The Ebola Outbreak: 'A Dress Rehearsal For The Next Big One'

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DAVID GREENE, HOST: In West Africa the Ebola virus is spreading with frightening speed. Let's just put this in perspective here. More than a third of all the people known to have died from Ebola since it was first discovered in 1976, have died in this current outbreak. David Quammen is the author of a book called "Spillover: Animal Infections And The Next Human Pandemic." We reached him because we wanted to learn more about the origins of Ebola.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Each of these new emerging diseases is sort of a mystery story. And the first mystery to be solved is, what's the reservoir host, and then, what caused it to spill over from that host into humans.

GREENE: You say reservoir host. Explain to me what you mean by that.

QUAMMEN: Well, a reservoir host is the animal in which one of these pathogens, viruses or another sort of bug lives permanently, inconspicuously without causing symptoms. That's its refuge, its home. And then when it comes out and gets into another species such as humans, it can cause big trouble. It's a new environment and it goes wild. So that's - when Ebola gets into humans or gets into chimpanzees, or gorillas it causes mayhem.

GREENE: Is there an example of an Ebola outbreak where we learned something from how scientists believe it, you know, it started?

QUAMMEN: There is one from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and I can't tell you the year off the top of my head. But it was suspected that the first case or one of the first cases involved contact with a bat, a big fruit bat. There were some that were roosting along a river near this area and one man in particular bought a bat at a market, carried it home and the infection passed from him to his daughter and onward to other people in that area.

GREENE: Is there some element of human behavior here that might be evolving. You know, selling or buying a fruit bat at a market, maybe that's a species that wouldn't be on sale in a market in the past? Some have said that maybe deforestation at increasing rates is bringing humans in contact maybe with this virus. I mean, is our species behavior maybe causing this?

QUAMMEN: Absolutely, our species' behavior is part this - is causing this. More and more we're going into the wild diverse ecosystems around the world, especially tropical forests, we go into those places, we cut down the trees, we build timber camps, we build mines, we build roads, we build villages. We kill the animals and eat them or we capture them and transport them around the world. And in doing that we expose ourselves to all of these viruses carried by wild animals and that gives the viruses the opportunity to spill over into human hosts.

GREENE: So it seems like no one expected this outbreak to become so big and for this to spread so quickly. It's going from human to human at a very quick pace. What do you think is happening here?

QUAMMEN: The circumstances on the ground in West Africa seem to be especially bad. You have three smallish countries with very porous borders; some of those are forested borders. The virus has gotten across those borders. People are scared of the Westernized health care system. They want to take care of their loved ones at home. There is always some belief that this is not a virus, that this is a phenomenon that involves sorcery or curses that somebody puts on somebody else. So it's been very hard for those reasons to isolate the outbreak in one or two villages in the countryside.

GREENE: Is this virus, Ebola, adapting, mutating, changing over time and perhaps some way that could be really alarming here?

QUAMMEN: Well, that's a potential and that's a real concern. The more cases of Ebola infection we have, the more chances there are for the virus to mutate in a particular way that adapts it well to living in humans, replicating in humans and perhaps transmitting from human to human.

GREENE: How do you see the future of Ebola right now?

QUAMMEN: Well, the experts I listen to remind us that this is not an easily transmissible virus. It doesn't travel by the respiratory route; it doesn't travel on a sneeze; it doesn't travel on a cough, so far. So I would hope that this outbreak, however bad it may become, can be controlled short of the scope of the big epidemics and pandemics. But there are lots of other viruses out there that are also jumping from animals into humans, passing from human to human, replicating abundantly, evolving. So that it may be that bird flu or the SARS coronavirus may return. The MERS virus out of the Arabian Peninsula, there are all these things. I don't think that this Ebola outbreak is the next big one, but I think it's a dress rehearsal for the next big one.

GREENE: David Quammen, thanks so much for your time. We appreciate it.

QUAMMEN: You're very welcome, David.

GREENE: David Quammen is the author of "Spillover: Animal Infections And The Next Human Pandemic."

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