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We're disturbing wild ecosystems, coming into contact with wild animals more. As we become more abundant, we're consuming more. Since 1960, there have been a number of these spillovers of pathogens, usually viruses, from wild animals into humans. QUAMMEN: It does seem to becoming more frequent. This virus now has achieved great evolutionary success. They're now in the world's most abundant large animal, and they've achieved great evolutionary success. And if they transfer to humans and are able to replicate and spread, then they have, as one scientist has told me, they've seized the golden ticket. If a species is becoming endangered and going extinct, the viruses in that have a chance to transfer to a new host. So as we come in contact with those animals - hunting them, cutting down their habitat, building timber camps, building mining camps in those diverse ecosystems - we offer ourselves as an alternative host to them. And many of them carry a lot of viruses of which most are unique to the human species. Every species of wild animal living in our diverse ecosystems and our remnants of ecosystems carries viruses. QUAMMEN: Well, it happens by human contact with wild animals. Why does wild-animal-to-human transmission happen? How does it happen? SIMON: We've seen this happen, obviously, in - over the past generation - AIDS, West Nile fever, SARS, Ebola. That was all what sort of a composite of the potential events that scientists were telling me 10 years ago when I was researching my book.

The idea that a new virus, a coronavirus, might come to us from a wild animal, probably a bat, maybe in a wet market, oh, for instance, in China, none of that was surprising. I was surprised by how unprepared we were. Good to be with you in this weird and difficult time. David, thanks so much for being with us.ĭAVID QUAMMEN: Thank you, Scott. David Quammen warned about exactly such a potential outbreak in his 2012 book "Spillover: Animal Infections And The Next Human Pandemic." David Quammen joins us now from his home in Bozeman, Mont.

The novel coronavirus originated in Wuhan, China, where it's thought to have jumped from wild animals to humans maybe in open-air markets.