"“Our choices as consumers ... cause miners to go in there and come in contact with wild animals that carry viruses. We implicate ourselves in this chain of consumer supply and demand,” says David Quammen, author of the book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. “That is one of the broader causes of contact with wild animals that leads to spillover of new viruses with the potential of becoming epidemic and pandemic,” says Quammen. Take gold, for example, which is used in a lot of electronics because it conducts electricity pretty well. Marburg, a viral hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola, killed 128 people in Congo between 1998 and 2000. Scientists surmised that gold miners probably picked up the virus from animals, like bats, in mines, and the virus spread from there."