That linkage-dead people, dead gorillas, Ebola raging-led me to start asking about where the virus would abide when it’s not killing off these populations. I knew from the scientific literature that humans as well as gorillas and chimps are susceptible to Ebola. That was the starting point for me, that riveting image. One of the guys told me that when the disease hit their village, he and his friend had seen a pile of 13 dead gorillas in the nearby forest. Thirty-one people had gotten sick, and 21 had died. We were walking through a stretch of forest in Gabon, and a couple of the guys on his crew were from a village that suffered an Ebola outbreak years earlier. I’ve heard that this book began 12 years ago when you were trekking with biologist Michael Fay on his Central African transect. Bruce Barcott spoke with Quammen as the Montana-based writer prepared for a trip to India. Spillover may do the same for a slew of new concepts: reservoir hosts, amplifier species, superspreaders, and wild flavor. Dodo turned island biogeography into mainstream fare. It’s a bruiser of a book, big and shocking and gripping as hell. His new book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, tracks the increasingly common jump that killer viruses like HIV, SARS, West Nile, and Ebola make from wild animals to humans. After hooking a generation of Outside readers with his Natural Acts column, David Quammen turned evolution and extinction into page-turning plot points in The Song of the Dodo.
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