David Quammen

David Quammen is the author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.

From the transcript of his Fresh Air interview with Dave Davies:

DAVIES: .... You begin your book with the story of a virus that appeared in Australia, which killed horses quickly and dramatically and painfully, and a number of people who treated them. And they had to do this detective work of finding what the reservoir host - what animal had this virus. How do you do that? How do they do that?

QUAMMEN: Well, in this case, it was a virus that was killing racehorses in a stable in a suburb of Brisbane, Australia, called Hendra. And some disease ecologists went in and said, well, we've got to identify the reservoir host. Where did this virus come from? And in particular, a man named Hume Field - he was a veterinarian. And he was working on a Ph.D. in ecology. He made this his dissertation project.

So he trapped all kinds of animals in the area surrounding the stables in the meadows of Hendra and elsewhere. He trapped rats and insects and small mammals of various different sorts and also trapped some bats. I think he caught a bat in a fence and tested it, tested all of them to see if he could find evidence of this virus. And he found it in the bats. He found it in two species of giant fruit bat that were native to that part of Australia.

And then the question became, how did the virus get from these giant fruit bats into these horses? And one of the fellows who worked on the response to this, another vet, a veterinarian, took me out to a meadow outside of this suburb of Hendra. And it was a big, hot, grassy meadow where they pastured horses.

For instance, one particular mare, when she was pregnant, they pastured her there. And there was just a single tree providing shade in the hot, subtropical Australian sun in this meadow. And this veterinarian pointed to it and said, there it is. That's the bloody tree - meaning that's the tree that this horse took shelter under for shade. It was a fig tree, and it attracted fruit bats.

The fruit bats came, ate the figs, dropped fruit pulp, dropped saliva, dropped feces onto the grass below. The horse ate the grass, picked up the virus. Then she was brought back to the stables, and she infected the rest of the horses. So it was Hume Field's detective work that...[read on]

Spillover is one of Laura Spinney's five best books about pandemics.

--Marshal Zeringue