First, I have a comment/question. With the exception of the chapter on livestock and germs, I’m not really sure why we were assigned this book. That chapter was interesting and pertinent. The rest of the book, while informative, did not seem so pertinent to the goals of this course. Especially since this book is more than twice the length of many of the other books we read this semester that were very important subject matter, it seems strange that this extraordinarily longer book would be the least on topic.
Second, recall the anecdote about the man whose wife got furious because he was having sex with the sheep (195-196). Diamond continues after that and says:
“This incident sounds bizarrely one-of-a-kind and of no possible broader significance. In fact, it illustrates an enormous subject of great importance: human diseases of animal origins. Very few of us love sheep in the carnal sense that this patient did. But most of us platonically love our pet animals, such as our dogs and cats…Some of us adults, and even more of our children, pick up infectious diseases from our pets. Usually they remain no more than a nuisance, but a few have evolved into something far more serious. (196)
This, as he says, “illustrates an enormous subject of great importance”. This topic and passage, as well as some of the comments he makes on later pages, brought to mind two specific things.
The first is the issue of getting sick from our pets. I remember a while back seeing things on TV about how sleeping with our pets will make us sick. I found an Article about the issue which brings up most of the points of it. Also here is the link to the pdf of the cdc report. The second thing it made me think of is the movie "Contagion". For anyone who was at all interested in his description of epidemics or in epidemics in general, it is a really great movie for showing how diseases spread.
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