Quotes from David Quammen

The ecosystem itself is not just a landscape full of plant and animal species; it's an intricate network of relationships, including those between predators and their prey, between flowering plants and their pollinators, between fruiting plants and the animals that disperse their seeds. Each such relationship constitutes a link between trophic levels.

Humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health.

If SARS had conformed to the perverse pattern of presymptomatic infectivity, its 2003 emergence wouldn't be a case history in good luck and effective outbreak response. It would be a much darker story.

Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.

Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial. They stand as reminders that not every bad, stubborn, new bug is a virus.

Numbers can be an important aspect of understanding infectious disease. Take measles. At first glance, it might seem nonmathematical. It's caused by a paramyxovirus

Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern—rising to a high case count, fading away, rising again after a certain interval

Continuation of the outbreak depended on the likelihood of encounters between people who were infectious and people who could be infected. This idea became known as the "mass action principle." It was all about math. The same year, 1906, a Scottish physician named John Brownlee proposed an alternate view, contrary to Hamer's. Brownlee worked as a clinician and hospital administrator

In other words, HIV hasn't happened to humanity just once. It has happened at least a dozen times—a dozen that we know of, and probably many more times in earlier history.

The much darker story remains to be told, probably not about this virus but about another. When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death.

Any tiny little thing that people do," Dwyer said, if it makes them different from one another, from the idealized standard of herd behavior, "is going to reduce infection rates.

We should appreciate that these recent outbreaks of new zoonotic diseases, as well as the recurrence and spread of old ones, are part of a larger pattern, and that humanity is responsible for generating that pattern. We should recognize that they reflect things that we're doing, not just things that are happening to us. We should understand that, although some of the human-caused factors may seem virtually inexorable, others are within our control.

History is a fable agreed upon.

Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed.

Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly. There are three elements to the situation.

From the ecological point of view an outbreak can be defined as an explosive increase in the abundance of a particular species that occurs over a relatively short period of time." Then, in the same bland tone, he noted: "From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

The order Chiroptera (the "hand-wing" creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

Charlie Calisher and his coauthors, besides touching on broad principles, discussed a handful of bat-related viruses in detail: Nipah, Hendra, rabies and its close relatives (the lyssaviruses), SARS-CoV, and a couple of others.

Now here's the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers.

The more numerous we become, the more crowded, the more interconnected, the more demanding of resources, the more invasive of wild places, the more disruptive of richly diverse ecosystems—the closer we stand to the epidemic threshold for any new virus that probes us as a possible route to greater evolutionary success.

Their sampling showed that this SARS-like virus was especially prevalent in several bats belonging to the genus Rhinolophus, known commonly as horseshoe bats.

No nos equivoquemos: estos brotes de enfermedad que se suceden uno tras otro están relacionados entre sí. Y no solo nos ocurren; constituyen las consecuencias imprevistas de todo aquello que hacemos.

Ten employees who had helped unload and handle the monkeys were also screened for infection, and they also tested negative, but none of them were euthanized.