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Scientists wait for next mass killer to spill over from nature

Sars outbreak in China
Sars outbreak in China
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More than a century after the Spanish Flu epidemic killed millions worlwide, Peter McGrath reports on the search for the next big one.

Scientists refer to it as the Next Big One and they know it’s likely only a matter of time before it strikes.

We’ve been here before of course. The Spanish Flu of 1918 went pandemic and killed millions, smallpox wiped out many native North Americans around 1520 and in five years Black Death did for one third of the people of Europe.

This time around it will likely be what’s known as a zoonotic infection, a disease passed from animals to humans, what author David Quammen calls a spillover, the title of his book. The list of diseases that batter the human immune system that have their origins in our four legged, bipedal and winged cousins is long and lethal. Some are familiar: AIDS, SARS, Ebola, avian and swine flu.

Some are less familiar: Hendra, Nipah, Marburg and the emerging strains of malaria. Tracking the next one is the subject of Quanmen’s latest book, which sees him shadow some of the scientists in the front line of the battle against disease.

Men like Brian Amman, a man who in 2007 went on the trail of the Marburg virus after an outbreak in Uganda. Similar to Ebola, catch it and you have a 50 per cent chance of dying.

Despite those odds, Amman and his team went into caves where it was known people had become infected. The cave floor was deep in rotting bat corpses, but the samples Amman collected proved that bats were the viral villain of the piece.

Sometimes it can take years or even decades for scientists to spot a virus. It was in Cameroon in 1908 or thereabouts when a hunter became the first human to be infected with HIV while butchering a chimpanzee for meat. The disease spread unrecognised around central Africa and eventually found its way to the US in the 1960s. However, it wasn’t until 1981 when a man suffering from oral thrush and pneumonia walked into the office of Dr Michael Gottleib that the medical community got on the trail of HIV.

Between that date and 2009, it is estimated that HIV has killed 35 million.

The story of SARS , also told in Spillover, is one of a disease bullet dodged and another virus that lives in bats and leaps easily into humans. Zhou Zoufeng, a fish seller from Quangzhou was the first to fall ill and while in hospital infected 30 nurses and doctors and 75 or so others. One doctor, unknowingly infected went to Hong Kong. He shared a hotel with a Canadian grandmother who later flew home to Toronto. SARS flew with her. A friend who lived in the city at the time described the reaction to the presence of as “hysterical... people stockpiling masks, staying at home, keeping kids off school”.

Fortunately, the people infected showed symptoms before they became highly infections and the disease broke out into populations that could contain it.

Often these stories seem like someone else’s problem, but it’s not. After the mild winter of 2011, last summer saw a tick epidemic, with Whitby minor injuries unit removing between 25 and 40 ticks a day. For most it resulted in nothing more than a little discomfort, but ticks can transmit Lyme disease which can cause a chronic, antibiotic-resistant condition similar to arthritis.

“Rather than the field work of finding the infectious agents and their animal hosts, much of the work now is dealing with the consequences of a spillover infection,” says Jonathan Wastling, an expert in zoonotic infections whose previous posts include research at Sheffield Universities. “In the event of an epidemic health professionals and politicians want to know what it is, who it will affect and how long it will last.”

Science, most people think, deals with facts. It doesn’t, it deals with probabilities. But the fact is that, sooner or later, as we push ever deeper into the wild places of the world in search of exotic tourism or resources, we are exposing ourselves to the possibility of viral or bacterial infection by something to which our immune system has no experience and no defence.

The Next Big One will probably be a spillover, an animal pathogen that finds a happy home on humans. It will probably be a virus, probably a flu virus that we have lovingly nurtured in a crowded farm, caught in a far eastern market and helped round the world into a crowded city on an air conditioned aeroplane.

It could be here before we know it and certainly before we’ve have time to stop it.

Spillover by David Quammen is published by Bodley Head, price £20.00. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 01748 821122.