When We Talk About Animals · Law, Environment & Animals Program at Yale Law School

Ep. 30 – Sonia Shah on how animal microbes become human pandemics

·1 hr·2 clips

New York's Manhattan Company sank its well in the Five Points slum to save money and start a bank.

1. When We Talk About Animals, a Yale University podcast, devotes Episode 30 to how animal microbes become human pandemics, recorded remotely in March 2020 during the COVID-19 outbreak. 2. Hosts Viveka Morris and Jennifer Skeen interview Sonia Shah, author of the 2017 book Pandemic and the forthcoming June 2020 book The Next Great Migration. 3. Shah's thesis is that the "unprecedented relationship with nature" created by humans using over half of the planet's surface drives spillover, so contact between wild animals and people keeps increasing. 4. She says bats displaced by deforestation roost near farms and gardens, and she cites the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak and Malaysia's Nipah outbreak, where bat droppings reached pigs and then farmers. 5. She traces cholera to marine bacteria living with copepods in the Bay of Bengal, which reached humans after the British Raj cut Sundarbans mangroves for rice farms, with the first outbreak in 1817. 6. She describes how the 1825 Erie Canal and steamships carried cholera into 19th-century New York, a city she says was six times more crowded than modern Tokyo, with about one sixth of its area covered by cesspools and privies. 7. She tells how the Manhattan Company sank its well in the Five Points slum to save money and start a bank, supplying contaminated water to one third of New Yorkers across more than 80 years of epidemics. 8. Shah says there are more livestock today than in the 10,000 years of domestication before 1960 combined, and that avian influenza grows more virulent when passed through crowded chickens, a process scientists can replicate in a lab. 9. She cites about 70,000 Americans infected yearly with Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, 14% of Americans over age six infected with dog roundworm Toxocara canis, and 44% of dog owners who do not collect waste. 10. Best for listeners interested in disease ecology, public health history, and climate.

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