good evening. i'm one of the founders of politics and prose and as you see this evening c-span here is the microphone working? we have one microphone here to ask questions. so if you need access to the microphone you can go around

back. i want to welcome david 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 has written many books including the son of the dodo that won the medal history writing. the honorary degrees from corrado college and montana state university where he served as the lawless state professor of western american studies. he's also won the national magazine award three times for articles and a wide variety of magazines including esquire, the atlantic and rolling stone asserteathird of these were fore national geographic story called

was darwin wrong. now he has the title contributing writer which requires them to write three articles per year. he describes them as evolutionary biology and conservation but i hope that people have as much appreciation for his physical strength and stamina as you have for his writing talents. in his research he tracks indiana jones finals through jungles and rainforests that most of us would never want to set foot in. tonight you're going to learn a new word zoonosis.

at least i learned that new word. zoonoses are infectious diseases that originate in animals and spread to humans. for those of you that read i can't believe that it was about 20 years ago, 18 to be exact, you had an early exposure to this frightening scenario that he has elaborated on a great deal in his new book. publishers weekly gave it a starred review and decide, and this is a quote, this is a frighteningly important for anyone interested in learning about the prospects of the bolts next major pandemic so here is david to talk about his book. plus

[applause] >> thank you very much, barbara is nice to be here at politics and prose. as barbara said, i've been here before a little bit too far away and don't publish books that often. it takes me about six to eight years to get one of these things done. i'm going to talk for 20 to 25 minutes about the book and some extent the writing about the bug and you know this better than i do i'm sure then we will have some conversation. as barbara explained that this is a book about the scary new emerging diseases and where they emerge from and in particular

nonhuman animals other than our domesticated animals. one point of entry is the daily newspaper itself. i think in the dallas area alone there have been some that died of west nile fever just since july. there's been an outbreak began in central africa the republic of the congo and its still going

on across the border in uganda for the democratic republic of the congo so these things are happening. it's like a drumbeat of disease outbreaks and crises. there's another on the arabian peninsula there is a virus that emerged that resembles the sars virus that scared the experts back in 2003. the new sars virus out of the arabian peninsula has only killed one person and another man in the hospital in britain but scientists all over the world were watching it carefully because they know the next big one could look something like

that. so there is a drumbeat of these things. the diseases that i've mentioned have two things in common. among those i mentioned they are all caused by viruses and that is the particular profile of the scariest of the exemplars of this phenomenon. they call these animal infections that pass into humans zoonoses, a virus or it can be other forms of infectious blogs. it can be a bacteria, a protozoan like the creatures that cause malaria, it could be a fungus, it could be a worm, something called a pre- dot that causes mad cow disease and

usually it is a virus more than anything. they pass from animals and humans. they don't always cause disease. sometimes they become harmless passengers and humans. there is a virus i talk about and about and i couldn't resist it because it has such a wonderfully gruesome name and you have tyou have to find the e of the subject. with all due respect to the people who suffer, the people who die and there are a lot of deaths in the book. strictly nonfiction, but still i didn't want this book to be just a painful gruesome duty i also wanted it to be a pleasurable experience and wanted to have

moments of suspense and mystery and discovery with some of the scientists out of studying this sort of thing and yes, even some moments of humor. it's not a very funn funny bookt i hope it might be the funniest book i've ever read about ebola. [laughter] some of these when they pass into humans are harmless but often they are not. if it passes them to call it a zoonotic disease and 60% of the infectious diseases of humans are zoonotic disease is and the other 40% everything comes from somewhere and the others are probably of zoonotic origin in the broad sense for him since

measles. where did it come from, a virus that causes the disease in food animals in africa, but it's been in humans long enough then it has evolved and has become adapted specifically to humans, so it's different enough that it's considered a uniquely human virus. but the 60% are passing back and forth or passing from animals to humans on either a continuing basis or they've done that very recently and that includes things like ebola, all of the influenza, west nile virus, hiv.

i talked at some length in the book of the ecologica about thel origins of the pandemic, and we now know that the strain passed from a single chimpanzee to a single human in a small corner of southeastern cameroon and south in 1908 or earlier give and take how do we know that, because there are wonderful scientists who've worked on the genetics of the viruses that are precursors and the diversity of hiv pandemic strain and they've managed to locate the spillover event with a high degree of confidence there's always a certain provision out of the bed

with a high degree they've located at presumably a human that killed the chimpanzee and then cut himself on the hand, got blood to blood contact while he was butchering the chimp for food, and in the early part of this century, sometime around or before 1908, these are the scientists who have done that work. so there are these diseases and a spillover. they are zoonotic. one other slightly technical term reservoir host, the kind of animal in which the bug or the virus lives permanently

inconspicuously without causing disease, without causing mayhem. why did it live there comments we nondestructively, probably because it has been there for millions of years and that accommodation has evolved. so the virus and its reservoir host replicates, but it doesn't replicate cataclysmic way. it's slowly and doesn't generally cause symptoms so it hides in its host and then something happens. humans kill and eat the toast and come into contact with it somehow. maybe i will tell you a couple of ways that this can happen. the reservoir host gets into humans independent becomes a

zoonotic disease. one of the things they do as they study the field and focus on the different diseases, one of the first things they have to do is identify the reservoir host. it's killing pigs and pig farmers and butchers and pork seller is. the human victims and the pigs. this is a true case that happened in 1998 they named after a particular village in malaysia than they went looking for the reservoir host and founded in large fruit bats. they finally tracked it through

the route of the spillover and here is what happened people were cutting it down for the development for agricultural, for the timber itself, cutting down the forest and destroyed the fruit bat habitat they had to look somewhere else and started looking closer to the human settlements. fruit trees planted by humans some were out on pig farms and it was a second stream of income who ran these factory scaled pig farms in northern and central peninsula. some of the farmers even planted mango trees and another kind of fruit tree called the water apple very close to their open air pigsty is in some cases even shading the precise.

the bats come to the fruit trees planted over the pig sty is, eat the fruit, choose the mango, drop pulled into the pig sty, drop the feces and urine, drop the virus into the pig sty, they pick it up, the pigs get sick and then it's a very infectious respiratory disease, the pigs are coughing and barking and passing a vase from one to the other. the pigs are mostly not dying, however that it becomes a tremendous agricultural problem and then it starts getting into humans and it kills 109 people and causes the government of malaysia to call preventively 1.1 million pigs is required for killing of all the pigs that came from the farms. some o of them people were so scared by the disease that they were abandoning their own farms, they were running away from their own pig farms.

at one point, pigs were running loose through the villages and some cases it's like a nightmare scenario but it really happened because it is something like out of early mccarthy or the book of exodus running wild through the countryside coughing. one fellow called it the one-mile barking cough because you could hear them coming. ..

>> pigs or horses or the amplifier host it reproduces abundantly the mission of the virus and it gets into people in australia are the virus is called hendrick after a suburban of brisbane which is a racing suburb. 1994 the stables horses suddenly started to die. why are they dying? did they get poisonous feed? a veterinarian, a horse trainer and stable hand try to save the horses. the stable foreman got sick and went home that he had the flu the trainer got sick the

very bad flu went to the hospital the veterinarian never got sick. the trainer died they isolated the virus from his organs in the horses they found a new virus and named it hendrick after the suburb. then they did the disease succession where did it come from? a fellow who was the chief detective on this case doing phd in ecology was a veterinarian sampled kangaroos, wombats, rats and mice and insects. he didn't find the virus finally he sampled fruit bats and he found the virus that killed the horses and killed the trainer and named it hundred virus it hasn't killed very many people that doesn't pass from human to human but it is a knock on the door and

a reminder of where these things come from, how they emerge, why they still over , the fact they are not all independent cases but part of a pattern that reflects things that we are doing on the planet and then they get into humans and in some cases they cause a local outbreak which is easily controlled or comes to an end on its own or in other cases they cause widespread suffering and death hiv the case in point there i might stop there to see if people have questions there are a lot of other points that i could touch on but let me hear from you.

>> first of all a comment there is a question about viruses i imagine it's a small number does anyone know what percentage are pathogenic? >> no because nobody knows how many viruses there are. we talk about ed wilson or other people trying to estimate how many living species there are in planet earth nobody knows how many vertebrate or vertebrate with any precision to make ranging from 8 million to 100 million species but then if you add the virus and bacteri bacteria, nobody knows.

the percentage of viruses coming out of animals that are pathogenic to humans may well be a small percentage. but the ones that are exceptions to that are consequential. thanks for your question. thank you of the song of the dodo very much. i had a question of the genealogy of these diseases. using a human genome where there is evidence that has killed a lot of people causing the bottleneck in the human population is now totally harmless because all of the survivors have produced generations and that's all that's left so looking back in time from old pandemics to

trace disease that way. >> i haven't seen much on that. one of the things that's very interesting to me is tracing in the human genome they call it endogenous retroviruses in the hiv retrovirus the rna virus that insert themselves permanently into the human genome and we don't know exactl exactly, maybe they have functions or what was called junk dna and in the record of past infections and they can be recognized to lie to this virus family or that virus family. and that darwinian relationship between the infections of the past and the human genome as it has

survived. very interesting i cannot point you toward any particular work i have come across. it has probably been done it would have to be speculative to a certain degree. i'm sorry. i can't tell you much more than that. >> i have a question so far we have heard you speak of different diseases that cause death and the examples that you gave us were dozens or hundreds or thousands, but the reaction seemed like the local government was overreacting trying to solve the problem. so in texas there was the west nile virus detected and they started to spray the swampy areas my question is are we doing more harm trying to

solve these issues with other diseases killing millions and millions? and here because they are so exotic when we hear about them we get into shock and the reaction is too much and harming the population. >> i hear you asking two questions. are we doing things that cause more harm than good and also are we taking these 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 the legal virus and it also occurs in bangladesh. it has a different story because it is a muslim country and there are not big pork farms. it doesn't pass through the pigs as an amplifier but is

transmitted into the rod date palm staff that the people drink because of the way it is tapped they leave the waste in the pots and then drink it and get the virus. i talked to this fellow named steve from the cdc and i asked him the same thing. there are tens or hundreds of thousands of children in bangladesh and he was base of the colorado hospital. so i asked him so what kills a few dozen people each year. and that this is such a nasty

disease and has such potential and cannot ignore it it could be large with these more old-fashioned garden-variety like cholera is more important to take the seriously but it's very important to be vigilant about the new emerging diseases because after all , 1981 we had a disease emerge called aides and it was one of these. the influenza emerged a new each year and it's also capable of killing millions of people. that is the response i have heard from the experts to take these boutique series on - - disease is very serious because you don't know when it will be the next big one and what we do to try to stop or contain the spillovers, in some cases, yes we probably do more harm than good, spraying

for insects depending with a spray with would be an immediate candidate for that think about that because we have done so much futile damage over the decades trying to spray insects out of existence and it doesn't work. but there are cases when governments have taken rigorous action and it has been very important and beneficial like when sars emerged in southern china from hong kong was a very nasty virus passed through the respiratory route killed 10 percent of the people it affected spread quickly from hong kong to toronto and beijing hanoi and singapore it infected a total of 8000 people and killed 900 so better than 10 percent and then it stopped one of the book reviews i got somebody

said why does he take it so seriously? that burned out. it did not burn out it was stopped by very good early diagnostic scientific work in the field and in the laboratory and firm public health measures containment and isolation of cases to get the right equipment and right ppe to the healthcare workers so it didn't go further and one of the things i wonder about with sars if it emerged from a different place than southern china and hong kong going to different cities than toronto or hanoi and beijing and singapore might the whole history have been different? those are command-and-control cities with a lot of strong government a lot of good public health, affluent facilities, if that disease emerged in the province of the democratic republic of the

congo i love the congo but it has a lot of disadvantages that would have been very consequential if sars had come out. >> you have spoke about the wildlife aspect can you comment on the role of the livestock industry in terms of control and prevention but also the potential spread? and huge operations and malaysia are part of what makes this problem more urgent and dangerous. it makes us the human population and our extensions a forest a very dry tender. and to mention the case in

malaysia the fact that pigs were kept in the huge outdoor compounds. and then arranged in a particular way with fruit trees is what resulted in the spillover. the huge aggregations of wildlife also represent in which a bug can evolve. the more abundantly a virus replicates the more likely it is to mutate as opposed to the double helix dna than the mutation rate will be high and generate a lot of chang change, genetic variability to replicate itself which is great for darwinian natural selection so that the viruses evolve more quickly than other pathogens and if you let them build up huge populations so there are many hosts that are infected and each contains

many virus particles, then you provide abundant opportunity for evolution to function in for particular strain to come out that is transmissible among humans and virulent so that represents a danger so the mass production of livestock is one aspect and there are others i'm sure i am less aware of but it's part of what makes us particularly jeopardized by the situation as it is. >> in your experience following scientists to these areas of a high rate of crossover spillove spillover, to what extent have you noticed the efforts to educate the local human population how to modify their

lifestyle to avoid those crossovers? >> there are efforts in bangladesh to educate people not to drink rod date palm sap. if you cook it it can kill the virus but people like to drink it raw it is a tradition and a seasonal treat. there are things like that around the world and in southern china they crackdown on the wet markets above ground at least they've gone underground now but all kinds of wildlife are sold live for food they call it wild flavor it's known for eating wildlife not just because people need the protein for subsistence but because they have money and this is considered to be a

robust and tasty food. one other thing on that in terms of education and local people i mentioned that original spillover of hiv occurred in cameroon. i went to retrace the route that it probably took coming-out down a river system and along the river down to the main stem congo and eventually to the cities. and that is where it started to have a higher rate of transmission. sexual morays was different, populated one --dash population was denser and it began to crackle and then went to haiti and the world so into southeastern

cameroon just to see what i could learn the state of human relations of chimpanzees there now people are still killing them and eating them exposing themselves to other spillovers of the simian virus that became hiv. that is true. they are. i heard about it from a confidential source and a practice of a tribal initiation practice which involves some rituals with the eating of chimpanzee arms so people are still exposing themselves to the viruses chimpanzees carry. and in one office of the wildlife department in the southeastern corner of cameroon i saw of aids awareness poster getting back to your question that french

is a colonial language the poster in french trying to educate people about the dangers of aids that they call the red diarrhea. the poster said not practice safe sex or use condoms don't exchange needles what it says is tony the apes don't eat the chimps are the gorillas. that is age education. >> thank you for being here i'm from animal planet tv. with the transportation system, supply chain within 24 hours as you know viruses can be around the globe. one of the most underfunded public programs is public health. this is a massive amount of money has been drawn out over the last 50 years.

so are there any best practices that you have traveled to to build up the public health system so they can more easily identify these pathogens and viruses to respond? or is it always a reactive instead of a proactive? >> thank you for your question. this is a very initiative one - - interesting initiative one that comes to mind is called global viral forecasting initiative scientist based out of stanford and worked in cameroon doing fieldwork with the transmission of viruses from african wildlife and hunters and the bushmeat countries and their families.

nathan has worked on this for a long time with a big grant from google and expanded the operation as a global viral forecasting initiative he now calls a global viral the type of work that is being done he and his people send the little kids out the men who do the bushmeat hunting in the villages with very simple filter papers for medical purposes that are not that different than you would filter your coffee with. and ziploc bags and they pay the hunters to collect samples for them. one.of blood on the filter paper placed in the ziploc bag now can be used as a sample from which in the laboratory a

month later you can extract enough rna to identify a virus. so that's what they do. it's a big advance over what used to have to be done used have to capture an animal and put on liquid nitrogen rushing it back to the us. they would freeze it. >> they do not have to be kept cool they can be kept at room temperature for think they use pcr technology to extract not live virus you cannot extract live virus you cannot grow in the lab that you can extract dna and rna to identify. the idea being to spot the next big one and are very very early phase.

before decades past before we realize that hiv was in the human population. >> how do these deadly animal viruses tend to revolve? how we continue to revolve and that recent experience. >> and picture yourself as a virus in central africa. humans are coming in and tearing down your habitat in the monkeys habitat killer with one - - killing the monkeys for food and the prospects of that virus were shrinking and shrinking.

another point the monkey approaches the brink of extinction than two things can happen it can go extinct with the monkey or make a leap to another house and viruses don't have a purpose. they don't make choices. and evolution is not paleo logical anyway. things just happen with consequences. if there is no spillover than the virus goes extinct with the monkey and then to replicate in the human and then to be better adapted and then to be transmitted to the next human it is passed from a species with a large

vertebrate animal. >> of thousands or millions of these viruses that have the potential to revolve into a dangerous killing virus? >> yes. the answer is yes presumably. we know there are millions in the tropical forest we can safely assume each has unique virus, at least one.

[applause] >> let's tell you about the author this evening from the book it tickled me and covers everything from knock knock