Wataru Yamazaki (Food hygiene, zoonotic disease, animal infectious disease)
My first encounter with pathogens was in January 1993, when I was just 20 years old and aboard a night bus from Nepal to India. I still vividly remember as the bus stopped at village stations and I rushed to the restroom each time (suspected diagnosis: enterotoxin-producing E. coli infection). For over 30 years since then, I have made it my life’s work to explore pathogens. Perhaps due to the light-footed nature often found in backpackers, I found myself collaborating with research institutions across five continents in 15 countries. Where do these spiteful yet mysterious pathogens come from to enter human societies? Two journalists’ search for the origin of pandemics have shed light on part of the mystery.
David Quammen’s Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, published in 2012, became an instant bestseller in the U.S. and won the Science in Society Journalism Award from the American National Association of Science Writers (NASW). The book is often regarded as a prophetic account of the COVID-19 pandemic. In it, the author accompanies cultural anthropologists during their fieldwork and vividly describes the outbreak sites of spillover (the transmission of pathogens across animal species) in locations like African rainforests and caves, Australian farms, and wildlife breeding facilities in China. As readers progress through the pages, they become immersed in the sense of being right there in the scene. By the end of the book, readers must acknowledge that human activities—such as urban development, deforestation, land-use changes, large-scale livestock farming, overhunting of wildlife, and population growth—have increased the frequency of contact between humans and the unknown pathogens harbored by wildlife. This, in turn, has repeatedly caused spillover events like Ebola, HIV-AIDS, malaria, SARS, and others.
Sharri Markson’s What Really Happened in Wuhan: A Virus Like No Other, Countless Infections, Millions of Deaths, published in 2021, presents a provocative argument that the virus was artificially created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology through gain-of-function experiments (modifying wildlife viruses to infect humans, essentially creating a man-made spillover) and that the leak and delayed response triggered the pandemic. The book’s shocking findings include: 1) In 2014, due to concerns over risks, the U.S. government stopped funding gain-of-function research at U.S. domestic institutions, leading to the U.S. National Institutes of Health funding the experiment in Wuhan; 2) The virus had already spread from the laboratory by September 2019, and the Military World Games in Wuhan in October 2019 helped spread it globally; 3) The probability of a leak occurring from a single laboratory in one year is 0.3%. Based on thorough investigative reporting, this book sparked a significant debate in Australia, where the author resides, and has contributed to deteriorating relations between Australia and China. While there is only one truth behind any event, the origins of COVID-19 remain unresolved. It may take even more time for us to fully understand the truth.
(Illustrations by Atelier Epocha)
This article is also available in Japanese. >>
「病原体と人類の交差点：パンデミックの起源を探る旅」
（山崎 渉）
