After reading the first three chapters of Spillover, I think that my favorite would have to be Chapter 2, Thirteen Gorillas. Thirteen Gorillas stuck out the most because it is the only extreme outbreak that I can remember. While it was sometimes tough to watch, the video clips shown in class gave me a much better understanding of what the people of Africa were really going through. I feel as though American news outlets didn’t do a very good job of really educating Americans about what was really going on. While we knew that Ebola was very deadly, I feel like that’s all we knew, making it scary when Dr. Kent Brantley and his nurse, Nancy Writebol, touched ground in Atlanta, so close to home.
Before taking this class, I did not know that a lot of infectious diseases were zoonotic. I have found it very interesting that animals can carry such deadly diseases and infect humans without being symptomatic themselves. After leaving class on the first day, I became very interested in the animals that carry zoonotic diseases here in the United States. After further research, I came across a list on the CDC's website of zoonotic outbreaks in the U.S. since 2007, and it is almost terrifying how many animals that people keep as pets carry Salmonella. I also found it very interesting that unless someone infected hops on a plane and travels to another continent or the host animal is brought to another continent, that disease is isolated to that continent.
“US Outbreaks of Zoonotic Diseases Spread between Animals & People.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 18 Dec. 2019, https://www.cdc.gov/healthypets/outbreaks.html.