Spillover was originally released in 2013, but it's been pushed back into mainstream attention due to its relevance to the ongoing global pandemic. Spillover details the history of zoonotic diseases, diseases that pass from animals to humans and have the potential to cause outbreaks in the human population. In a best case scenario a zoonosis doesn't cause disease in the population, or reaches a deadend, infectecting a handful of people and then not making it any further; like Henra which was deadly but limited in scope. In a worst case scenario we get a zoonosis like COVID-19, and the whole world falls apart.

What is interesting about reading this book in the year 2021, is being able to see the clear relevance of the warnings and predictions littered about the book. I have had the (mis)fortune of living through the Next Big One as David Quammen constantly refers to during his book, so when the dangers of coronaviruses and the increased globalisation of travel and communication, I can see how that contributed to the pandemic we're currently in the middle of. I think if I'd read this at the start of the pandemic I wouldn't have been able to make it through, but now, when it feels like there's light finally at the end of the tunnel, it was an interesting book to consider.

I adored the way this book was written, popular science books tend to fall into two categories from my somewhat limited experience (I estimate I've read a handful a year for the past several years). They tend to either be very fact heavy, here is how this thing works and here is why we think it's important, or they try to tell a story. It is these story telling books that I think work best, where the important of what is being discussed is clearly demonstrated. Here is why zoonotic diseases are important, because here is the effect they have previously had on the human population. This book therefore gripped me more than I think it would have done if it had been more in the first category, this book was still clearly very fact heavy, but it weaved that in between stories of outbreaks and how they demonstrated the facts, and also discussions with scientists who have been heavily involved in identifying the causes of these outbreaks.

I will say that I have nearly completed my masters in biochemistry, and therefore I would like to think I have a pretty good understanding of basic science. I understand how DNA and RNA work, I have a very very basic knowledge of virology, I understand how common lab techniques work and have even done some of them myself. I vaguely understand how phylogenetics works. As a result I found the science aspect of this book educational, but not super heavy. It took me a few moments to wrap my head around some concepts, but the vast majority of it was building on my previous knowledge. I have to say if you're coming at this from a non or limited science background, I think this book might take some thinking and so expect slow progress, I do think completing it is worth it though.

I would love to have an update to this book from David Quammen in light of COVID-19, even just a reflection on this book and how previous pandemics could have led us to predict how COVID would go, even from the start. I would especially like this reflection in light of the final chapter of this book. David Quammen and a mathematic modeller of outbreaks in caterpillars discuss how prepared humans are to deal with a worldwide outbreak. They decide due to the variations in human behaviour, and thus the likely variations in response to the pandemic on average humans are likely to survive well. In a time where the variation in human behaviour feels more frustrating than everything, when I find myself wondering why we can't all just follow the rules, this assertion felt somewhat illogical but also reassuring? Food for thought, most definitely.

I really enjoyed this read. And reading it in 2020 in the midst of a global pandemic really helped give me some insight.
It can be quite heavy in some parts however the author did a great job of making it more understandable as well as light-hearted and jovial in parts.

SPILLOVER is a fascinating and in-depth exploration of zoonoses – i.e. diseases that can jump from various animal species into humans. This continues to be a germane topic in the face of our current zoonotic pandemic – COVID-19. The book came out in 2012 / 2013, but has seen a groundswell of interest because it’s the most well-known popular work on this subject. One will read a few sentences in the book that seem prescient, but the author and the many experts he consults would be the first to state that this is no act of mystical precognition. Rather, a zoonotic pandemic seems to be an inevitability given humanity’s huge and growing population and the nature of our interactions with the rest of the animal kingdom. Of course, no one could say precisely when or what pathogen would lead to “the next big one,” of which – it so happens – we are currently amid. Though coronaviruses do come up as potential candidates, but so do others (e.g. certain strains of influenza.)

The book is organized differently than most. It’s cut up into bite sized chunks, with 115 chapters that are usually not more than a few pages each. However, chapters aren’t the relevant unit of interest so much as the book’s nine parts, each of which takes on a particular zoonosis, or class thereof. Because zoonoses are such a huge topic, the author focuses on a few that are of particular interest for varied reasons, including: the challenge of tracking the disease’s origins, the potential to be the next big one, the global influence of some diseases, as well as other reasons a particular zoonosis generates an interesting story.

The first part explores one of the lesser known zoonoses (except for in locales where outbreaks have occurred, e.g. Australia,) Hendra virus. While a common species of bat (the flying fox) is the reservoir for Hendra, what makes the story gripping for humans is that humans contract the disease through the intermediary of horses. While interaction with exotic wildlife is the the mode throughout the book, the fact that, here, transmission occurs from one of humanity’s closest animal friends increases the closeness-to-home effect.

Part two shifts into one of the most dramatic and well-known of the zoonoses, Ebola virus. Ebola is familiar from Richard Preston’s book “Hot Zone,” though Quammen does explain how Preston sensationalized and overstated the physical effects of the disease. [Presumably what Preston did was take the most vicious looking case and describe it through as dramatic of analogies as possible, such that it became unrecognizable from the typical case.] At any rate, it’s a disease that grabs one by the fear center because – while it doesn’t spread readily – it’s highly lethal and is unarguably an unpleasant way to go.

Part three delves into malaria and P. falciparum, the bug that causes it. Malaria has profoundly shaped human existence in the tropics. A vector-borne disease carried and passed by mosquitos, Malaria is widespread throughout much of the world and continues to generate debilitating effects. Many concepts are drilled into one while reading this book, and one worth mentioning here is the differentiation of reservoirs and vectors. A lot of the stories in this book revolve around scientists’ searches for reservoirs – the species where the pathogen resides in waiting. It’s often much more difficult to uncover a reservoir species than it is a vector (vectors invariably coming into direct contact with humans, whereas reservoirs can be far removed from humans.)

Part four investigates Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS.) This is one of the most relevant sections because SARS is a corona virus -- like COVID-19 -- and it served as a harbinger of a corona virus pandemic. SARS is also at least vaguely familiar to most people as it was a relatively recent epidemic.

The next two sections zoom out a bit and, instead of diving down into one zoonosis, they each consider a range of bacterial and viral zoonoses, respectively. Part five discusses Q fever, Lyme disease, Psittacosis, and other bacterial diseases that enter humans by way of other animals. Part six explores a range of viral diseases and – in the process – gives a bit of a lesson as to why viruses present such a risk as well as how different viruses work. This section covers rabies and Nipah virus.

Part seven tells the story of the search for the Marburg virus origin and reservoir. Marburg is similar to Ebola, but the story of the epidemiological search for it makes for intriguing reading. Part eight discusses HIV-AIDS and its simian predecessor, SIDS. What made this fascinating to me was that I learned that HIV has been around (at least) since the first decade of the twentieth century. If you’re like me, you associate the origin of AIDS with the 1980’s. However, with so many people regularly dying from so many different conditions in central Africa, it wasn’t obvious that those killers were getting an added help from a virus that crippled immune systems. It also took scientist a while to realize that SIDS was resulting in the death of chimpanzees. (It’s possible for a reservoir to be unaffected by a disease, and this is what they first thought to be the case.)

The final part is a wrap up that zooms out to look at the nature of episodes of ecological imbalance and “outbreaks” of species. In this case, “outbreak” is used to describe any explosion of population growth of a species. While the section opens with a species of caterpillars [forest tent caterpillars] that would occasionally flare up, killing off trees on a large scale, it discusses human population growth as an outbreak that – like all others – will inevitably end one way or another. This section also discusses influenza (which isn’t a major topic earlier in the book,) presumably because it had been the lead candidate at the time for the “next big one.” And “the next big one” is a related overarching theme in this section.

The book is annotated and has an extensive bibliography. There are few graphics, but there are maps that are helpful for those who aren’t familiar with the areas where many of these disease outbreaks originated (e.g. central Africa.)

I found this book to be intriguing. It teaches the reader some basics of epidemiology as it goes about telling the story of the spread of these diseases. [e.g. It will help one distinguish virulence and transmissibility – terms that are often used by neophytes interchangeably, but which are distinct in important ways.] However, the focus is always on the story and, therefore, it keeps these lessons interesting throughout. I’d highly recommend this book for those who are interested in the pandemic, zoonoses, or the challenges of combating disease.

trigger warning
<spoiler> lethal illnesses, death of a parent, being orphaned, child death, miscarriage, animal death, mention of slavery </spoiler>

Before I start, I want to take a look at the publishing date which was in 2015. I recieved this book as an arc, but I guess the publisher decided to make it available again because of the current relevancy of the topic.
This is <i>not</i> a book about Covid-19, <i>but</i> SARS-viruses and corona viruses in particular get mentioned.

So, this book is about Spillover events, about zoonose, which are illnesses that occured in wild and domesticated animals before they jumped over to human hosts. Which are also animals. If you're against evolution theory, this book will frustrate you a lot.
But if you're against evolution theory, you're probably not going to pick this one up, so no problem there.

The author is a medical journalist, who travels around the world to interview people, either in nice and clean offices and labs, or in the field while they gather data in a rainforest. At first, I was irritated by the low number of footnotes, but then I realised that this is because he went to the source and interviewed the people and based most of his book on that.
So, this is in part a kind of travelogue.

It starts in Australia with sick horses, and if you're more informed than I was before reading this book, you'll know it's about the Hendra virus that spilled over in the 90-ies but got contained in Australia.
In turn, Nipah, Ebola and HIV get their turn, with a site excursion to a few bacteria-induces illnesses.

This book is very readable, and I guess that part of my enjoyment comes from the feeling that you'd also get in a crime book - the investigation from "hm, that's weird, there are different people coming in with similiar symptoms but we don't have a name for that illness" to "oh shit, this is a virus", to finding the animals that also have it.

Broken down, we have three important groups. The reservoir is made up of animals that are infected by a virus but don't suffer symptoms. They infect the amplifiers, who do suffer the symptoms and, depending on the lethality, die after infecting the human group.
After that, the main question is if human-to-human infection occurs, because if yes, well, we're screwed.

I was impressed by the tone of the writing. The author is able to differentiate between the role of animals in infection scenarios and the animals as such, warning that devilisation of infectious animals won't help in any way, because in a lot of cases, spillover can be sourced to bats. I like bats. A lot. And I am annoyed by stereotypes depicting them as evil bloodsuckers, so I am glad that he made it very clear that this is how it goes, the animals don't intend this, just take precautions where you can.

So, five stars in non fiction titles usually suggest that I had fun while learning. This case is no different. I learned a lot. Despite being more into social sciences, his words and theories and the evidence presented was easy to follow.
Normally, I have this limit to how many pages of a non fiction title I can read and comprehend in day, but with this book, the only limitations were time I could spend reading.
This was so illuminating and entertaining, that I am going to look into other books he wrote, because I like learning.

Due to current circumstances, I feel that this is a very necessary read. While I am angry at governments that ignored warnings about the possibility of a pandemic for years, I think that the knowledge I gained this week make me feel better about our current pandemic.
A great part of this is that this book is not there to induce panic, just to give you the necessary facts. However, I am very glad that I am a vegetarian and will not be tempted by raw meat.

What I'd like is a revised edition with a section about Corvid-19.
And now I will be training myself to say Corvid-19 instead of Coronavirus because the latter is so unprecise.

I recieved a copy of this book in exhange for a honest review.

This book was first published some time ago, and was read - and very much enjoyed - at the time by my husband. Now, obviously, the subject is enjoying something of a revival. Quammen’s style is casual, chatty, and therefore easy to read for what is ultimately a science book. In a way, however, that was almost a weakness from my perspective. I found myself wanting more of the dry stuff, and was not quite so fascinated by the peripheral details of what the people he encountered in his journey of viral discovery looked like! But I’m sure that’s just me. The book is hugely relevant at the moment and is an interesting, and palatable read.