Quotes from David Quammen

no imagines que estos virus tienen una estrategia deliberada. No pienses que guardan una clase de responsabilidad maligna contra los seres humanos. "Se trata sólo de oportunidad", dijo. No significa que vienen por nosotros. Más bien, de una manera u otra, nosotros somos los que vamos a ellos. Les damos la oportunidad de infectarnos cuando nos metemos con sus huéspedes reservorios, cualesquiera que éstos sean.

The culinary trade in such unusual wild animals, especially within the Pearl River Delta, has less to do with limited resources, dire necessity, and ancient traditions than with booming commerce and relatively recent fashions in conspicuous consumption.

But what is it about bats? I asked. Why do so many of these zoonotic viruses—or what seems like so many—spill over onto humans from the chiropteran order of mammals? Or is that the wrong question? "It is the right question," he said. "But I don't think there's a good answer for it yet.

Herpes B is a very rare infection in humans but a nasty one, with a case fatality rate of almost 70 percent among those few dozen people infected during the twentieth century (before recent breakthroughs in antiviral pharmaceutics) and almost 50 percent even since then. When

La gente celebró el final del brote, pero los más informados lo celebraron con cautela. El SARS-CoV no se había ido, solo estaba escondido. Podía volver.

For a paper delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he plotted sharp up-and-down graphs of case numbers, week by week or month by month, from the empirical records of several disease outbreaks—plague in London (1665), measles in Glasgow (1808), cholera in London (1832), scarlet fever in Halifax (1880), influenza in London (1891), and others—and then matched them with smooth rollercoaster curves derived from a certain mathematical equation.

Does a virus constitute wildlife?

It was "the condition of the germ," not the character of the human population, that determined the course of the epidemic.

By a strict definition, zoonotic pathogens (accounting for about 60 percent of our infectious diseases, as I've mentioned) are those that presently and repeatedly pass between humans and other animals, whereas the other group of infections (40 percent, including smallpox, measles, and polio) are caused by pathogens descended from forms that must have made the leap to human ancestors sometime in the past.

Britain's Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens had lately reclassified herpes B into biohazard level 4, placing it in the elite company of Ebola, Marburg, and the virus that causes Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. National

Bats come in many, many forms. 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. Such diversity might suggest that bats don't harbor more than their share of viruses; it could be, instead, that their viral burden is proportional to their share of all mammal diversity, and thus just seems surprisingly large.

One: Mankind's activities are causing the disintegration (a word chosen carefully) of natural ecosystems at a cataclysmic rate.

Two: Those millions of unknown creatures include viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists, and other organisms, many of which are parasitic.

Three: But now the disruption of natural ecosystems seems more and more to be unloosing such microbes into a wider world.

His name too goes unmentioned, and he has been described simply as a "local government official." The only salient aspect of his profile, in retrospect, is that he had helped prepare some meals, of which the ingredients included chicken, domestic cat, and snake.

A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. There are more such diseases than you might expect. AIDS is one. Influenza is a whole category of others.

Appearances have enormous importance, Mr. Kessler. The creation and maintenance of appearances. Appearances govern.

The significance of the concept, Lloyd-Smith and his coauthors noted, is that if superspreaders exist and can be identified during a disease outbreak, then control measures should be targeted at isolating those individuals, rather than applied more broadly and diffusely across an entire population. Conversely, if you quarantine forty-nine infectious patients but miss one, and that one is a superspreader, your control efforts have failed and you face an epidemic.

landscapes that formerly supported wild herbivores, are just another form of human impact. They're a proxy measure of our appetites, and we are hungry. We are prodigious, we are unprecedented. We are phenomenal. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like this degree. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.

Trophic cascades, as defined by Diamond in his "Rosetta Stone" paper, are the secondary effects that can ramify from level to level in consequence of a single extinction.

A few monkeys and parrots were loose on the wreck, clambering hysterically toward nowhere. He saw several animals disappear into the flames.

We know that ecological isolation—either by seawater or by other sorts of delimitation—correlates strongly with risk of extinction

Two men, on opposite sides of the world, had made the same great discovery at the same time.

It was the first coronavirus ever found to inflict serious illness upon humans. (Several other coronaviruses are among the many viral strains responsible for common colds. Still others cause hepatitis in mice, gastroenteritis in pigs, and respiratory infection in turkeys.) SARS-CoV has no ominous ring.