There I was, minding my own business, listening to the most recent episodes in my podcast feed, when the new episode of the Science History podcast queued up and began playing. As the subject was – or at least initially seemed to be – the history of the spread of infectious diseases, a particular interest of mine, a cocked an ear and began paying more focused attention. Within ten minutes, my mind was, as the kids say, totally blown.
The cause of this cerebral explosion was Dr. Leslie Reperant and her explanation of her new book Fatal Jump; Tracking the Origins of Pandemics. It quickly became apparent that the subject Dr. Reperant takes up in this book is far larger than what would be found in a standard history of epidemiology. She is reaching back to the very origins of microbes, to the beginning of eukaryotes itself, to uncover how they came to be, how they evolved, how they live, and finally how they spread; both within discrete as well as across multiple hosts.
And, of course, as this is a book of the post-CoVid-19 pandemic, Dr. Reperant also includes in her book an extensive discussion of how we both can and must better come to understand the potential in zoonotic pathogens in order to perhaps prevent them from becoming pandemics, or at least be prepared to mitigate the effects when they do so.
I’m presently well into a reading of Fatal Jump, and I’m finding it fascinating as well as rich in both its level of under-the-hood detail of microbiology and its history of pathogenic diseases, and I’m looking forward to presenting my collected thoughts about it in a full featured review to be published here in the near future.
