Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

The Origins of AIDS

smallpox, with material direct from a “vaccinal sore,” came down with syphilis. Smallpox vaccine administered to kids in Camden, New Jersey, at the start of the twentieth century, seems to have been contaminated with tetanus bacillus, resulting in the death of nine vaccinated children from tetanus. Around the same time, a batch of diphtheria antitoxin prepared in St. Louis, using blood serum from a horse, also turned out to carry tetanus, which killed another seven children. Producers then began filtering vac

ack in 1861, a group of Italian children vaccinated against

Subtype A got to East Africa, probably via the city of Kisangani, halfway between Léopoldville and Nairobi. Subtype C spread to southern Africa, probably via Lubumbashi, way down in

the Congolese southeast. Seeping across Zambia, achieving rapid transmission in mining towns full of workers and prostitutes, subtype C proliferated catastrophically throughout South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho, and Swaziland. It went on to India, which is linked to South Africa by channels of exchange as old as the British empire, and to East Africa. Subtype D established itself alongside subtypes A and C in the countries of East Africa, except for Ethiopia, which for some reason became afflicted early

and almost exclusively with subtype C. Subtype G got up into West Africa. Subtypes H, J, and K remained mostly in Central Africa, from Angola to the Central African Republic. In all these places, after the usual lag of years between infection and full-blown AIDS, people began dying. And then there’s subtype B.
Sometime around 1966, subtype B crossed from Léopoldville to Haiti.

suggested that I forget about Ebola and write a book on asthma, which afflicts 22 million Americans

roup B was traceable mainly to countries on the eastern end of West Africa, such as Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire

It lives in coastal West Africa, from Senegal to Ghana,

Even during an average year, seasonal flu causes at least 3 million cases and more than 250,000 fatalities worldwide