[inaudible conversations] >> our look as pandemic related programs from booktv's archives continues with science writer david quammen who talked about diseases that originated in animals but still over to humans. >> good evening. i am barbara meade, one of the founders of politics and prose. as you see this evening we have c-span here. we -- is the mike working back there? i see somebody running toward the mike. we have just one like here to ask questions. if you need access to this mike

you can go around the back. i want to welcome david quammen who has come this evening to talk about his new book "spillover: animal infections and the next human pandemic". it's the first time he has been to politics and prose. he has written many many books including the song of the dodo which won the dondero's metal for history writing. david holds honorary degrees from colorado college and montana state university where he served as professor of western american studies. he has also won the national magazine award three times for articles in a wide variety of magazines including a squire, the atlantic and rolling stone. the third of these awards was

for a national geographic story called what went wrong. national geographic now, he has the title contributing writer, that is with capital letters which requires him -- did you say three articles a year? three articles a year for national geographic, he describes this as field biology, evolutionary biology, theoretical ecology and conservation but after this evening i hope you have as much appreciation for his physical strength and stamina as for his writing talent. in his research he tracks indiana jones style through jungles and rain forests but most of us would never want to set foot in. tonight you're going to learn a

new word, through gnosis. infectious diseases that originate in animals and spread to humans. for those of you who read the hot zone, i can't believe it about 20 years ago, 18 to be exact, you had an early exposure to this frightening scenario that david has been elaborating on a great deal in his new book "spillover: animal infections and the next human pandemic". publishers weekly said this is a frightening but critically important book for anyone interested in learning about the prospects of the world's next major pandemic.

[applause] >> thank you very much and nice to be here. i haven't been here before, live a little too far away and don't publish books that often. takes me about 6 or 8 years to get one of these things done. i will talk informally for 20 or 25 minutes. is that what you said? about the book. the subject and to some extent the writing of the book. you know the drill better than i do. then we will hear from you, have some conversation. as barbara explains, this is a book about scary new emerging diseases and where they emerge from and where they emerge from

generally is wildlife, from other species, nonhuman animals and in particular nonhuman animals other than domesticated animals. if you have been following certain stories in the news over the last few months, you know that one point of entry into the subject is the daily newspaper itself. you probably heard about hunter virus killing three people who visited you somebody. in the summer. people have been dying in north texas of west nile fever. in the dallas area alone, 15 people died of west nile fever since july. there has been an ebola outbreak in central africa. the democratic republic of the congo has an ebola outbreak

that has killed 3 dozen people by now and it is still going on. there was another ebola outbreak across the border in uganda unrelated to the spillover that caused the outbreak in the democratic republic of the congo. these things are happening. it is the drumbeat of disease outbreaks and small crises. there is another on the arabian peninsula. a virus that emerged that closely resembles the sars family, coronavirus, it really scared the disease experts in 2003. this new sars like 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 are they watching it carefully? they know the next big one could look something like that. as i say there is a drumbeat of these things. those diseases that i have mentioned all have two things in common. they all come out of wildlife, they emerge from nonhuman animals and among those that i mentioned they are all caused by viruses. that is the profile of the scariest of the exemplars of this phenomenon. the scientists have a fancy name for it. as barbara mentioned, they call these animal infections the passing humans, zoonoses. a virus or other forms infectious bug can be a bacteria, protozoa, like the creatures because malaria. it could be a fungus, it to be a worm. it could be something called a

prion which causes mad cow disease. but usually it is a virus. viruses more than anything. they pass from animals into humans, don't always cause disease. sometimes they become harmless passengers in humans. there is a virus i talk about in the book that i couldn't resist because it has such a wonderfully gruesome name. you have to find the light side of the subject where you can find it. with all due respect to the people who suffer and die there are a lot of deaths in this book. district we nonfiction, there are a lot of deaths. but still, still, i didn't want this book to be just a painful,

gruesome duty, just an important scary book. i also wanted to be a pleasurable reading experience, page turner, to have moments of suspense, mystery and discovery, moment a wisdom by scientists are studying this thing and some moments of humor. it is not a very funny book but i hope it might be the funniest book about ebola you will ever read. [laughter] >> so the -- as i said, some of these bugs when they pass into humans are harmless. often they are not. if the zoonoses passes into humans and causes mayhem, we call it a zoonotic disease and 60% of infectious diseases of humans are zoonotic diseases. the other 40% comes from somewhere, the other 40% are

probably of zoonotic origin in the broader sense. for example measles. measles is only a disease of humans was where did he come from? it probably came from a virus that causes the disease in who for animals in africa but it has been in humans long enough that it has evolved and become adapted specifically to humans. it is different enough to be considered and functions as a uniquely human virus. 60% that are considered zoonotic are passing back and forth, 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 influenzas, west nile

virus, hunter viruses, hiv. i talk at some length about the ecological origins of the aids pandemic and we now know the pandemic strain of hiv passed from a single chimpanzee to a single human in a fairly small corner of southeastern cameroon in central africa. in 1908 or earlier give or take a margin a, how do we know that? there are wonderful scientists who have worked on the genetics, molecular phylogenetic of those that are precursors to hiv or those in chimps and monkeys and the genetic diversity of hiv-1 with the pandemic strain of hiv and

the scientists managed to locate the spillover event with a high degree of confidence. there's a certain provision alien science but with a high degree of confidence they have located it to southeastern cameroon. one chimpanzee, one human, presumably human who killed the japanese and then cut himself on the hand, got blood to blood contact when butchering the chimp for food, in the very early part of the twentieth century, sometime around or before 1908. their colleagues and labs have done that work. so there are these diseases. they spillover. they are zoonotic. one other slightly technical term i want to familiarize you with the reservoir host, the

kind of animal in which the bug, the virus or whatever it is lived indirectly, permanently, inconspicuously without causing disease, without causing mayhem. why does it live a? probably because it has been in that species for millions of years and an accommodation has evolved. a virus and its reservoir host replicates but doesn't replicate cataclysmic lee. it tends to replicate slowly and doesn't generally cause symptoms so it is invisible. it hides in its reservoir host and then something happens, humans kill and eat the reservoir host, come in contact with it somehow. i will tell you some ways this can happen. the reservoir host sheds virus and the virus gets into humans

and then becomes a zoonotic disease. one of the things the scientists do as they study this field, if they focus on these different diseases one of the first things they have to do is identify the reservoir host. new disease stills over in malaysia. is killing pigs, then pig farmers and pig butchers and pork sellers. where did it come from? they find the isolated very virus human victims and the pigs the same virus in the human picked victims and the pigs. this is a true case that happened in 1998. they named me but virus after a village in malaysia. then they went looking for the reservoir host and found it in large fruit bats, large fruit bats, the kind that are called flying foxes in asia. how did the spillover occur?

the disease detectives tracked it through the root of most likely spillover and here's what happened. people were cutting down forests, in peninsular asia for development, agriculture, timber itself, cutting down that forest, destroyed fruit that habitat. the fruit bats were displaced, had to go looking for food, nectar, somewhere else. they started going closer to human settlements. they were attracted to orchards, fruit trees planted by humans. some of the fruit trees planted by humans were on pig farms, the second stream of income for the pig farmers who ran great big factory scale pig farms in northern and central peninsular malaysia. some of these farmers even planted mango trees and another fruit tree called the water apple close to their open-air pigsty's and in some places

even shading their pig size. for bats come to fruit trees planted over the pig size, eat the fruit and chew the mango, the water apple, drop into the pigsty, but drop their feces and urine, there virus into the pigsty, pigs pick it up, pigs get sick and pig is a very infectious respiratory disease, pigs are coughing and barking and passing this virus from one to the other. the pigs are mostly not dying, not killing that many pigs but it becomes a horrendous agricultural problem. then it starts getting to humans and kills 109 people, causes the government of

malaysia to call preventively 1.1 million pigs, require 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 point pigs were running loose through the villages in some cases abandoned villages of peninsular malaysia, a nightmare scenario that really happened, like something out of early cormac mccarthy or the book of exodus. infectious pigs running wild through the countryside coughing a virus. one fellow called it the 1-mile barking cough. you could hear the sick pigs coming and you knew your pig farm would be next. meefa encephalitis is the disease. scientists try to solve the ecology and ablution a biology of these new diseases. where does the virus live? what is the reservoir host? how do humans come in contact

with the virus? in many cases it is that ecological disruption that causes the contact, causes the spillover, get into an intermediate animal, pigs as the case in australia where a virus falls out of bats and get into horses, pigs or horses are referred to as the amplifier host, the virus reproduces abundantly, they showed lots of virus into getting to people. the case in kendra, in australia, the virus is called henrietta after a suburb of brisbane known as kendra which is a racing suburb, 1994 in one stable in that suburb, horses started to die. why are they dying? did they get poisonous feed? a veterinarian, horse trainer and stable hand tried to save the horses.

the stable form and got sick, thought he had a bad flu, the trainer got sick, went into the hospital, veterinarian never got sick. the trainer died. the isolated virus from him and the horses they found a new virus, named at hand after the suburb. they did disease detection. where did kendra virus come from? a fellow who was the chief detective on this case, a veterinarian doing a phd in ecology sampled all sorts of animals, kangaroos, wombats, rats, mice and insects and things called porter troops, he didn't find the virus, he sampled fruit bats and found a virus that matched what had killed the horses in the trainer and gave it the name kendra virus. it hasn't killed very many people, doesn't 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 still over. the fact they are not all independent cases that are part of a pattern and the pattern reflects things we humans are doing on the planet and then they get into humans and in some cases cause a local outbreak which is easily controlled comes to a end on its own and in other cases cause widespread suffering and death, hiv being the case in point. i might stop there and see if people have questions. there are a lot of other points i can touch on, but let me hear

from you all and see what you would like to hear about. >> my name is rick. i have a toasty warm memory of swimming at bozeman hajj springs. >> it is still there. >> great place. the other is a question about viruses. i imagine it is a small number. anyone know what percentage of viruses are pathogenic? >> nobody knows how many viruses there are. 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 there are of vertebrate and invertebrate animals and plants and fungi there are with any precision. they make estimates ranging from i have heard estimate ranging from 8 million, to 30 million, 100 million species but when you had the viruses

and bacteria - nobody knows. the percentage of viruses that come out of animals that are pathogenic to humans may well be a small percentage. but the ones that are the exception to that are consequential. .. all the survivors have reproduced down generations and that's all there is left. looking back in time for old

pandemics to trace disease that way. >> i haven't seen much on that. certainly one other thing is very interesting to me is tracing in the human gene something they call endogenous retroviruses, which are retroviruses, hiv is a retrovirus, particular cachet ã ãendogenous retroviruses insert themselves permanently into the human genome and we don't know exactly maybe in some cases they have functions maybe they are what used to be called junk dna but they are there. they are record read in the human genome of past infections and can be recognized as belonging to this virus. in terms of the i can't put you

toward any particular worker come across on that noise. probably been done it would have to be speculative to a certain degree. i'm sorry, i really can't tell you much more than that. >> i have a question so far we've heard you speak about different diseases and they cause death in the examples you gave us was hundreds and dozens and maybe thousands but the reaction seemed like the government was overreacting when it was trying to solve the situation. recently in texas there was a west nile virus detected and they started spraying the swampy areas with the

airplanes. there are other diseases that killed millions and millions and we are not doing much in here since these are such exotic diseases when we hear about them we get into shock and the reaction seems to be too much and may be harming the population. >> i hear you asking two questions, one is are we doing some things that cause more harm than good and also her we sort of taking these things out of proportion to the damage that they do? let me answer the second one first, i asked the same thing of a fellow who studies at dnieper virus i mentioned to has a different story in bangladesh because bangladesh is a muslim country and there aren't big pork farms. it doesn't pass through pigs as

amplifiers in bangladesh it's transmitted broad date palm sap that people drink and the bats because of the way the date palm sap is tapped, batson drink from the pot to leave their waste to the pots and people drink it and get the virus. i spoke to this fellow steve luby second from cdc and asked him the same thing, there are hundreds of thousands of children in bangladesh dying of bacterial diarrhea and bacterial pneumonia and bangladesh, he was based at a place called the colorado hospital. these kinds of diseases have been murderers in bangladesh for centuries. ãbtold me that this is such a nasty disease and has such

potential that we can't ignore it simply because it's now small, it could be large it's important to take these other diseases these more old-fashioned garden-variety diseases like cholera it's very important to take them seriously and keep this in perspective but it's 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 emerge anew each year and influences are also capable of killing millions of people. so i think that's the response i've heard from the experts about why to take these small boutique diseases like dnieper 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 to stop contain or prevent these spillovers, in some cases, yes, we audibly do more

harm than good. spraying for insects is depending on what they are spraying with would be an immediate candidate for that. you'd want to think about that. we've done so much, so much futile damage over the decades trying to spray and sex out of existence and it just doesn't work. there are cases when governments have taken very rigorous action and it has been very important and beneficial. for instance, with stars emerging from southern china got to hong kong was a very nasty virus that was passed by the respiratory route killed 10% of the people that infected and spread quickly from hong kong to toronto in the beijing, and singapore. it infected a total of about 8000 people, killed about 900, better than 10%. and then it was stopped. i heard somebody i think in one

of the book reviews i got somebody was saying, why does he take sars so seriously it's one of those that burned out? sars did not burn outcome but sars's was stopped by very good early diagnostic scientific work in the field and laboratory and then very firm public health measures. containment of cases isolation of cases getting the right equipment the right personal protection to the healthcare workers so that it didn't go further. one of the things i always wonder about when i think about sars, if that disease had emerged from a different place then southern china and hong kong and had gone to different cities then toronto hanoi, beijing and singapore, but the whole history of been different? big about those cities, those are command-and-control cities with a lot of strong government. a lot of good public health, effluent facilities, if that disease emerged in a province of the democratic republic of the congo got to kinshasa, i

love the congo but it has a lot of disadvantages and its disadvantages would have been probably very consequential if something like sars had come out of cantata. >> you spoke 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. >> factory farming, huge operations like pig farms in malaysia are part of what makes this problem more urgent and more dangerous. part of what makes us the human population and are extensions of forest a very dry tender waiting for a spark. i mentioned the case in

malaysia, the fact that the pigs were kept in these huge outdoor compounds and that they were arranged in a particular way with the fruit trees was part of what resulted in that spillover. the other thing is that huge aggregations of wildlife also represent populations in which a bug can evolve. the more abundantly a virus replicates ãbit's mutation rate will be particularly high it's can generate a lot of change the genetic variability

if you let them build up huge population so there many hosts of an infected in each host contains many who host particles then you provide abundant opportunity for evolution to function and for some particular strain to come out that's both really transmissible among humans and really virulent. that represents a danger. that's what makes us particularly jeopardized by the situation. >> in your experience following scientists to these areas of a high rate of crossover and spillover of these diseases. to what extent have you noticed efforts to educate the he local human population on how to

modify their lifestyles so as to avoid the crossover. >> there are certainly efforts in bangladesh that trying to educate people not to drink raw date palm sap that can potentially contains dnieper virus. if you cook the stuff you can kill the virus. you like to drink it raw it's sort of a tradition and seasonal treat. there are things like that around the crackdown on the big web markets. at least above ground, they gone underground there's a black market but the big wet markets where all kinds of wildlife are sold live for food. there is a fashion in southern china they call it wild flavor, it's a vogue for eating wildlife. not because people need the protein for subsistence but

because they have some money and this is considered to be very robust and tasty food. one other thing on that in terms of education of local people. i mentioned the original spillover the pandemic strain of hiv occurred in southeastern cameroon i went there to retrace what was probably the route that it took coming out of southeastern cameroon and took it along the song the river down the mainstream congo in the cities of brazzaville and leopoldville, leopoldville is a city that became kinshasa and that's where it really started to have a higher rate of transmission. sexual morays were different, population is more concentrated. there were other factors i described in a long chapter on hiv. it began to crackle and what became kinshasa and went from kinshasa to haiti in the world.

i went to southeastern cameroon to learn but i could about the state of relations with chimpanzees there now where the people were still killing and eating chimpanzees and exposing themselves to other spillovers of the simian virus that became hiv, it's true they are. i heard about from sort of a confidential source i heard about a practice, but quality tribal initiation practice called beco which involves some rituals including the eating of chimpanzee arms. people were exposing themselves to the viruses of chimpanzees carry. in one office, and office of the wildlife department in the southeastern corner of cameroon, i saw a poster and aids awareness poster in french

french is the colonial language most people speak there. a poster in french trying to educate people about the dangers of aids. what they call the red diarrhea. with poster said there was not practice safe sex use condoms, don't exchange needles, with the aids awareness poster saying in southeastern cameroon is don't eat the apes. don't eat the chimps don't eat the gorillas. bethpage ãbthat's the aids education. >> i'm from emerald planet tv, with the transportation systems supply chain within 24 hours as you know viruses can be around the globe. in one of the most underfunded public programs is public health. this is something that massive amounts of money has been drawn out over the last 50 years and put in specialty.

are there any best practices you've seen in the various countries you travel to about how to build up the public health system so they can more easily identify some of these pathogens and the viruses and be able to respond to it or is it something that's always reactive instead of proactive. >> thank you for your question. there are some very interesting initiatives of vigilance that are going on and you may have heard about some of these. one of them that comes to mind is something called the global viral forecasting initiative founded by a fellow named nathan wolf. the youngish disease scientists based at sanford. he worked in cameroon for years to work on the transmission of viruses by way of bushmeat from african wildlife into hunters and bushmeat hunters and their

families. nathan has worked on this a long time he is a grant from google now that he's expanded this operation into a global viral forecasting initiative. he simply calls it global viral. one of the things one sample of the kind of work that's being done out there is that he and his people send little kids out with the people usually men the men who do the bushmeat hunting from the villages in central africa little kits that involve filter papers, 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 they pay the hunters to collect samples from them. a dot of blood on a filter paper then placed in a ziploc bag now can be used as a sample

from which in a laboratory week or two weeks or a month later you can extract enough dna or rna to identify a virus. that's what they do and it's a big advance over what used to have to be done each have to capture an animal take a blood sample from it and then put that sample in liquid nitrogen and brought it back to the u.s. liquid nitrogen you would freeze it. dots of blood or at room temperature they do not have to be kept cool. this can be done i think they use pcr technology and a lot of other fancy laboratory things to extract, not libraries you can extract live virus from a sample like that you can't grow in the lab but you can extract dna and rna to identify what was there. thoughts will nathan wolf and his people are doing the idea of being to spot the next big one at a very early days before

the decades pass before we realize that hiv was in the human population. the idea is try and catch the next big one much earlier than that. >> how do these deadly animal viruses tend to evolve? and do you think they will continue to evolve at the rate that they have done in recent experience of monitoring and trying to control them? >> two things can happen, picture yourself a virus living in a monkey in central africa and humans are coming in, they are tearing down your habitat, tearing down the monkeys habitat. killing the monkey for food, building villages, settlements, timber camps so the horizons

the prospects of that particular virus are shrinking and shrinking. 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. viruses don't have purposes, i don't want to make this sound theological. they don't make choices. evolution is not theological anyway. things just happen and they have consequences. if the monkey is killed and there is no spill over the virus goes extinct probably with the monkey. if the virus gets into a human by chance by opportunity and it finds itself able to replicate in the human and adapts to the human by mutating and undergoing natural selection so it's better and better adapted to the human both replicate in the human add to be transmitted by the next human that that virus has won the sweepstakes. it's passed from species of

host with shrinking prospects to a species of host that is the most abundant species of large vertebrate animal that's ever existed on this planet, us. >> the thousands of millions of these viruses that have the potential to then evolve into and be into a dangerous killing virus? >> yes, presumably. >> and then transmitted? >> i think the safest answer is yes, presumably. we are just scratching into that area. some of the scientists i talked to 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 each has a unique virus, at least one. >> we ran out of questions just as we ran out of time. [applause] fatethank you very much!

>> this is just one of many programs book tv has covered on pandemics. to review the full list doug to booktv.org and type pandemic and booked into the search bar at the top of the page. >> booktv covers a number of book fairs and festivals around the country around. this spring we planned on being live from the tucson book festival and on attending the virginia festival of the book ends charlottesville, both of these festivals have been canceled due to the coronavirus. the national book critics circle of wards has also been postponed for a later date and los angeles times festival of books originally set for april has been rescheduled for october. to watch any of our previous festival coverage click the book fairs tab on our website booktv.org. >> recently on our weekly author interview program "after words" the american enterprise

ãbon the threats the u.s. faces from china. >> given your own experience in congress and in american politics, what do you think are some of the changes we need to make domestically to make sure we do have the resources to compete with china? >> that's part of why i wrote the chapter it is in china's fault because a lot of what has to be done is not china. when you have six schools in baltimore in which last year not a single student in six schools not a single student could pass the state math and writing exam. you have a crisis that would be there whether the chinese existed or not.

it slows everything down and makes everything too expensive. we have huge zones of reform that we need. the chinese currently are mopping up all sorts of international organizations by basically bribing companies and are going to end up either being the leader or having picked the leader for an amazing range of international organizations. we are not even repaired to start thinking about a campaign on the scale and complexity that we will need in places like the food and agricultural organization or the world health organization, just go down the list. it's astonishing how methodically successful they

been. i think we are going to have to, if we are serious, and we are determined to overmatched the chinese, we are going to have to really get our act together we have to go through some very painful and very profound reforms and part of the reason i wrote trump versus china was to set the stage for people to have this conversation and to recognize that everything the president is doing which i think is the right general direction is about 10% of what we need to do if we are all going to be capable of competing with china. >> to watch the rest of the program visit our website booktv.org, search for "newt gingrich" or the title of his book " trump china". >> journalist ãbturning point

usa founder charlie kirk offers his thoughts on what he calls the new conservative agenda, historian matthew l geo chronicles robert kennedy's visit to appalachia in the winter of 1967 68 and its role in his decision to run for president. former deputy national security advisor katie mcfarland reflects on her time in the trump administration. in former obama administration official dan pfeiffer weighs in on how to beat president trump in the 2020 election. check your program guide for more information. >> can you hear us out there? there we are. welcome, i'm dorian devens and. >> by margaret mandelbaum. >> we are happy to be back here at symphony space. welcome to all of our regulars. anyone who is a first timer, this is an event series and we bring scientists of all discipline out of their labs and onto the public