Wallace Stegner Lecture
"Thirteen Dead Gorillas: Zoonotic Disease and the Future of Human Health"
Infectious diseases are all around us. In his fall Stegner Lecture on October 11, 2007, David Quammen, prolific writer and current Stegner Chair of History at MSU, discusses how animals and humans exchange disease. When a pathogen successfully leaps from a nonhuman animal to a person, and succeeds in establishing an epidemiological foothold, the result is known as zoonosis. This is a global problem, from Ebola in Africa to avian influenza in Asia. Zoonosis is the biological reality behind the scary headlines about many nasty new diseases, and the resulting pandemics that have historically occurred. Quammen offers new insights by linking outbreaks of zoonosis to global climate change and habitat destruction, demonstrating the interrelatedness between human health and environmental destruction on Earth. “We’re all in this together,” he concludes. (58 minutes)
