{"id":1915,"date":"2014-06-01T07:31:32","date_gmt":"2014-06-01T15:31:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1915"},"modified":"2014-06-01T07:31:32","modified_gmt":"2014-06-01T15:31:32","slug":"review-spillover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1915","title":{"rendered":"Review: Spillover"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is easy alarm people over the possibility of a pandemic.\u00a0 The mass media does it every cold and flu season, which made me a little leery of David Quammen&#8217;s <em>Spillover: Animal Infections And The Next Human Pandemic<\/em>. I was pleasantly surprised.\u00a0 This is an informative, well-reasoned and researched book about epidemiology.\u00a0 Admittedly, this is a niche.<\/p>\n<p>Quammen spends all of <em>Spillover<\/em> tromping the globe describing different diseases that have jumped from other species to mankind, with differing severe effects.\u00a0 Outbreaks of Ebola or Hendra, frightening though they can be are usually isolated and small events; AIDS has been a widespread slow burn. Along the way he introduces us to the people who study these things and the techniques they use.<\/p>\n<p>He also builds the edifice of our current understanding for the reader.\u00a0 He describes how diseases can primarily live in a reservoir host for decades and why they can be more virulent when they jump species.\u00a0 We also learn why diseases that have such a safe haven are harder to eradicate.\u00a0 AIDS and ebola can hide in their animal reservoirs; polio and smallpox cannot.\u00a0 There is much more to our understanding than that simple fact, and <em>Spillover<\/em> does a good job building up that understanding.<\/p>\n<p>The writing is technical.\u00a0 Quammen expects his readers to be comfortable with science and a little math, but he has a real knack for the illustrative example.\u00a0 He also is good at pointing out the salient aspects of a mathematical or scientific principle, even if the reader doesn&#8217;t know the full principle.<\/p>\n<p>The only thing that disappointed me about the book was that there&#8217;s no introduction that sets a road map for the book.\u00a0 You have to sort of trust Quammen that he&#8217;s got a point or two and that they will emerge over the course of the lengthy text.\u00a0 They do, but given the size of the tome and the occasionally daunting technical content, a goal would have helped.<\/p>\n<p>Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is easy alarm people over the possibility of a pandemic.\u00a0 The mass media does it every cold and flu season, which made me a little leery of David Quammen&#8217;s Spillover: Animal Infections And The Next Human Pandemic. I was pleasantly surprised.\u00a0 This is an informative, well-reasoned and researched book about epidemiology.\u00a0 Admittedly, this is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1915"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1917,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1915\/revisions\/1917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}