Some of them are bugaboos about which you have heard: Ebola, West Nile, SARS, influenza, HIV. Some are more obscure: Hendra, Nipah, Machupo, Marburg, Chikungunya, simian foamy, herpes B. My engagement with the subject of emerging viruses began in July 2000, when I hiked through a sizable stretch of pristine Central African forest that had lost many of its gorillas, and some of its people, to Ebola. Five years later I was asked by National Geographic to write an article on zoonotic diseases, including Ebola; that piece, with chilling photographs by Lynn Johnson, appeared in the October 2007 issue under the title “Deadly Contact.” Then for me it grew into a book project.
Nearly all zoonotic diseases result from infection by one of six kinds of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, protozoans, prions, fungi, and worms. Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut's infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early novel Cat's Cradle. Sleeping sickness is a protozoan infection, carried by tsetse flies between wild and domestic mammals and people on the landscapes of sub-Saharan Africa. Anthrax is a bacterium that can live dormant in soil for years and then, when scuffed out, infect humans by way of their cattle. Toxocariasis is a mild zoonosis caused by roundworms; you can get it from your dog. But fortunately, like your dog, you can be wormed. Viruses are the most problematic. . . . --from “Deadly Contact” National Geographic, October 2007
Research on the subject has taken me repeatedly to the Congo, twice to Australia, twice to Bangladesh, as well as to Cameroon, Cambodia, Uganda, Tanzania, Malaysia, southern China, Hong Kong, suburban New York, and Butte, Montana, among other places. The book will be published by W.W. Norton in 2012. Its working title is Spillover.
Some of them are bugaboos about which you have heard: Ebola, West Nile, SARS, influenza, HIV. Some are more obscure: Hendra, Nipah, Machupo, Marburg, Chikungunya, simian foamy, herpes B. My engagement with the subject of emerging viruses began in July 2000, when I hiked through a sizable stretch of pristine Central African forest that had lost many of its gorillas, and some of its people, to Ebola. Five years later I was asked by National Geographic to write an article on zoonotic diseases, including Ebola; that piece, with chilling photographs by Lynn Johnson, appeared in the October 2007 issue under the title “Deadly Contact.” Then for me it grew into a book project.
infection by one of six kinds of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, protozoans, prions, fungi, and worms. Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut's infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early novel Cat's Cradle. Sleeping sickness is a protozoan infection, carried by tsetse flies between wild and domestic mammals and people on the landscapes of sub-Saharan Africa. Anthrax is a bacterium that can live dormant in soil for years and then, when scuffed out, infect humans by way of their cattle. Toxocariasis is a mild zoonosis caused by roundworms; you can get it from your dog. But fortunately, like your dog, you can be wormed.