Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic is a 2012 narrative nonfiction work about the relationship between animal infections and human disease. It was nominated for several awards and won the Science and Society Book Award, given by the National Association of Science Writers, and the Society of Biology (UK) Book Award in General Biology.

In Spillover, Quammen’s narrative alternates between the outbreak and eventual discovery of recent emerging diseases, and the scientific discoveries of the past that made such advancements possible. Quammen’s main subject is zoonotic disease: diseases that humans acquire from animals. He routinely intersperses these health mysteries with accounts of his own travels and personal meetings with experts so that he can meet zoonotic diseases in their environments, with the lurking threat that one will cause a pandemic.

Quammen opens his narrative with a mysterious virus, Hendra, that sickened horses and a few people in Australia in 1994. Hendra virus lives routinely in its “reservoir host” of bats, but when it enters horses, the virus multiplies easily and can spread to people. Many of Quammen’s protagonists are scientists, virologists, or veterinarians with a background in infectious disease and public health, and his Hendra narrative includes a scientist who identified the reservoir so that outbreaks could be understood, if not contained.