The Sunday Read: ‘Animals That Infect Humans Are Scary. It’s Worse When We Infect Them Back’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2022

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There’s a working theory for the origins of Covid-19. It goes like this: Somewhere in an open-air market in Wuhan, China, a new coronavirus, growing inside an animal, first made the jump to a human. But what happens when diseases spread in the other direction? Sonia Shah, a science journalist, explores the dangers of “spillback,” or “reverse zoonosis”: when humans infect non-humans with disease. Using the history of diseases spreading through mink farms in the United States and Europe as a focus, Shah considers the implications of spillback, and how we might minimize its future impact. Shah considers how spillback can ignite epidemics in wild species, including endangered ones, and can ravage whole ecosystems. More worryingly, she describes how it can establish new wildlife reservoirs that shift the pathogens’ evolutionary trajectory, unleashing novel variants that can fuel new, dangerous waves of disease in humans.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's episode of The Daily is sponsored by BetterHelp.
0:03.5	Why not take the next 10 seconds to focus on your breath, whatever you are doing, wherever
0:08.1	you are.
0:09.1	Breathe in.
0:10.9	Breathe out.
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0:41.0	When we think about COVID, we're usually thinking about how it affects humans.
0:45.5	But COVID most likely did not originate in us, but in some other animal.
0:50.6	Most likely it was a bat, and from there it may have crossed over into some other intermediary
0:55.6	species before making its way into humans.
0:59.5	When pathogens cross species barriers into humans, we call it a spillover.
1:03.8	It's how we've gotten diseases like measles, influenza and smallpox among many others.
1:10.8	But spillover is not the end of the story.
1:13.7	Pathogens continue to move across species boundaries even after they erupt in humans.
1:18.8	We've seen evidence of COVID infections and free living species such as Whitetail deer.
1:24.3	We've also seen it in a range of zoo animals, and even our family cats and dogs are susceptible
1:30.4	to being infected.
1:33.5	When this happens, we call it spillback.
	...

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