Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen Read Free Book Online Page B

hit with another devastating pandemic? Can we do that without inflicting fearful punishment on all those other kinds of infected animals with which we share the planet? The dynamics are complicated, the possibilities are many, and while science does its work slowly, we all want a fast response to the biggest question: What sort of nasty bug, with what unforeseen origins and what inexorable impacts, will emerge next?
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    D uring one trip to Australia I stopped in Cairns, a balmy resort city about a thousand miles north of Brisbane, for a conversation with a young veterinarian there. I can’t recall how I located her, because she was wary of publicity and didn’t want her name used in print. But she agreed to talk to me about her experience with Hendra. Although her experience had been brief, it included two roles: as doctor, as patient. At that time she was the only known Hendra survivor in Australia, besides the stable hand Ray Unwin, who had also suffered infection with the virus and lived. We spoke in the office of a small veterinary clinic where she worked.
    She was an ebullient woman, twenty-six years old, with pale blue eyes and hennaed brunette hair pulled back in a tight bun. She wore silver earrings, shorts, and a red short-sleeve shirt with a clinic logo. While an earnest border collie kept us company, nudging my hands for affection as I tried to write notes, the vet described a night in October 2004 when she had gone out to attend to a suffering horse. The owners were concerned because this particular animal, a ten-year-old gelding, seemed “off color.”
    The horse was named Brownie, she remembered that. He lived on a family farm down at Little Mulgrave, about twenty miles south of Cairns. She remembered it all, in fact, a night full of vivid impressions. Brownie was a quarterhorse-thoroughbred cross. Not a racer, no, a pet. The family included a teenage daughter; Brownie was her special favorite. At eight o’clock that evening the horse seemed normal, but then something went suddenly wrong. The family suspected colic, bad stomach—maybe he had eaten some toxic greens. Around eleven o’clock they phoned for help and got the young vet, who was on call that night. She jumped in her car, and when she arrived Brownie was in desperate condition, panting heavily, feverish, down on the ground. “I found the horse had a heart rate through the roof, temperature through the roof,” she told me, “and there was bloody red froth coming out the nose.” Giving him a quick look, taking his vitals, she came close to the horse and, when he snorted, “I got quite a degree of bloody sort of red mucousy froth on my arms.” The teenage girl and her mother were already smeared with blood from having tried to comfort Brownie. Now he could barely lift his head. The vet, a fiercely caring professional, told them the horse was dying. Knowing her duty, she said: “I want to euthanize it.” She ran back to her car, got the euthanasia solution and tools, but by the time she returned Brownie was dead. In his last agonal gasps, he had brought up more bubbly red froth through his nostrils and mouth.
    Were you wearing gloves? I asked.
    No. The protocol was to use gloves for a postmortem, but not for live animals. Then the one situation led so swiftly to the other. “I was wearing exactly what I’m wearing now. A pair of shoes, short socks, blue shorts, and short sleeves.”
    A surgical mask?
    No, no mask. “You know, in the laboratory all those precautions are easy to take. When it’s twelve at night and it’s pouring down rain and you’re out in the middle of the dark and you’re operating via the car headlights with a hysterical family in the background, it’s not always easy to take the proper precautions. And the other thing was, that I just didn’t know.” Didn’t know what she was confronting in Brownie’s case, she meant. “I wasn’t really thinking infectious disease.” She was defensive on these points because