Reddit reviews Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

I'm only a premed student so I hope these are up to the standards you're looking for, but I do love reading books. So with that out of the way, check out books by Mary Roach (Spook wasn't as good as the others, and is less medicine-oriented, but it wasn't bad, and the others are marvelous). I just finished reading Spillover, which was an excellent book on zoonotic diseases. Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body was a bit fluffy but also a pretty neat (if shallow) overview of some of the many ways human development goes wrong.

I have a bunch more but they aren't springing immediately to mind. I'll try to remember to find them on my bookshelves and post links later.

You can't talk about public health/epi lit without bringing up The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. It's a really intriguing look at the known history of Ebola and the Ebola Reston outbreak at a monkey house in the US, but take a lot of his details with a grain of salt because he's on the record saying that he dramatized a number of details but its entertaining and informative nonetheless. Preston has a few other books that fall in a similar fold.

I'm currently reading Spillover by David Quammen and I'm really loving it! It's a more scientifically sound book about zoonosis and how infections make their way across species and into humans. I'm personally finding it to be a lot more entertaining than The Hot Zone as well.

To add on to what people have said here--

There also is a fair bit of evidence that, in general, diseases tend towards having less impact on their host. In other words, they evolve their systems to be benign, but still successfully reproduce.

There are obviously exceptions, but this change happens over time. Many of the diseases you think of as harmful to humans have only recently spread over to humans. Often they are benign in the host that they have cone to us from (or from their ultimate host) For example Hendra Virus in Australia was fatal in humans, fatal in the horses those humans caught it from, but was completely benign in the various bat species that served as its reservoirs.

So a lot of the 'new' diseases that you hear about have been sitting, doing their thing completely harmlessly in some other species for a very very long time. The problem only occurs when for some reason people come in contact with the virus in a way that is conducive to transfer. (interestingly there is basically no evidence of Hendra, mentioned above, transferring from bats directly to humans--it seems to only work through the intermediary)

If you're interested in disease ecology, and especially the animal->human type diseases, Id recommend Spillover, by David Quammen. Really interesting, and an enjoyable read for scientific but non-informed folk.

I absolutely love books like The Hot Zone. Here are some really good ones like it that your SO might like if they're into those kinds of books:

http://www.amazon.com/Spillover-Animal-Infections-Human-Pandemic/dp/0393066800

http://www.amazon.com/The-Viral-Storm-Dawn-Pandemic/dp/B007SRWI1W/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1CRSHT2HR2AG3YTCGKZJ

http://www.amazon.com/Killer-Germs-Barry-Zimmerman/dp/0071409262/ref=pd_sim_b_6?ie=UTF8&refRID=1BH68CCY5GBEXNZ4VKJT

Hope these help

i would normally agree with this sort of stance about being exposed to things in life, but i'd like to respectfully disagree in the instance of bats. their genetic diversity, ability to fly and habitat set them apart from most other animals in terms of risk of zoogenic infections. it's become alarming in recent years just how many viruses have been isolated from bats alone and since they are a-symptomatic, they continue to spread whatever diseases they have contracted in their close living dens for sometimes up to 30 years. hopefully /u/unidan will stumble across this post to concisely point out all the facts and save me from paraphrasing david quammen's book, spillover: animal infections and the next human pandemic.

i am in no way anti bat, although i would never go near one. i was just wondering what sort of extra precautions one might have to take in order to keep an animal like that, especially if they are exposed to the outside.

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One of my favorite books is Spillover by David Quammen https://www.amazon.com/Spillover-Animal-Infections-Human-Pandemic/dp/0393066800 - Nathan

This is one of the books I read. I highly recommend it, it's a really great read. Heard about it on NPR.

I believe that if we enter an apocalypse at any point in the near future, it will be caused by a global pandemic. We've seen in the past how susceptible humans can be to disease (Spanish flu epidemic), and even with all our modern technology a strain of virus that had mutated from an animal host could be devastating to the human population.

For those interested Spillover is a great book about this.

Filmography includes Contagion, a relatively scientifically accurate movie.