Spillover Chapter Summary

Spillover is not just a regular book about diseases. In this book, the author, David Quammen, dialogues about a multitude of zoonotic diseases, which are pathogens that can be transmitted from an animal into a human. There are eleven diseases that the author primarily discusses: Hendra, Ebola, Malaria, SARS, Q-fever, Psittacosis, Lyme disease, Herpes B, Nipah and HIV/AIDS. All of these are viruses, with the exceptions of Q-fever, Psittacosis and Lyme disease, which are bacterium. All zoonotic diseases have a reservoir host, which is a living organism that carries a certain pathogen without suffering from it. Some also have amplifier hosts, which is where the reservoir hosts transmits its pathogen to another animal, which can then transfer it to humans. Throughout the book, the author includes his own personal field experiences, like gorilla hunting in the Congo and netting bats in China. He tries to answer why these diseases arise when and where they do. The big question is when will the Next Big One emerge and “spillover” into humans. In each chapter of the book, a disease gradually comes to our attention. Mysterious deaths happen and then rumors start. The author, through facts, interviews and his own personal experiences, unfolds the history of each disease. Hendra virus comes …show more content…
The victims were pig farmers. People thought that it might be Japanese Encephalitis, but that proved wrong. Samples from people were sent to the CDC to be analyzed and what they found was similar to Hendra but different. It became known as Nipah virus encephalitits. So once again the question arises, where did it come from? Ken Lam, the head of microbiology at a university in Malaysia worked with Hume Field, whom found that bats were the reservoir hosts of Hendra, to find the source of Nipah. Together, they found that pigs were amplifier hosts and that flying foxes were the reservoir