“the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.” — David Quammen Copy Share Image
“Continuation of the outbreak depended on the likelihood of encounters between people who were infectious and people who could be infected. This idea became known as the “mass action principle.” It was all about math. The same year, 1906, a… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
I am very, very old-fashioned and clumsy. I use those long reporter notebooks. This is what a troglodyte I am. The night before I… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
Most Americans know nothing about the African forest, and it seems to them a very scary, spooky dangerous place. I've spent a lot of… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
“Horses aren’t native to Australia. They are exotic, first brought there by European settlers barely more than two centuries ago. Hendra is probably an… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
“People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We’re all in this together.” — David Quammen Copy Share Image
Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation. — David Quammen Copy Share Image
“Each outbreak, by this view, represents a local event primarily explicable by a larger cause—the arrival of the wave. The main proponent of the… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
“The Towner paper contained a very interesting statement, as an aside, concerning the five ebolaviruses: “Viruses of each species have genomes that are at… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel. — David Quammen Copy Share Image
The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning. — David Quammen Copy Share Image
“It comes and it goes. But epidemiologists have recognized that, with measles virus, as with other pathogens, there’s a critical minimum size of the… — David Quammen Copy Share Image
