W. W. Norton & Company Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

i have only read 2 chapters of it and so far it is amazing, if you are interested in learning about animal diseases that are zoonotic. great for veterinarians.

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In the age of unbridled ignorance this book should be on the bookshelf of everyone. For people with an education in science, even base level science, it opens new, worrying, terrifying prospects for our future. For those, instead, which lack any scientific education, reading this book will be like opening a window on the real face of Nature. In both cases, I highly recommend to read it, no matter its publication is now 11 years in the past.Natural Selection is, once again, the leitmotif of it all. Random mutation followed by logical selection based on environmental pressures is key. That, and human behaviour. Is right the author when he states that variability in human behaviour is a major factor when it comes to the spreading potential of a new bug. Covid story is still fresh in our memories, after all. Refusing to adopt a reasonable, respectful and rational behaviour is the fastest way to catastrophe. The price we pay everytime there’s a new pandemic - and there have been quite a few since we started to collect data and to study old events - is incredibly high. It is surely higher than the price we should pay to avert the next pandemic. This last message in my opinion is important: many people believe that their life is utterly detached from the environment in which they live so why should they go all the way to pay huge sums of money to avert something that might happen tomorrow as well as in the next 100 years? Risk assessment is not even an option in the mind of common citizens. Unfortunately, though, the so-called “next Big One” will, sooner or later, hit us, like COVID did. Once again we will be forced to adopt again those strict measures that we all hated so much. We hated them because they limited our lives, cutting our rights. Only understanding the seriousness of a pandemic could bring people to reason. Again, this book is enlightening in this respect.I learned a lot from reading it. In some places it is worse than horror movies - if one catches the implications of dynamics described by the author. It’s a series of stories for everyone, written in a magnificent way, full of chilling details.In the end, one cannot help but think that as a society we don’t understand the world we live in. We are changing the planet in so many terrible ways that we are constantly creating those conditions that will allow, once again, the “jump” of a virus, or a “bug”, from the “wild” world to the “civilized” world. Once that jump is accomplished, our hyper connected world will allow it to travel the globe in a matter of hours. It happened in the past, many times. It will happen again. The only logical question is, “when?”.

I am a biology buff. I read anything related to biology right from research papers to Medium blogs. This book has been the most engrossing read so far! The author's command on the subject shows very clearly in his writing. It is a must read to understand the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic by the virtue of all the important past disease outbreaks that the author talks about in the book. Go for it, you will be wiser at the end of the book.

Amazingly written book that has been compelling in each section and offers great insights. It goes into great detail on the biology (ecology, evolution, and genetics) of many zoonotic diseases, yet is written in a way that is accessible to readers from all walks of life. Terrifyingly accurate in predictions on future "spillover" events. Great read.

El libro es muy interesante, y a cada página dan ganas de leer la siguiente. Si compran este libro podrían considerar ahorrarse "The Chimp and the River" porque ese libro derivó de un capítulo con el mismo título de este libro.