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The Elephant in the Room

How to Stop Making Ourselves and Other Animals Sick

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The Elephant in the Room

By: Liz Kalaugher
Narrated by: Jennifer Ness
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About this listen

Humans, animals and disease. They're all inter-related, so why do we keep ignoring the elephant in the room?

It's well known that Covid-19 may have come from a bat, but diseases are often transmitted in the other direction too. Humans have passed diseases to animals countless times through history, and it's the cross-currents of this relationship between humans, animals and disease that are explored by Liz Kalaugher in The Elephant in the Room.

Taking the listener on a globe-trotting journey through time, Kalaugher presents a series of fascinating case histories of human-related wildlife diseases. Among the stories featured here are the early humans who may have carried pathogens responsible for the extinction of Neanderthals, the native birds of Hawaii that have been devastated by human-introduced disease, and the Tasmanian tiger that has been lost to the sands of time.

©2025 Liz Kalaugher (P)2025 W.F. Howes Ltd. Biological Sciences Biology Science Elephant
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This is SUCH an impressive and book and important in that it documents an often overlooked aspect of the modern world. It is a comprehensive account but full of human insight and humour, and eminently readable.

Magnificent

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