Fatal Jump: Tracking the Origin of Pandemics

Fatal Jump: Tracking the Origin of Pandemics

Leslie Reperant

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023

It does not take long as one scrolls through newsfeeds to catch mention of yet another disease outbreak or epidemic, which seem to circle as an incessant merry-go-round of infectious attacks we humans have been marked by—some of us literally—since our earliest days on this planet. Leslie Reperant offers to us in Fatal Jump: Tracking the Origins of Pandemics, an engaging and easy-to-read conversation on the biology and history of infectious pandemics: the why, the what, the how, and thoughts on what we can do to “live to fight another day.”

Reperant begins with a detailed and straightforward integration of evolutionary biology, with the principles of virulent spread across species. She spices up our understanding through some vivid Lewis Carroll analogies (p. 43). The Red Queen and Court Jester, for example, spring out of Through the Looking Glass to make their appearance in Fatal Jump early and often. Incremental, spatially dispersed evolution is the dominion of the Red Queen, while the Court Jester wreaks drastic and unpredictable change. This lays the groundwork for Reperant to then detail journeys of infectious spread, destruction, and subsequent adaptation of both pathogen and host. Our hunter-gatherer predecessors are tracked through their migratory travels—and travails—as they begin “collecting souvenirs” (p. 89)—the souvenirs being to the myriad and sometimes drastically game-changing infections they encounter, fight, and either die from or overcome. As in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs & Steel, Reperant shares the biologic and demographic trade-offs between the cohabitation of species, and cross-species spread of infectious pathogens. She then tracks our ancestors’ depositions of this baggage as they transit during the Ice Age, and other mass, and lesser, migrations.

And now, like the monsters in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, all the less-than-cuddly creatures of this great green earth seem to come out, in the parade of pandemic pathogens which cause leprosy, plagues, typhus, and more. At this point, this reviewer's skin crawls from juicy and evocative terminology such as “visceral leishmaniasis” and “venereal syphilis.” Many diseases are explained within the context of co-evolution, and there is a powerful discussion on “mysterious disappearances” of cultures—such as the Late Dorset people (p. 159). Who? Exactly. As well as storied disappearances more familiar to me, such as indigenous North, Central, and South American civilizations.

She then pulls us to today, by expanding upon the confluence between human development and human destruction, touching on Mpox and then of course COVID-19 (p. 293, 402). Resonating with what many of us felt about the Malthusian message wrought by COVID-19, she warns that (p. 408): “…the successful jump of a “novel” emerging pathogen…is a rare event. The spark that may ignite the large-scale spread of a novel emerging pathogen in the global human population is extraordinarily improbably and a most unpredictable event. Paradoxically, it is, through time, an event that will repeatedly prove inevitable.”

Are we humans just doomed? To play Sisyphean games of “chicken” with oncoming pandemics, or engaged in a Darwinian game of Russian roulette with our planet and co-inhabitants, the weaker (more susceptible) among us exiting stage left, while our human molecular mettle is tested again and again? Or is there a “way out”—a means or process by which we can “beat the wind”? And, if so, what are our options?

Dr. Reperant answers these questions with circumspection. We humans know what needs to be done: learn more, act faster, act together. Educate, vaccinate, collaborate. Fight against our climactic and environmental messes. But money and politics get in the way, among other things: “The living world has endured for four billion years. Even in the face of utmost catastrophes, nature has and will endure. Humanity may not. No matter how brilliant our technologies are, they will never rival the awe-inspiring cogs and gears of nature…. At present, humanity foolishly boasts and indulges in self-destructive risk taking. She must regain her senses and attain maturity. For our species namesake: Homo sapiens sapiens (pp. 423-424).”

What we've been through—the pandemics we've seen—are hopefully not our last. And with our growing presence in the Near-Earth, and beyond, it is likely we'll be experiencing, and contributing, to the same beyond this planet. Until COVID-19 for this generation, many ignored the serial killers among us. And then the scale, the gravity, the intractability—the reality—of COVID-19—caught our attention. Enough so that we should not ignore the next signs of another pandemic. How we manage the next one is up to us. The prize for survival—as Homo sapiens sapiens—is to earn the privilege of facing more such inevitable manifestations of the evolutionary process: To live to fight another day.