Hendra virus lives routinely in its “reservoir host” of bats, but when it enters horses, the virus multiplies easily and can spread to people. Quammen opens his narrative with a mysterious virus, Hendra, that sickened horses and a few people in Australia in 1994. He routinely intersperses these health mysteries with accounts of his own travels and personal meetings with experts so that he can meet zoonotic diseases in their environments, with the lurking threat that one will cause a pandemic. Quammen’s main subject is zoonotic disease: diseases that humans acquire from animals. In Spillover, Quammen’s narrative alternates between the outbreak and eventual discovery of recent emerging diseases, and the scientific discoveries of the past that made such advancements possible.
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