Quotes from David Quammen

Darwin wrote: "organized beings represent a tree.

And like all forms of ecological equilibrium, it's temporary, provisional, contingent.

And hopefully nothing will happen." But of course, as she well knew, something always does happen. It's just a question of what and when.

The chimpanzee seems to have been the index case for infecting 18 primary human cases," they wrote.

Viruses couldn't be viewed with an optical microscope; they couldn't be grown in a culture of chemical nutrients; they couldn't be captured, as bacteria could, with a porcelain filter. They could only be inferred.

Wilson came up with this: "When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land.

Even the influenza virus of 1918–1919, having killed up to 50 million people around the world, remained a ghostly cipher, unseen and unidentified at the time.

The vet, a fiercely caring professional, told them the horse was dying. Knowing her duty, she said: "I want to euthanize it.

Es de suponer que, cuando llegue la próxima gran pandemia, es probable que se conforme a ese mismo y perverso patrón, el de la elevada inefectividad antes de los síntomas notables, que la ayudará a moverse entre ciudades y aeropuertos como un ángel de la muerte.

What makes a species of insect—or of mammal, or of microbe—capable of the outbreak phenomenon? That's a complicated question that the experts are still trying to answer.

Alan A. Berryman addressed it some years ago in a paper titled "The Theory and Classification of Outbreaks.

Moraleja: si eres una población próspera, que vive en altas concentraciones pero está expuesta a nuevas infecciones, es solo cuestión de tiempo hasta que llegue la próxima gran pandemia.

Around 1840, a German anatomist named Jakob Henle began to suspect the existence of noxious particles—creatures or things—that were too small to be seen with a light microscope and yet able to transmit specific diseases.

From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

INFECTIOUS DISEASE IS all around us. Infectious disease is a kind of natural mortar binding one creature to another, one species to another, within the elaborate biophysical edifices we call ecosystems.

In 1846, a Danish physician named Peter Panum witnessed a measles epidemic on the Faroe Islands, a remote archipelago north of Scotland, and drew some keen inferences about how the ailment seemed to pass from person to person, with a delay of about two weeks (what we'd now call an incubation period) between exposure and symptoms.

Another way to comprehend it is this: From the time of our beginning as a species (about 200,000 years ago) until the year 1804, human population rose to a billion; between 1804 and 1927, it rose by another billion; we reached 3 billion in 1960; and each net addition of a billion people, since then, has taken only about thirteen years. In October 2011, we came to the 7-billion mark

And here's the thing about outbreaks: They end. In some cases they end after many years, in other cases they end rather soon.

The song of the dodo, if it had one, is forever unknowable because no human from whom we have testimony ever took the trouble to sit in the Mauritian forest and listen.

It's not Don't kill your host. It's Don't burn your bridges until after you've crossed them.

Emergence and spillover are distinct concepts but interconnected. "Spillover" is the term used by disease ecologists (it has a different use for economists) to denote the moment when a pathogen passes from members of one species, as host, into members of another. It's a focused event. Hendra virus spilled over into Drama Series (from bats) and then into Vic Rail (from horses) in September 1994. Emergence is a process, a trend.

Worobey's work directly refuted the OPV hypothesis. If HIV-1 existed in humans as early as 1908, then obviously it hadn't been introduced via vaccine trials beginning in 1958.

With our virus, people like to say, they'll say, 'Oh, you study that virus that causes the insect to explode!' Like, the virus doesn't cause the insect to explode," he insisted. "It causes it to melt.

Among the most important things to remember about evolution—and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors—is that it doesn't have purposes. It only has results. To