Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

Quammen opens his discussion of SARS with a brief interlude of “personification”: He describes how the virus “got on a plane” from Hong Kong to Toronto in February 2003, and then another from Toronto to the Philippines (167). It was particularly hazardous to medical professionals—during its spread to Hanoi it killed a WHO communicable disease specialist who treated a patient there. Once the disease spread to 70 hospitals in Beijing, the WHO issued a global alert about the new disease, originally characterized as “severe, acute respiratory syndrome of unknown origin” (168). The new disease was the subject of so much alarm because of its “infectiousness” and its “lethality”—it was much more dangerous than typical pneumonia (169).

Hong Kong was not the origin of SARS: instead, the virus originated in a neighboring province, Guangdong, the southernmost part of mainland China. In November 2002, a man in Guangdong province became ill with mysterious respiratory symptoms. No samples were taken, but the nature of his illness and the fact that he infected his family led to the assumption that this “local government official” had SARS (170). His more important trait may have been that he prepared a chicken for a family meal, as a restaurant chef in the city of Shenzhen later became ill.