“Readers will come away with a newly visceral understanding of the phrase One Health, as they journey with scientists and epidemiologists through the bodies and ecologies of animal viruses in China. This is a book that rearranges one's sense of scale and time, with a slow and massive build to the sharpness of crisis and the paradoxical enormous scale of the microscopic at play in every scene.” — Hannah Landecker, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
“Virulent Zones tells an intricate story about ways the sciences interlace with geopolitics, with profound impacts on public health at many scales. Lyle Fearnley also provides new perspective on how the sciences advance, both geographically and conceptually, through displacement rather than discovery. This important book will be of critical interest to anthropologists and historians of science, scientists, and those working to build transnational scientific and governance capacity.” — Kim Fortun, author of Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders
“Lyle Fearnley’s Virulent Zones offers a gripping anthropological account of the search for the origins of influenza pandemics in China…. Virulent Zones is an outstanding scholarly work as it unmasks the mechanism of virus hunting and disease control in China at a time of marketization and globalization. It allows for an alternative understanding of the interplay of science and everyday life. It is highly recommended reading not only for anthropologists but also for anyone interested in public health in contemporary China.” — Qiliang He, East Asian Science, Technology and Society
"[A] compelling argument for the move away from older microevolutionary theories of pathogenesis, based on competition of hosts and parasites, toward a more systemic and rigorous reckoning—a dynamic configuration—of how environments and animal populations (human and nonhuman) connect up to promote viral innovation. . . . We can read [it] with profit to learn more about our current predicament, to see how historical perceptions and responses are repeated or modified as we come to terms with the pandemic that confronts us today." — Warwick Anderson, Public Books