Understanding major infectious disease events
The Hidden Zoo Inside You: An illustrated guide to pesky organisms and pandemics
by Dr. Allen Jones, M.D.
Vancouver: Granville Island Publishing, 2024
$39.95 / 9781989467763 (softcover)
Reviewed by Tom Koppel
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For many of us, the Covid-19 pandemic was a challenging time in various ways. One of the less ominous ones was discovering how little we truly understood about the medical science involved. Questions such as, how does a widespread pandemic differ from a more localized epidemic? How did the Covid-19 pandemic originate? Why were masks and social distancing so important for personal protection? How did it differ from other disease outbreaks?
Now, we have an easy-to-read and -digest book that goes to great lengths to explain medical basics and put this pandemic in perspective relative to past (and inevitably, future) diseases. It is sobering to be reminded that the three types of plague (bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic) have caused some 50 epidemics and at least three terrible pandemics, leading to tens of millions of deaths, or that Spanish influenza alone killed 50 million in 1918, and that there have been other coronavirus pandemics much more recently, including SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012.
Author Allen Jones is a Vancouver-based general practitioner and surgical assistant. The Hidden Zoo Inside You is a hand-written and colourfully-drawn large-format book that resembles a graphic novel in visual style. It includes many maps and diagrams, digressions on geography and scientific classification, along with humorous asides and pithy vignettes to lighten the story of deadly organisms and their often catastrophic impacts. The result is far from the dry or highly technical volume that might be expected on such a potentially intimidating range of topics.
Readers will savour a wealth of fascinating factoids and provocative lines of scientific reasoning. We learn about the five “kingdoms” of life. In addition to plants and animals, there are fungi, bacteria, and amoebas. But viruses are not to be thought of as life, since a virus is just a “scrap of genetic code” and cannot reproduce except by “hijacking” a cell from one of the five kingdoms to make copies of itself. Jones gives us a vivid picture of Wuhan, China, where Covid-19 originated, a city of 11 million with a major subway system and international airport. The seafood market there, which was ground zero for the outbreak, is the size of three Walmart stores combined. The Covid-19 virus apparently jumped from bats to pangolins (a type of anteater), which were then eaten by humans, who passed the virus along to other humans through aerosol droplets or even more direct contact. But because pangolins and humans share “only” 92% of the same genetic code, the case for pangolins as the intermediary is not absolutely proven.
Covid-19 (also known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus-2) is one of seven coronaviruses, including the common cold, all of which are characterized by spike proteins. Others that have caused pandemics and death include SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which jumped from bats to civet cats and then to humans, and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), which jumped from bats to camels and then to humans. Whereas 1% of Covid-19 cases lead to death, the fatality rate for SARS cases was 10% and for MERS 34%. However, vastly more people have contracted Covid-19 than these earlier pandemics, so total worldwide deaths from Covid-19 were approaching 7 million as of March 2023.
One great strength of the book is the detailed, step-by-step explanations, including tables, diagrams, and other graphics, of how each major disease outbreak evolves. Bubonic plague, for example, is spread by bacteria in the blood of rats, which is then eaten by fleas and transferred to humans in turn when the fleas bite a person. Ebola is a virus that lives in African bat populations. The bat partially eats fruit and leaves behind its saliva and feces, which are then eaten by mammals and transferred to humans via an unknown mechanism. Yellow fever is a viral disease that is spread by mosquitoes. The Panama Canal could only be built once mosquitoes in the Canal Zone had been virtually eradicated. Typhus, which caused the Plague of Athens in 430 BC, is a bacterial disease spread by lice that bite humans. It killed 75,000 to 100,000 in ancient Athens, and in modern times took the life of Anne Frank. Smallpox virus is spread human to human by pus or other bodily fluids, often on clothing or blankets. The Crusaders carried smallpox to Europe, and the Spaniards in turn brought it to South and Central America, “wiping out the non-immune Aztecs and Incas in a single generation.”

Malaria is caused by a single-cell amoeba that is spread by mosquitoes and feeds on a person’s red blood cells, making it a parasite. Amoebic Dysentery, believed to have killed Alexander the Great, is caused by an amoeba that can infect drinking water, get into a person’s large intestine, cause severe diarrhea and, at its worst, damage the intestine, causing death. Some parasites are much larger. The fish tapeworm, for examples, begins as an egg in animals or people, which is then shed by feces into water. There it matures into a “hairy critter” that can swim and assumes a larval stage that is eaten by small fish. These are consumed by larger fish and ultimately by humans, where they become a worm in the small intestine that can grow up to 30 feet long. The worm out-competes the human gut for vitamin B-12, which is needed by our red blood cells, leading to pernicious anemia. We also learn about polio, chickenpox, rabies, and many more.
The Hidden Zoo pays careful attention to size and scale, showing how incredibly tiny the viruses and bacteria are in relation to our cells and blood vessels. Here, the drawings are a big help, and far more instructive than math would be on its own. Jones also explains the derivations of many medical terms and how they are pronounced.
Although I enjoy “groaner” jokes as much as anyone, unfortunately much of the attempted humour did not work for me. Jones inserts an omniscient little character he calls Sompoo, who makes supposedly drole comments on nearly every page. Over nearly 200 pages it wears a bit thin. Still, readers will come away feeling satisfied that they’ve absorbed a vast amount of fascinating information. Meanwhile, Jones has only begun. He is working on a second volume covering DNA/RNA, immune systems, vaccines, ventilators, and disease-fighting drugs. Are we ready for it? Or will a new pandemic arrive first?
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Tom Koppel is a veteran BC author and journalist who has published five books on history and science. For 35 years, he has contributed feature articles to major magazines, including Canadian Geographic, Archaeology, American Archaeology, Equinox, The Beaver, Reader’s Digest, Western Living, Isands, Oceans, and The Progressive. His book Kanaka: The Untold Story of Hawaiian Pioneers in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest (Whitecap Books, 1995) is available by email from koppel@saltspring.com Tom lives with his wife Annie Palovcik on Salt Spring Island. Editor’s note: Tom Koppel has also reviewed books by Kirsten Bell, Steven Earle, Daniel Kalla, Britt Wray, May Q. Wong, and Richard J. Hebda, Sheila Greer, & Alexander Mackie for The British Columbia Review.
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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