Spillover

* As mankind continue to destroy ancient ecosystems and forge our way ever deeper into the farthest reaches of the planet, we unleash a maelstrom of 'zoonotic diseases' - strange and dangerous infections that are transmitted from animal to human populations.
* This is not a new threat to humanity - the bubonic plague, the Black Death and AIDS all stemmed from the spillover of animal diseases.
* But zoonotic diseases now make up 60% of human infectious diseases, and the emergence and re-emergence of such animal-hosted diseases represents an ever increasing trend. It is a symptom of modernity.
* In a journey that takes him around the globe, David Quammen, one of the world's finest naturalists, sets out to identify the sources of these outbreaks and asks what we can do to prevent them.
* He travels to a campfire in the Congo forest, a rat farm in southern China, an infamous hotel in Hong Kong, a horse stable in Australia and a pantry of human tissue samples in Kinshasa.
* In a final optimistic uplift, Quammen discusses how such concrete knowledge can be used to prevent the next pandemic from spreading across the face of the earth.