Of Bats, Pythons and the Marburg Virus

Read an excerpt from Spillover, David Quammen's new book about emergent pandemics.

Quammen visits the Writers Institute tomorrow, Thursday.

"Astrid Joosten was a 41-year-old Dutch woman who, in June 2008, went to Uganda with her husband. At home in Noord-Brabant, she worked as a business analyst. Both she and her husband, Jaap Taal, a financial manager, enjoyed annual adventures, especially to Africa. The journey in 2008, booked through an adventure-travel outfitter, took them to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, home to mountain gorillas. While there, the operators offered an optional trip, to a place called the Maramagambo Forest, where the chief attraction was a peculiar site known as Python Cave. African rock pythons lived there, languid and content, grown large and fat on a diet of bats."

More in The Guardian:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/sep/28/deadly-viruses-ebola-marburg-sars

More on Quammen's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/quammen_david12.html

Picture:  Egyptian fruit bats, Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda

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They're Coming!... The Zoonotic Diseases

Here's a 2007 National Geographic article by David Quammen, who visits Albany tomorrow, about the rise of zoonotic diseases, which "jump" from animals to people-- the subject of his new critically acclaimed book, Spillover (2012).

"In September 1994, a violent disease erupted among racehorses in a suburb of Brisbane, Australia. The place, called Hendra, was a quiet old neighborhood filled with racecourses, stables, newsstands that sell tip sheets, corner cafés with names like The Feed Bin, and racing people. The first victim was a pregnant mare named Drama Series, who started showing symptoms in an outlying pasture and was brought back to her trainer's stable for doctoring, where she only got worse. Three people worked to save her—the trainer himself, his stable foreman, and a veterinarian. Within two days Drama Series died, leaving the cause of her trouble uncertain. Had she been bitten by a snake? Had she eaten some poisonous weeds out in that scrubby, derelict meadow? Those hypotheses were eliminated two weeks later, when most of her stablemates fell ill. This wasn't snakebite or toxic fodder. It was something contagious."

Read more:  http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/10/infectious-animals/quammen-text

More about his visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/quammen_david12.html

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