Quotes from David Quammen

Some knowledgeable and gloomy prognosticators even speak of the Next Big One as an inevitability. (If you're a seismologist in California, the Next Big One is an earthquake that drops San Francisco into the sea, but in this realm of discourse it's a vastly lethal pandemic.) Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people?

Not only are islands impoverished relative to the mainlands, but small islands are more severely impoverished than large ones. That bit of insight became famed as the species-area relationship.

Let's keep an eye on wild creatures. As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we're getting their diseases.

two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These

convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease.

Many factors contribute to the case fatality rate during an outbreak, including diet, economic conditions, public health in general, and the medical care available in the location where an outbreak occurs. It's hard to isolate the inherent ferocity of a virus from those contextual factors.

molecular phylogenetics.

No convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease.

Zoonoses by definition involve events beyond the ordinary, and the scope of their consequences can be extraordinary too. Every spillover is like a sweepstakes ticket, bought by the pathogen, for the prize of a new and more grandiose existence. It's a long-shot chance to transcend the dead end. To go where it hasn't gone and be what it hasn't been. Sometimes the bettor wins big.

Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

Ebola, West Nile, Marburg, the SARS bug, monkeypox, rabies, Machupo, dengue, the yellow fever agent, Nipah, Hendra, Hantaan (the namesake of the hantaviruses, first identified in Korea), chikungunya, Junin, Borna, the influenzas, and the HIVs (HIV-1, which mainly accounts for the AIDS pandemic, and HIV-2, which is less widespread) are all viruses.

The cold is a mnemonic device.

AIDS began with a spillover from one chimp to one human, in southeastern Cameroon, no later than 1908

More precisely, he placed the most recent common ancestor of DRC60 and ZR59 in the year 1908, give or take a margin of error.

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical.

Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.

the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.

By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.

The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.

People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We're all in this together.

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.

In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.