Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

For Quammen’s next zoonosis tale, he goes back to Australia and also back in time to the 1930s—to a mysterious flulike illness later christened “Q fever.” Unlike previous diseases Quammen has examined, Q fever is a zoonotic bacterium, not a virus. Like Hendra, Q fever has particular ties to Australia, while psittacosis first attracted major attention after parrots that were brought to the United States sickened people in Annapolis, Maryland. The disease causes a variety of symptoms, described as “fever, aches, chills, pneumonia, and sometimes death” (212). Newspapers popularized it as “parrot fever.” The third subject of this section is Lyme disease, so named after parents in Lyme, Connecticut, noticed their children were developing arthritis-like symptoms after being bitten by ticks. All three diseases are bacterial, which Quammen points to as a sign that “not every bad, stubborn, new bug is a virus” (213).

The first recorded outbreak of psittacosis was discovered in the 1880s by a Swiss physician who notice that the symptoms of a mysterious new “pneumotyphus” were traceable to the household’s pet birds. Another outbreak in Paris was caused by a large shipment of parrots, while a cluster of cases in Germany showed that canaries could also transmit the illness.