Reddit reviews Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

Not just ebola, the list of viruses harbored within bat populations is both extensive and terrifying. Ebola, Nipah, Hendra, Marburg. I recently read a great book on emerging zoonotic diseases (called Spillover, for anyone that's interested) and the biggest thing that I took away from the book was that I need to stay the fuck away from bats.

I would recommend (in this order):

At the waters edge or anything by Carl Zimmer

Shadows of our forgotten ancestors by Carl Sagan

The blind watchmaker or anything by Richard Dawkins

Spillover or anything by David Quammen

Try nonfiction

• Spillover
  
• Demon in the Freezer
  

What kind of books do you like? Something with a narrative or something that's more like a text book? Something that fits in between is a short read called " Microcosm: E.coli and the New Science of Life

My favorite book is "The Hot Zone" though. It's more of a page-turner, but some information in it is dramatized and it's more about the story than the organism. It depends what you're looking for. Another good book is "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic" It's a bit of a slower read, but it's a good read that focuses more on diseases while having good stories

The diseases are actually quite old. They're both zoonoses, or diseases transmitted from animals to people. In the case of HIV from chimps, and in the case of Ebola we don't know the reservoir species. Maybe bats. From there, these diseases are able to transmit directly from human to human. HIV turned out to be quite well adapted for this, perhaps because SIV was in chimps for so long and also because unlike Ebola, HIV takes awhile to cause symptoms, and symptoms aren't as scary at least for awhile.

It's new patterns of population and travel that have amplified them (and a bit of bad luck). A great book on this for HIV is [Jacques Pepin's The Origin of AIDS] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-AIDS-Jacques-Pepin/dp/0521186374). Essentially we can see based on historic biological samples and the pace of genetic viral mutation that HIV has crossed into humans from chimps multiple times and among primates as well. What changed was that HIV managed to infect a bush meat hunter then make it into a city with a lot of men and few women and then perhaps into a sex worker and . . . away we go. Whereas infecting one bush hunter who then infects his wife and she goes on to have an infected baby - well they all just die out, end of "epidemic."

[Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague] (http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balance/dp/0140250913/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407301527&sr=1-1&keywords=the+coming+plague) and [David Quammen's Spillover] (http://www.amazon.com/Spillover-Animal-Infections-Human-Pandemic/dp/0393346617/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407301582&sr=1-3&keywords=the+coming+plague) also address this question well.

We can share several diseases with dogs and other domestic animals, among them tuberculosis, toxoplasmosis, plague (among St. George's many other saintly responsibilities, he is thought to protect domestic animals from the Black Death), and most famously, rabies.

Diseases that can hop from animals to humans are called zoonotic diseases, and have been responsible for some of the scariest recent disease outbreaks. SARs, Ebola, Zika, AIDS, and the historic Spanish flu all began in animal populations before hopping over to humans to absolutely wreak havoc.

If you're interested in learning more about how diseases move from animal to human populations (and vice versa), Spillover by David Quammen is a really informative and interesting book.

Read Spillover by David Quammen and really enjoyed it. Discusses the appearance of zoonotic diseases like Ebola, SARS, and AIDS.

I really liked The Fever by Sonia Shah about the history of malaria, I'd also liked Rabid, Beating Back the Devil and The Coming Plague. I also really liked Spillover

Not entirely scientific, but Spillover by David Quammen is a really good read on diseases that have 'spilled over' from animals to humans. It covers lots of recent epidemics, from smaller ones like Q-fever to very big ones like HIV and ebola (not that ebola is quite as big as HIV, but it has been making big headlines).

It's one of the few books that I keep recommending to people 'cause it makes epidemiology sound very cool and explains lots of complicated concepts in a really engaging and understandable way. And it reads like a detective novel while not dumbing down the science.

It's also got a very detailed bibliography, so you'll find all the references you need to start writing a paper.

'Spillover' and 'People, Parasites and Plowshares'

Fair warning - this book is really sensationalist in how it depicts Ebola. I'm not saying don't read it, but if you're going to, do youself a favor and read Spillover as well. They're both great, and Spillover discusses a wider range of infectious diseases. Ebola is scary, but how Hot Zone discusses it is borderline fear-mongering in my opinion.