Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

Quammen next considers where viruses “jump” from, noting that while some come from monkeys, or rodents, bats are a particularly common reservoir host, encompassing diseases like SARS and rabies. Quammen’s next disease exploration, Nipah, also belongs to this group, though it enters humans from pigs that bats have previously infected.

The Nipah outbreak began in Malaysia in 1998 after several people came down with “fever, headache, drowsiness, and convulsions. The victims were pig farmers or somehow associated with pig processing” (314). Health officials assumed the pigs had been infected by mosquitoes and that the disease was Japanese encephalitis (JE). Scientists at in the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Malaya became suspicious, though, when most of the cases appeared in adults. The department was led by Dr. Sai Kit Lam, called “Ken” by English speakers. JE was mainly known as a pediatric affliction. The virus also had a higher fatality rate than JE, and Malaysian pigs were suffering more from this disease than they typically did. In pigs, it was airborne, accompanied by “a rolling chorus of porcine hacking—people could hear it coming and wait with dread” (316).

Using samples from patients, scientists at the University of Malaya placed the virus inside a monkey kidney and observed that “the virus in culture started causing damage.