Renowned science writer to speak in Hamilton

By Michael Howell

 

Rocky Mountain Laboratories, one of the few laboratories in the nation conducting research on the Ebola Virus, is hosting a talk by Montana author and journalist David Quammen, entitled “Ebola to Zika and Beyond: Scary Viruses in a Globalized World” on Tuesday, October 17, at 7 p.m. at the Hamilton Performing Arts Center. The event is free and intended for a general audience.

 

Quammen’s book, “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic,” was published in 2012. It started as a story for National Geographic and grew into a 500-page book based on six years of research and writing, including field work in the Congo forest of Africa, Australia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, southern China … and Butte, Montana.

 

“It was quite a hair raising and interesting few years’ of work when I was chasing around with those people,” said Quammen in a telephone interview with the Bitterroot Star.

 

A couple of years after that book was published, Ebola was making international headlines following an outbreak that spread quickly through Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea and even, eventually, into the United States through an airport in Dallas, Texas.

 

National Geographic asked Quammen to do a story about it. But while other journalists were rushing to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to cover the ongoing medical and humanitarian crisis in those countries, Quammen instead followed his interest in the “detective work” that was going on into the source of the virus. He joined a German scientist and his team in forays into the jungles of neighboring Ivory Coast in search of the animal host of the virus.
Ebola is a zoonotic disease, that is a virus that lives habitually in some non-human animal and then occasionally “spills over” from that animal into the human population, setting off a chain of infections among humans. It is the detective work going on in search of this animal that has captured Quammen’s interest. The ecological rather than the medical aspects of the crisis.

 

He says it is important because the medical impacts of the outbreak can and have been controlled. The virus is transferred through body fluids, meaning you must come into contact with an infected individual’s blood or other body fluid to get infected. Proper protocols can confine the disease and it will die out. But when the human scourge is over, the disease has not been eliminated. It has retreated into its “reservoir host” and could re-emerge into the human population at any time.

 

“This is important medically,” said Quammen, “because until you know where it lives after the first outbreak, you can’t take the measures to stop the next outbreak.”

 

Despite all the sleuthing, according to Quammen, “We still don’t know where the Ebola Virus lives when it is not killing humans.” Although Fruit Bats have been identified as a ‘suspect’, he said they have not been confirmed. He said scientists have found anti-bodies in the blood of some bats, but they have never isolated an Ebola virus in the blood of a bat. “Therefore we do not know for sure where the virus lives.” He calls it “one of the enduring mysteries of Ebola.”

 

Another emerging virus that has caught the world’s attention lately is the Zika virus. This virus is not spread by body fluids. It is carried by mosquitoes and brings a very different set of problems with it, according to Quammen. But these problems are striking a little closer to home, as the mosquitoes that carry the virus are moving northward into the southern United States.

 

If for instance, he said, it is fruit bats that host the Ebola virus, you simply have to avoid eating bats and you won’t get infected. But when a mosquito vector is involved, it is different. “They come looking for you,” he said.
Compounding the problem of mosquito vectors is the highly developed transportation system that humans have contrived which ends up carrying mosquitoes all over the globe.

 

“We have globalized infectious disease,” said Quammen. “In 24 hours a mosquito can get from wherever it is to any major city in the world.”

 

And not just mosquitoes. Obviously, an infected person can get from Hong Kong to any major city of the world in 24 hours as well. That’s how Ebola arrived in Dallas.

 

But in the case of Ebola a person would have to come into contact with the infected person’s body fluid to catch the virus. In the case of Zika the mosquito would have to find you and succeed in puncturing you. But in the case of Sudden Arrest Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), for instance, all you have to do is be on the airplane when an infected person sneezes, or walk into a hotel room just after the person has left and breathe.

 

That is what happened in the SARS epidemic in early 2002-2003. An infected person stayed in a Hong Kong hotel room and probably sneezed. The next thing you know the disease shows up in Bangkok, Singapore, Beijing and Toronto and people are dying quickly.

 

The airborne aspect of the SARS virus infection puts it into a much scarier class among these deadly infections. According to Quammen, it was a combination of good luck and a good response that squashed that SARS epidemic.

 

Quammen said that he has great confidence in the skills, knowledge and expertise of the scientists at RML, CDC and other top labs in the world.

 

“I have high, high regard for their skills and perspicacity,” said Quammen, “but they have a formidable adversary in these viruses.”

 

He said we not only need the expertise of these medical professionals, we also need good decisions by our politicians.

 

“It would be very unwise,” he said, “to cut funding for CDC. It would very unwise not to take these threats seriously. I am concerned in an era where we have very polarized political stances and have budgets to balance and we have people who are inclined to deny facts and talk about fake news and reject science. I am very concerned about those things undercutting the work of our professionals to deal with these very serious disease challenges.”

 

Quammen will share his views at the talk on Tuesday, October 17, at the Hamilton Performing Arts Center. He has had no problem in garnering acclaim for his work from the very professionals whose work fascinates him so. As Marshall Bloom, MD, RML associate director for scientific management, put it, “David is a gifted writer and speaker with an unmatched ability to transform scientific information into a compelling narrative. Spillover is one of the best books on viruses and the world that I have ever read. We are really fortunate that he can take time out of his busy schedule to share with our community.”

 

More about David Quammen

 

David Quammen, who with his wife resides in Bozeman, travels widely for research, often to tropical forests and other wild landscapes. His 15 books include “The Song of the Dodo” (1996), “The Reluctant Mr. Darwin” (2007), and “Spillover” (2012), a work on the science and history of dangerous viruses, including Ebola and HIV.

 

He began his career as a fiction writer, publishing his first novel in 1970, and then after several more books (including two spy novels) turned to nonfiction. He has written for Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, Outside, and Powder, among other magazines, and is a Contributing Writer for National Geographic.

 

Quammen wrote the entire text of the May 2016 issue of National Geographic on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the first time in the history of the magazine that an issue was single-authored. His book Yellowstone: A Journey through America’s Wild Heart is an expanded version of that text, with photographs by his National Geographic colleagues.

 

By coincidence a movie based on one of his early short stories, “Walking Out,” is going to show in Missoula on October 18, the day after his talk in Hamilton. The movie, made by two brothers, Alex and Andrew Smith, is the story of a father and son on a hunting trip that goes wrong. The movie premiered in New York and was well received at the Sundance Film Festival. It is also being shown as part of the Film Festival activities in Missoula.