https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/06/best-books-about-pandemics

As the coronavirus has spread to four continents, Laura Spinney chooses scientific studies, memoirs and novels about Aids, TB, polio and Spanish flu

With cases of coronavirus reported on four continents, health experts are concerned it could become a pandemic. The world is currently in the grip of two others – Aids and tuberculosis – while measles is on the rise again and polio stubbornly resists eradication. When smallpox was wiped out, some in the medical community were so high on their success they thought other infectious diseases would soon be licked. Fifty years later, this triumph remains unique.

David Quammen’s Spillover serves as a rousing wake-up call, because he conjures up the complex web of microbial ecosystems through which humanity stumbles blindly. Mostly the microbes mind their own business, but occasionally we blunder into their finely tuned arrangements for survival and provoke the spillover of a pathogen from its usual animal host to us. It takes time for them to find a sustainable way to colonise their new host, or hosts, so the initial fallout can be carnage – a trail of gorilla carcasses in an African forest, for example, that heralds an outbreak of Ebola in people.