Spillover, David Quammen (ISBN 978-0393066807, W.W. Norton & Company)

This book came out in October 2012 and I read it myself in June 2015. The subject of the book is zoonoses, diseases that are transmissible from animals to humans. The book explores recent new diseases that appeared and outbreaks of these diseases. Among the diseases covered in the book are AIDS, ebola and sars. It came out right in the middle of a series of outbreaks of Ebola which gave it quite some free ‘publicity’ so to speak. The book investigate the mechanisms of zoonoses and tries to explain why we have seen many new diseases of this type appear in recent times. Based on that analysis it also predicted that we would have to face a next big pandemic sooner or later. In 2020 this finally arrived but reading about some of the diseases covered in the book I can say that I cannot help feeling it could have been a lot more ugly and that worse is yet to come from this front. On his goodreads page David Quammen explains a bit his motivation to write this book which was mainly to inform people about how these types of diseases arise and work. If you want to learn more about various zoonoses I can highly recommend this book. It is well researched and excellently written. David Quammen is an award winning science, nature and travel writer and he is a master at creating a story. He uses non technical language so you don’t have to worry that you need to be a biologist to follow it and it reads like a travel story thriller that will keep you turning pages into the small hours if you are not careful. It is sometimes said that you have two types of readers. Some read fiction because they want to be absorbed by a captivating story. Some people read non fiction because they want to learn. The beauty of this book is that it combines both qualities. You can read it being captivated by a well written story and learn fascinating things about the world at the same time. You may believe that Covid-19 will soon be behind us and you could be right or not. But if there is one message take away from this book it is that there are many other diseases out there which we don’t know about just waiting to happen. And we basically are bringing it on to ourself by the way we are abusing the earth. If you haven’t read this book yet I recommend you to do so now. It will be enjoyable time well spent.