thank you, Scott. David Quammen warned about exactly such a potential outbreak in his 2012 book 'Spillover: Animal Infections And The Next Human Pandemic.' David Quammen joins us now from his home in Bozeman, Mont. The transcript for the episode is at novel coronavirus originated in Wuhan, China, where it's thought to have jumped from wild animals to humans maybe in open-air markets. I’m reposting it because of its relevance to what’s going on today. I interviewed David Quammen about his book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic back in 2012. And once in the human population, the virus evolved to become potentially dangerous and sometimes deadly. More than one intermediate animal species could also have been involved in that transmission. In the second, a relatively harmless version of the virus jumped from bats to another animal and then to humans. In the first, the virus became pathogenic in a nonhuman animal and then jumped to humans.

Two possibilities emerged from that analysis. Research published March 17, 2020, in the journal Nature Medicine looked at the genome of the virus. It’s the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans. We’re now living in that situation with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the condition COVID-19. Odds are that the killer pathogen-most likely a virus-will spill over into humans from a nonhuman animal.” The bug that’s responsible will be strange, unfamiliar, but it won’t come from outer space. will be caused by a new disease-new to humans, anyway.

On his Web site back then, he wrote, “The next big and murderous human pandemic. In 2012 David Quammen published the book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. Welcome to another in our series of coronavirus episodes of Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on March 18, 2020.

Animal infections and the next human pandemic