and, as you see this evening, we have c-span here. we moved our -- is the

microphone working back there? as he somebody running to the microphone. we have just one microphone here the past questions. so if you -- if you need access to this mike, if you're sitting over there, you can go around back there. i want to welcome david clemens who has come this evening to talk about his new book, the spillover. this is the first time david has been to politics and prose. he lives in bozeman, montana. he has written many, many books. including the song of the doe, which one that john burroughs medal for natural history writing. david holds honorary degrees from colorado college in montana state university where he served as the wallace professor of western american studies. he is also aware of the national

magazine award three times for articles and a wide variety of magazines, including esquire, the atlantic, and rolling stone. the third of these awards, magazine awards was for a national geographic story called was a star when wrong. the national geographic, he has the title contributing writer with some, which gives him the -- which requires him to write, did you say three articles a year, david? three articles a year for national geographic. he describes his fields as biology, the radical ecology and conservation. after this evening i hope you will have as much appreciation for his physical strength and stamina as you have for his

writing talents. in his field, research, he tracks indiana jones style through jungles and rain forests that most of us would never want to step foot in. tonight you are going to learn a new word, though enosis, at least i learned that a new word. the tse's are infectious diseases that originate in animals and spread to humans. for those of you who read the hot zone, that was, i can't believe it, about 20 years ago, 18 to be exact, you had a very early exposure to this frightening scenario. david has elaborated on a great deal in his new books. publisher's weekly gave spillover a stark review and said, this is a quote, this is a frightening, but critically

important book for anyone interested in learning about the prospects of the world's next major pandemic, so here is david to talk about his book. [applause] >> thank you. thank you very much, barbara. and thank you all. nice to be here at politics and prose. as barbara said, i have not been here before. i live a little bit too far away and don't publish books that often. it takes me about six or eight years to get one of these things done. i am going to talk informally for 20 or 25 minutes. is that what you said? yes. about the book. and the subjects and to some extent about the writing of the book, and then you notice drill better than i do, i'm sure. you will hear from you.

you will have some conversation. as barbara explained, this is a book about scary, new, emerging diseases and where they emerged from. where they emerged from, generally, as wildlife. it's from other species, non-human animals. in particular nonhuman animals other than our domesticated animals. there is -- if you have been following certain stories in the news over the last few months you know that one point of entry into this subject is at daily newspaper itself. you have probably heard about the hantavirus killing three people have visited yosemite this summer. people have been dying in north texas of west nile fever. in the dallas area alone there have been 15 people died of west nile fever just since july.

there have been an ebola outbreak began in central africa, the democratic republic of the condo has an ebola outbreak that has killed three dozen people, i think, by now, and it is still going on. there is another outbreak across the border in uganda unrelated to the spillover that had cost the outbreak in the democratic republic of the congo. that one has been ended. these things are happening. this is like a drumbeat of disease, outbreaks and small crises. there is another on the arabian peninsula. there is a virus that emerged that closely resembles the saar's virus, the loss to the same family, corona viruses, the virus that really scared the disease experts back in 2003. this new virus out of the

arabian peninsula has only killed one person. put another man in the hospital in britain, but scientists all over the world are watching it carefully. why? because they know that the next big one could look something like that. so there is this, as i say, a drumbeat of these things. diseases that i have mentioned all have two things in common. they all come out of wildlife. they emerge from nonhuman animals. among those that i mentioned, there are all caused by viruses, and that is a particular profile of this curious of the exemplars of this phenomenon. the scientists have a fancy name for it, as barbara mentioned. they call these animal infections that pass into humans so nessie's. a virus or it could be other forms of infectious bug. it can be a bacterium.

it can be a protozoan, the creatures that causes malaria. it could be a fungus. it could be warm. could be something called the pre on, which causes mad cow disease. but usually it's a virus. viruses more than anything cause these. and they pass from animals into humans. they don't always cause disease. sometimes they become harmless passengers in humans. there is a a virus that i talked about in the book, and i could not resist it because it has such a wonderfully gruesome name. you have to find the right side of the subject where you can find it. and with all due respect to the people who suffer, the people who die, and a lot of deaths in this book. it's strictly nonfiction. a lot of debts, and i respect

that. still, still i did not want this book to be just a painful, gruesome duty, just an important, scary book. i also wanted it to be a pleasurable reading experience, a page turner, have moments of suspense, have mystery and discovery, moments of heroism by some of these scientists who are out studying this sort of thing. yes, even some moments of humor. it is not a very funny book, but i hope it might be the funniest book about a bowl you ever read. [laughter] so, as i said, some of these bugs, when they pass into humans, they're harmless. but often they're not. if that zoonosis passes into humans and causes mayhem we call it as though not a disease.

60 percent of the infectious diseases of humans our's a aeronautic diseases. the other 40%, everything comes from somewhere. the other 40 percent of probably a of the zone of the -- excuse me, of zone audit origin in the broader sense. for instance, measles, measles is only a disease of humans, where did it come from? it probably came from a virus that causes the disease when their past in her of animals in africa, but it has been in humans long enough that it has evolved and become adapted specifically to humans. so it is different enough that it is considered and functions as a uniquely human virus. but the 60 percent that are considered so not like our passing back and forth, were passing from animals to humans on either a continuing basis or

have done that very recently. and that includes things like ebola, marburg, all of the influences, west nile virus, the hantaviruses, hiv. i talked at some length in the book about the ecological origins of the aids pandemic. we now know that the pandemic strain of hiv passed from a single chimpanzee to a single human in a fairly small corner of southeastern cameron in central africa. in 1908 or earlier give or take a margin of error. had to know that? we know that because there are some wonderful scientists who have worked on the genetics, the minute to look to the molecular phyla genetics of the viruses that are precursors to hiv, the virus is better engines and monkeys, and that genetic

diversity of hiv-1 group m, which is the pandemic strain of hiv. the scientists have managed to locate the spillover of and with a high degree of confidence. there is always a certain provision melody, but with a high degree of confidence they have located it to southeastern cameron, one chimpanzee, one human, presumably one who killed a chimpanzee and then cut himself on the hand, got blood to blood contact while he was butchering the chamfer food. and the very early part of the 20th century, sometime around or before 1908. michael ward the nba to respond by the scientists to with their colleagues in the labs have done that work. so there are these diseases. a spillover. they are so monodic. one other slightly technical

term that i want to familiarize you with, reservoir host. the reservoir host is the kind of animal in which the bug, the virus, whenever it is, lives in dan wrigley, permanently, a conspicuously without causing disease, without causing mayhem in that particular creature. why is it live there? why is it live their none destructively? well, probably because it has been in a species from millions of years. an accommodation has evolved. so a virus in its reservoir host replicates, but it does not replicate cataclysmic plea. thames to replicate slowly, and it does not generally cause symptoms. so it is invisible. it hides in its reservoir host. then something happens. humans kill and eat that

reservoir host. they come in contact with it somehow. maybe -- of tell you a couple of stories always the this to happen. the reservoir host sheds virus, and that virus gets into humans and then it becomes the sole not a disease. one of the things that the scientists to as they study this field, and as they focus on these different diseases, one of the very first things that they have to do is identify the reservoir host. a new disease spills over in malaysia. it is killing takes. it is killing pig farmers and paid butchers and poor sellers. where did this come from? they find -- they isolate the virus. the human victims and in the pigs. the same virus and the human victims and in the pigs. this is a true case that happened in 1998. they named it nebo virus after a particular village in malaysia. then they went looking for the reservoir host.

where was it? they found it and large fruit bats, large fruit bats of the genus to rope is, the kind that are called flying foxes and asia how did this spillover occur? the disease detectives finally tracked it through their route of most likely spillover, and here is what happened. people were cutting down forests in peninsular malaysia for development for agriculture, for the timber itself, cutting down and forest destroy fruit bat habitats. the fruit bats were displaced. they had to go looking for fruit, fruit, nectar somewhere else. they started going closer to human settlements. if there were orchards there were attracted to the orchards. food trees planted by humans. some of them were unpick farms. it was a second tier of income for the pig farmers to read these great big factories compared firms in northern and

central peninsular malaysia. some of these farmers even planted man go trees and another kind of retreat called the water apple. very close to their open air pigsties, and sometimes even shading their pigsties. the bats come to the fruit trees, planted over the pigsties. they eat the fruit, choose the man got a much to the water apple, drop the pulp into the pig sty, they dropped the feces, they drop their urine. they drop their virus into the pig sty. the pigs ticket up. they get sick. and the pig is a very infectious respiratory disease. their coughing and parking and passing this virus from one to the other. the pigs are mostly not dying, however. it was not killing them many pigs. it becomes a her rent is agricultural problem. and then it starts getting into humans and that kills 109 people causes the government of malaysia tech call prevent

civilly 1 million pace, required the killing of all the pigs that came from infected farms. some of these farms people were so scared by this disease that they were abandoning their own farms, running away from their own pig farms. at one. pigs were running loose through the villages, in some cases abandoned villages of the peninsular malaysia. it's like a nightmare scenario, but it really happened. something out of her lee car mack mccarthy with a book of exodus. infectious page running wild through the countryside coughing the virus. one fellow called it the 1 mile barking cough because you could hear these sick pigs coming. and you knew that you're a pig farm would be next. real story. nipa encephalitis is the disease in humans. this is what the disease scientists to. they go out and try and solve the ecology and evolutionary

biology of these new diseases. where does the virus live? what is the reservoir host? how did humans come in contact with the virus? what are they doing? in many cases it is that ecological destruction that causes the contact and that causes this bill of work, that gets into some times in intermediate and will come up takes as the case in australia where virus falls out of bats, gets endorses. takes or horses that are referred to as the amplifier host, the virus reproduces abundantly. they shed lots of buyers and then it gets into people. the case, the virus in australia, the virus is called and dry after a suburb of brisbane known as indirect, which is a racing suburb. 1994 and one stable in that suburb. horses sublease started to die.

why are they dying? did they get some poisonous feet? a veterinarian, a trainer, horse trainer, and stable and tried to save the horses. the stable foreman got sick and went home. he thought he had a bad flu. a trader gusts sick. very bad flu. went into the hospital. the veterinarian never got sick. the trainer died. they isolated a virus from him, his organs, and the courses and found a new virus and ended in representative after the suburb. then they did the disease detection. where did it come from? a fellow who was the chief detective, this case during his ph.d. he sampled all sorts of animals. kangaroos', wombats, rats, mice, and sex and things called porter ruse. he did not find a virus.

finally, he sampled fruit bats and he found the virus that matched what had killed the horses and what had killed the trainer. they gave its name and a virus. another of these cases, had not killed very many people. does not pass from human to human, but it is a knock on the door, a reminder to us of where these things come from, how they emerge, why they spill over, the fact that they are not all independent cases, but part of a pattern, and that pattern reflects things that we humans are doing on the planet. and then they get into humans, and in some cases they cause a local outbreak which is easily comptroller comes to an end on its own, and in other cases they cause widespread suffering and death. hiv being the case in point there.

i might stop there and see if people have questions. there are certainly a lot of other points that i can touch on, but let me hear from you and see what you would like to hear about. >> thanks, david. my name is rick, and first of all, comments. toasty, warm memory of swimming at bozeman our springs. i bet you have been there, too. >> is still there. >> great place. the other, the question about viruses. i imagine it is a small number, but does anyone know what percentage of virus are pathogenic? >> no, because nobody knows how many viruses there are. i mean, we hear talk about it wilson or other people trying to estimate how many living species there are on planet earth. nobody knows how many species of vertebrates and invertebrates

animals and plants and fun guy there are with any precision. guesstimates ranging, i've heard estimates from 8 million the 30 million to 100 million. but when you had the virus is with bacteria, nobody knows. the percentage of viruses that come out of animals that are pathogenic to humans may well be a small percentage. yes. but the ones that are the exception to that are consequential. thank you for your question. >> hello. i enjoyed your book very much. i used it well i was a student in the class on but it -- miles yes, of hasidic. >> thank you. >> i have a question about the study of the genealogy of these diseases, and i was curious if there had been -- using that human genome from the deep past where there is evidence of stuff that killed a lot of people,

maybe cause a bottleneck in the human population, but is now totally harmless because all the survivors have reproduced down the generations, and that is all there is left. you know, looking back in time for old index and to trace disease that way, so have you -- >> i have not seen much on that. certainly there is -- one of the things that is very interesting to me is tracing, in the human genome, something that they call endogenous retroviruses, which are retroviruses, hiv is a retrovirus, a particular kind of arenavirus. endogenous retroviruses insert themselves permanently into the human genome and we don't know exactly. maybe in some cases they have functions. maybe they're would use to the college of dna, but they're there. usually right in the human genome the past infection's permit e. rubin of -- in terms

of the darwinian relationship between the infections of the deep past and the human genome as is has survived, very interesting. i can point you toward any particular work that i have come across on that. is probably been done. it would of sorry. i really can't tell you much more than that. >> hi. i have a question. so far we've heard you speak about different diseases. they cause death. usually it's -- and the examples that you gave us, dozens and hundreds, maybe thousands, but the reaction seems to be -- it seemed like the government -- the local government was overreacting when it was trying to solve the situation.

just recently, for example, in texas there was a west nile virus detected and they started spring. the swampy areas with the airplanes, my question is, are we doing more harm when we try to solve these issues? only hundreds of time when there are other diseases that kill millions and millions and millions. here, such exotic diseases. when we hear about them we get into shock when. reaction seems to be too much. it may be harming the population >> yeah. i hear you asking two questions. one is, are we doing some things that cause more harm than good? and also, are we sort of taking these things out of proportion to the damage that they do? let me answer the second one first. i ask the same thing and a fellow whose studies the virus

that i mentioned. it also occurs in bangladesh and has a different story because bangladeshes a muslim country and there are big pork farms. it doesn't pass through pegs as amplifiers. it is transmitted into ron -- brought date palms that that people drink. they drink from the pots and leave waste and the paths. so i talked to this fellow named steve blimpie second from the cdc, invest in the same thing. there are hundreds of thousands of children in bangladesh dying of bacterial diarrhea and bacterial pneumonia. basin a place called the colorado. these kinds of diseases have been murderous in bangladesh for

centuries. i asked him, why bother with the po which kills a few dozen people each year when you have all these other diseases? and he told me that this is such a nasty disease, and it has such potential that we cannot ignore it simply because it is no small could be large. it is important, yes, to take these other diseases, these more old-fashioned garden variety diseases like cholera. very important to take them seriously and keep it in perspective. very important also to be vigilant about these new emerging diseases because, after all, in 1981 we had a disease emerge called aids, and it was one of these. the influences emerged a new each year. influences are also capable of killing millions of people. i think that is the response that i have heard from the experts about what to take these small boutique diseases very

seriously. you never know when one of those is going to become the next big one. in terms of the things we do to try and stop, contained, or prevent the spillovers, in some cases, yes, we probably do more harm than good. spring for insects, you know, depending on what they're spraying with, would be an immediate candidate. you would want to think about it. we have done so much, so much, so much fuel damage to the decades trying to spread in six out of existence, and it just as work. but there are cases when governments have taken a very rigorous action demanded has been very important and beneficial. for instance, when stars emerged from southern china, got on,. it was of very nasty virus that was passed by the respiratory route, killed 10 percent of the people that it infected, spread quickly from hong kong to

toronto, beijing, hanoi, and singapore. and it injected a total of about eight dozen people, killed about 900, so better than to%. and then it was stopped. i heard somebody, and one of the book reviews somebody was saying, well, it's one of those that burned out. stars did not burn out. it was stopped by a very good, early diagnostic scientific work in the field and the laboratory and then very firm public health measures, containment of cases, isolation of cases, getting the right equipment, the right personal protection to the health care workers so that it did not go further. and one of the things i always wonder about when i think it was ours is, if that disease had emerged from a different place than southern china and then hong kong and had gone to different cities than toronto, hanoi, paging, and singapore, but the whole history have been

different? think about those cities. command-and-control cities with a lot of strong government, a lot of good public health, a flood facilities. if that disease immersed in a province of the democratic republic of the condo, gutted kim johnson, i love the condo, but it has a lot of disadvantages, and its disadvantages would have been probably very consequential if something like saar's it come out. >> site. yes, book and a lot about the wildlife aspect of the diseases. could you comment on the role of the livestock industry, both in terms of the control and prevention of these diseases, but also the potential spread. >> yes. the factory farming, huge operations like the pig farms in malaysia are part of what makes

this problem more urgent and more dangerous. it is part of what makes us, the human population and are extensions of a forest of very dry tinder waiting for a spark. the mention the case of malaysia. the fact that there were kept in these huge outdoor compounds. they were arranged in a particular way with the fruit trees, part of what resulted in a spillover. the other thing is that huge aggregations of wildlife also represents populations in which a bug can evolve. more abundant the virus replicates the more it is likely to mutate, and if it is an arenaviruses opposed to a double helix dna virus then its mutation rate is willing to be particularly high. it will generate a lot of change, a lot of genetic variability as replicates

itself. and, of course, that is great for darwinian natural selection said that arenaviruses evolve more quickly than other kinds of pathogens, and if you let them build up huge populations so that there are many, many hosts that are infected and each host contains many, many virus particles then you provide abundant opportunity for evolution to function and for some particular strain to come out of there that is both really transmissible among humans and really brilliant, so that represents a danger. so the mess -- mass production of livestock is part of what -- and that is only one aspect. there are others. but this is part of what makes us particularly jeopardized by this situation. >> in your experience because --

scientists, these areas where they're is a high rate of crossover, spillover of these diseases, have you -- to what extent have you noticed efforts to educate the local human population on how to modify their lifestyles so it is better to avoid those crossover and spillover? >> there are certainly efforts in bangladesh. they're trying to educate people not to drink rod date palms that that can potentially contain meat of virus. if you cook the stuff you can kill the virus. people like to drink raw. it's sort of a tradition, a seasonal treat. so there are things like that. in southern china they crack down on the big markets, at least above ground. they have gone underground. there is a black market. but the big markets, all kinds of wildlife for sold live for

food. there is a fashion in southern china. they call it wild flavor. it is a vote for eating wild life this is considered to be very robust and tasty. one other thing on that in terms of education of local people, i mentioned that the original spillover, the pandemic strain of hiv occurred in southeastern cameron. i went there to retrace was probably the route it took coming out of southeast and cameron down a river system that ticket along the somme river down to the main stem condo and eventually to the city's of brazzaville and leopoldo, leopoldo is the city that became consensus, and that is where it really started to have a higher rate of transmission, sexual mores were different. population was more concentrated

there were other factors that i described in my long chapter on hiv. and it began to crackle in what became can shaw's and eventually went from can shows up to haiti into the world. so i went to southeast and cameron to see what i could learn about the state of human relations. the people were still killing. that is true. they are. i heard about from sort of a confidential source, i heard about a practice, a tribal initiation practice which involves some rituals that included the eating of chimpanzee arms. so people are still exposing themselves to the viruses that chimpanzees carry.

in one office, an office of the wildlife department in the southeastern corner of cameron i saw a poster, an aids awareness poster, getting back to your question. in french, french is the colonial language of most people still speak. a poster in french trying to educate people about the dangers of aids, what they call the red diarrhea. and but the poster said there was not, you know, practice safe sex, use condoms, don't exchange needles. with the aids awareness poster says in southeast and cameron is don't eat the apes. don't eat the champs, don't eat the guerrillas. that is aids education. >> thank you for being here. dr. sam hancock of emerald planet to mineral plenty the. and with the transportation system, supply chain within 24

hours, as you know, viruses can be around the globe. so in one of the most underfunded public programs, of course, public health. this is something that the massive amount of money has been drawn out of of the last 50 years and put in specialty health. so are there any best practices that you have seen in the various countries the u.s. travel sues buildup the public health system so they can more easily identify some of these pathogens and viruses and be able to respond to it, something that is always reactive instead a proactive. >> some very interesting initiatives of vigilance better going on, and you may have heard about some of these. when it comes to mind is something called the global viral forecasting initiative founded by a fellow named nathan wolfe, a young disease scientists based in stamford.

he worked in cameron for years doing field work on the transmission of viruses by way of which need from african wildlife and to hunters and the people, the bush meat hunters and their families. nathan has worked on this a long time. he has a big grin now, and he has expanded this operation into , as i said, a global viral forecasting initiative. he now simply calls it global viral. in one sample of the kind of work that is being done out there is that he and his people send little kids out with the -- the people, usually men, the men who do the bush meat hunting from the villages in central africa. little kids that involve filter papers, just simple filter papers, the kind used for medical purposes and probably not that different from what you would filter your coffee with.

and ziploc bags, and they pay the hunters to collect samples for them. at dot of blood on a filter paper then placed in a ziploc bag now can be used as a sample from which in the laboratory, a week or two weeks or months later you can extract enough dna or rna to identify a virus. so that is what they do, and it is a big advance over what used to have to be done. he would have to capture an ample @booktv animal, take a blood sample, and put that in liquid nitrogen and rushed back to the u.s. and liquid nitrogen, it would freeze it. well, the dots of blood are at room temperature. they do not have to be kept cool. this can be done, i think the use pcr technology and a lot of other fancy laboratory things to extract, not live virus. you can't extract live virus

from a simple like that. you can't grow it in a lamp, but you can extract dna and rna to identify what was there, so that is what nathan wolfe and his people are doing. the idea being to spot the next big one at a very, very early phase before decades pass before we realized that hiv was in the human population. the idea is try and catch the next big one much earlier than that. >> how did these deadly animal viruses tend to revolve? and do you think there will be, they will continue to evolve at the rate that they have done in our recent experience of monitoring and trying to control them? >> two things to happen if you are a virus. picture yourself a virus living in a monkey in central africa. humans a coming in. they are tearing down their habitat. they're tearing down the monkeys

habitat. they are killing the monkeys for food. they are building villages, settlements, timber camps. so the horizons, the prospects of that particular virus are shrinking and shrieking in shrinking. and at the point where that monkey approaches the brink of extinction, two things can happen to the virus. it can go extinct along with the monkey or it can make a leap to another host. and viruses don't have purposes. i don't want to make this sound to in the logical. they don't make choices. evolution is not a theological anyway. the things just happen, and they have consequences. and if the monkey is kill then there is no spillover then the virus goes extinct, probably with the monkey. the virus gets into a human by chance, and opportunity, and it finds itself unable to replicate in the human and then adapts to the human by mutating and

undergoing natural selection so that it is better and better adapted to the human to above to replicate and to be transmitted to the next, then the virus has won the sweepstakes. it has passed from a species of host with shrinking prospects to a species of host that is the most abundant species of large order and all that has ever existed on this planet, us. >> thousands or even millions of these viruses that have the potential to then evolve into a dangerous killing virus? >> yes, presumably. >> transmitted. >> i think this is his answer is yes presumably. we are just scratching into that area. some of these scientists say, we don't know how many species there are out there in the tropical forest. we know there are millions.

we can safely assume that each one has a unique virus, at least one. >> okay. we ran out of questions because we ran at a time. >> thank you very much. thank you for your questions. thank you. [applause] >> we would like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback. twitter.com/booktv. >> it was almost two years ago that i decided it was time to write a fact based primer -- premiere on gay-rights, specifically targets right of center voters, has the subtitle of the book. to do two things, number one gun a to challenge the religious right on its own turf and to show that what it -- that much of what is derisively or what they derisively called the gay agenda is actually consistent with fundamental republican and libertarian principles. number two, to show center-right voters who believe in social tolerance that not only are they

not a voice in the wilderness, they actually represent a majority of rank-and-file republican voters. so the book has three major things. the first one i just alluded to, many on the right simply don't understand that properly understood, a gay rights are, in fact imperfectly compatible with fundamental republican principles of limited government , individual rights, and equal protection of law. the essence of the classical liberal or libertarian philosophy is simply one of live and let live, all people are created with certain inalienable rights. the government does not allow brides depending on what religion you are, what economic class iran. what your gender is. or if directly what your sexual orientation as at least that is the way it is supposed to be preserved the most libertarians already get that. that is why they have a special obga