Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Confronting Zika and other Viruses, with Bill Nye and Laurie Garrett – StarTalk All-Stars About this episode If you want to sleep tonight, skip this episode of StarTalk All-Stars. Bill Nye, Chuck Nice and virus expert Laurie Garrett examine how we’re fighting Zika, Dengue, West Nile, HIV and other viruses – and why the battle may not be going our way.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Bill Nye? This is StarTalk.
0:09 Bill Nye? Greetings, greetings. I'm Bill Nye, hosting StarTalk special edition. This is the all-star edition of StarTalk. And this week, not only am I here, and not only is Chuck Nice here, our beloved man about the universe and the planet.
0:22 Speaker 01 Hey, Bill.
0:23 Bill Nye? But Dr. Laurie Garrett, who's a senior fellow for global health at the Council for Foreign Relations, the oldest think tank in the United States.
0:32 Speaker 01 On foreign relations.
0:33 Bill Nye? On foreign relations.
0:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, not for.
0:35 Bill Nye? That's a whole nother thing.
0:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a whole nother thing.
0:37 Bill Nye? Council on Foreign Relations, and you want a Pulitzer Prize chasing Ebola viruses around.
0:43 Speaker 01 Back in the 90s.
0:44 Bill Nye? Yes, the 1990s, yes.
0:46 Speaker 01 Thank you.
0:47 Bill Nye? See, and now we have Zika, right? And everybody loves to hate the government until it's time to get the Centers for Disease Control to create some magic or magical scientific answer to an infestation, right?
1:03 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. This week, I've been twice doing briefings for congressional staffers about Zika, because, of course, it's coming to the United States. It's just not hot enough yet for the mosquitoes.
1:15 Bill Nye? Right.
1:16 Speaker 01 We're in our winter, and it's steadily moving up through the Caribbean, moving north. We're going to hear of more cases in Mexico, and then, you know, it's inevitable that when our 80s egypti and 80s algalpictus mosquitoes, which we have, come out of their winter hibernation and start looking for food, we will almost undoubtedly see Zika cases in the United States.
1:41 Bill Nye? For food, it's among which we are home.
1:43 Speaker 01 We are home. Yummy, yummy.
1:45 Bill Nye? Yes.
1:45 Speaker 01 And the problem that is unique to the United States, that is not shared by most of our southern amigos, is... We do not have national mosquito control.
1:57 Chuck Nice? Mm-hmm.
1:58 Speaker 01 We don't even, in most states, have state mosquito control.
2:02 Bill Nye? No mosquito control, this is DDT.
2:04 Chuck Nice? Yes.
2:05 Speaker 01 Well, no, we're not allowed to use DDT anymore. That's been banned for decades.
2:09 Bill Nye? But I was a kid, it was sprayed on you, on a person.
2:11 Chuck Nice? Isn't that how we got rid of malaria in the United States?
2:14 Speaker 01 It is indeed.
2:14 Chuck Nice? The government did massive sprays of DDT.
2:17 Speaker 01 Actually, the CDC was originally created to control malaria. But the problem is that now it's local. And so, in the United States, we face the NIMBY problem. Not in my backyard. And we face every conspiracy theory imaginable. "Oh, you're coming in and my children will all have pointed heads because of you," or "All my kids will be autistic because of you," or whatever. And it's going to be, I've warned members of Congress, it's going to be very, very difficult for us to control our mosquitoes in the United States for political reasons. And the worst-case scenario is if it gets involved in the presidential election campaign in some way, then we can all just kiss it all goodbye and assume we're all gonna get Zika.
3:02 Bill Nye? Why is that? Why do you say that?
3:03 Speaker 01 Well, I'm exaggerating.
3:04 Bill Nye? Well, just a little.
3:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, because the mosquitoes are not in every state. The further north you go, the lower the mosquito population is because they can only tolerate a certain temperature range. They like it.
3:15 Bill Nye? But as the world gets warmer...
3:16 Speaker 01 As the world gets hotter, we are seeing more mosquitoes in areas where they had not previously existed.
3:23 Bill Nye? Well, with all that said, this is Cosmic Query Edition of All-Star Star Talk.
3:29 Chuck Nice? Yes.
3:30 Bill Nye? And Dr. Laurie Garrett just set up a charming scenario that I hope gives us all pause. And Chuck, Dr. Nice, you're gonna give us, read us the first query from the cosmos.
3:43 Chuck Nice? Yes, yes, I am. And, you know, it's amazing, we have questions from all over the internet. And you'd be surprised how many people are really concerned about Zika. So, let's go to Greg Fixer on Facebook, who wants to know, "With Zika's primary vector as the mosquito, what is the WHO's current anti-mosquito approach besides long sleeves, bug spray, and hoping like hell the mosquito just doesn't bite me or have Zika?"
4:09 Speaker 01 Yes.
4:09 Bill Nye? WHO's World Health Organization.
4:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:12 Bill Nye? And also, Doctor, for me, the civilian, what is the relationship between the World Health Organization, our Centers for Disease Control? And controlling mosquito populations.
4:24 Speaker 01 Boy, you just asked a $10,000 question. Uh, let's start-
4:27 Bill Nye? Well, this is a very expensive show.
4:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:30 Bill Nye? And may I please have that in cash?
4:32 Speaker 01 Um, let's take the Facebook part of the question first. Um, look, we can't control every single possible way that a virus can be transmitted when it's human-to-human transmission. It's very, very difficult. We have all the human behavioral issues to deal with. Here, in a way, we're lucky. It's a vector-borne disease, meaning there's an intermediary between the humans.
4:58 Bill Nye? You don't just sneeze on somebody to pass Zika.
5:00 Speaker 01 Exactly. Um, having said that, we do- we are now discovering that there are at least 14 confirmed cases of sexual transmission of Zika. There are at least three-
5:13 Bill Nye? No, no, no, no, what's- And that's human-to-human or mosquito-to-human?
5:15 Speaker 01 Human-to-human.
5:16 Bill Nye? I'm joking. Is this smooching? Yeah, I'm sorry, that was a- Is this kissing or something more, uh-
5:21 Speaker 01 This is intercourse.
5:22 Bill Nye? More of a commitment, yeah.
5:23 Speaker 01 It's in semen.
5:24 Bill Nye? Wow, thanks.
5:25 Speaker 01 And, you know, we're finding more and more viruses have somehow adapted to semen, because Ebola, we were having this problem trying to finally end the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Some of the sort of resurrected cases seen long after it looked like the epidemic was over have involved sexual transmission from an individual who survived, and then many months later passes the virus sexually to a female partner.
5:53 Bill Nye? So he has antibody, or she, yeah, he has antibodies to this Ebola.
5:57 Speaker 01 Yes, and she does not.
5:58 Bill Nye? She does not.
5:58 Speaker 01 And the same appears to be true with Zika. And of course, we know it's transmitted from mother to child in utero. And this is not 100% proven, but it is assumed at this point that that is how these babies are being born with the misshapen heads. And we're now seeing a whole chain of other issues showing up in people who've been exposed to Zika. The Guillain-Barre paralysis, which can be anywhere from a very minor sort of change in the walk and gait that you're able to execute, to total body paralysis that can last for months.
6:35 Bill Nye? This is just frightening stuff, terrifying. All the more reason to engage in safe sex.
6:40 Speaker 01 Well, and indeed, the government of Puerto Rico just announced that they are putting a price freeze on condoms to keep them affordable to the total population.
6:51 Chuck Nice? Oh, thank God you said condoms. I was thinking something totally different when you said price freeze, but, you know, that's just me.
6:58 Bill Nye? You travel in different circles.
7:01 Speaker 01 But you asked, so what can you do besides not get bit by mosquitoes? Well, to not get bit by mosquitoes, there are personal protective measures, and then there's society protective measures. The personal overlaps with society because if a lot of people refuse to go along with the program, they're imperiling everybody in their neighborhood by providing...
7:23 Chuck Nice? But I've got rights, man.
7:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, I've got rights, dude. And the Second Amendment says I can carry a gun, so if you come on my property...
7:29 Chuck Nice? I'm gonna shoot a mosquito.
7:30 Speaker 01 Well, we had Chris Christie, as a candidate for president before he pulled out of the campaign, said in one of the debates that he would use quarantine to control Zika. And I thought, well, if you can figure out how to quarantine mosquitoes, more power to you. But obviously, he was talking about quarantining human beings, which is ludicrous. It has nothing to do with the transmission. What has to happen is everybody, every single person who lives in a state where these mosquitoes flourish in the summertime, needs to look around your property and say, what do I have sitting outside that could hold water and therefore be a breeding site for these mosquitoes? What makes 80s Egyptians especially tough is they can breed in something the size of a thimble.
8:15 Speaker 01 So if you have any kind of trash, if somebody in the household threw, you know, a coffee cup outside...
8:23 Bill Nye? The bottom of a milk carton.
8:25 Speaker 01 The bottom of a milk carton.
8:27 Bill Nye? Orange juice container.
8:29 Speaker 01 Things that are innocent.
8:30 Bill Nye? Now, is it possible, doc, to create a vaccine for this?
8:34 Speaker 01 A lot of work is going into it right now, but let's keep in mind, it is a very close cousin in terms of how the immune system sees it, sees the Zika virus, to dengue and chikungunya. And we don't have vaccines for those. And when they, one of the reasons they're having such a hard time figuring out the mysteries about Zika is that it cross reacts in antibody tests with dengue.
9:01 Bill Nye? It cross reacts.
9:02 Chuck Nice? Yes.
9:03 Bill Nye? Antibodies. What does that mean, doctor?
9:05 Speaker 01 It means that, it means that if I'm trying to do an, I take a little of your blood and I want to do an antibody test and see, have you ever had Zika? I can't easily tell the difference between have you ever had dengue? Have you ever had chikungunya? Or have you ever had Zika? They cross react. The antibodies, all of them.
9:24 Bill Nye? Still, in North America, in the United States, Canada, or Mexico, there can't be that many people who've had dengue fever.
9:30 Speaker 01 Right, there aren't.
9:32 Bill Nye? So if you had a positive, you'd be pretty, statistically, you'd be pretty far along.
9:37 Speaker 01 Right now, perhaps that is our advantage compared to what they're going through in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and Central America, is that we don't have huge populations dealing with all three viruses at once.
9:50 Bill Nye? So writ large, this is another science problem that is going to be affected by political issues.
9:57 Speaker 01 It already is.
9:57 Bill Nye? Yeah. Great, that's great. So Chuck, let's try another query.
10:02 Chuck Nice? Let us move on.
10:02 Bill Nye? That's great, everybody, I mean, that's, that's not great. That's, that's what it's being, it's irony.
10:08 Chuck Nice? Why? I mean, the people in Washington are so smart and so proactive on everything else. Why would they drop the ball on something like this?
10:14 Bill Nye? I mean well. Lead on.
10:17 Chuck Nice? All right, so Randall Zeisler wants to know this. He says, hi, Bill. With Zika virus having been around for over 60 years, we only hear about it when it spreads to pandemic proportions. How many other viruses are out there that are just contained to a certain area that are waiting to spread under the right conditions? Also, what do you think will be the next Zika virus? Well, here's a rosy outlook for you to paint, Laurie.
10:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, that's, that precise question is what I have focused on for the last, you know, three decades professionally. And We don't know a number. We can't give you an exact count and say, this is how many viruses lurk out there. One of the reasons is that they're all mutating all the time. They adapt at an incredible pace, at whatever we throw at them, including climate change.
11:06 Bill Nye? Because they reproduce so fast.
11:07 Speaker 01 So fast. Many of the viruses are reproducing in the order of minutes or hours. And of course, the bacteria are producing on the order of days.
11:15 Bill Nye? And the humans are reproducing on the order of years.
11:18 Speaker 01 Decades.
11:19 Bill Nye? Yeah.
11:20 Speaker 01 And so it allows them tremendous advantage to change. And in a way, you can look at any given ecology, whether it's right here, the top, the surface of this seems to be some kind of felt here.
11:32 Bill Nye? Bays.
11:33 Speaker 01 There is, there is a biome.
11:36 Bill Nye? Right.
11:37 Speaker 01 Right? On this surface. We don't see it, but there are a lot of organisms living here. And they-
11:42 Bill Nye? And by the way, people, they're delicious.
11:44 Speaker 01 And they, and they range from the big ones, you know, parasites, all the way down to the really tiny ones, phage, which are just little packets of DNA, right?
11:55 Bill Nye? That attack viruses.
11:56 Speaker 01 That attack viruses and bacteria.
11:58 Bill Nye? And bacteria.
11:59 Speaker 01 And so here's what's happening. It's a giant lending library.
12:02 Bill Nye? Mm-hmm.
12:03 Speaker 01 You know, all over here is DNA. And bacteria, if they feel attacked, if I had antibiotics to splash on the surface-
12:10 Bill Nye? The word feel is anthropomorphizing a little bit.
12:12 Speaker 01 But if bacteria experience an assault, some sort of a antiseptic I put on this surface, they scour actively their environment for any phage that might have some DNA that they can use to counter-
12:28 Bill Nye? That's a model for us.
12:30 Speaker 01 Wow.
12:31 Bill Nye? We scour the rainforest and our tummies and everything else, looking for something that will fight this, a given-
12:39 Speaker 01 Well, we mostly destroy.
12:40 Bill Nye? Oh, that's great. So by that, I mean, it's not great. So
12:44 Speaker 01 Did we answer the question? I don't remember what
12:46 Bill Nye? How many?
12:47 Speaker 01 What's the next?
12:48 Bill Nye? There are sixty viruses that caused the cold. There gotta be
12:51 Speaker 01 There's a great guy
12:52 Bill Nye? Sixty thousand that we've never heard of.
12:54 Speaker 01 There's a great guy up at Columbia University at the medical school named Ian Lipkin, who has proposed a project to actually go out and scour the planet for missing viruses and to identify them.
13:06 Bill Nye? Is this akin to what Craig Venter was doing with his sailboat?
13:09 Speaker 01 Well, he was doing total microbiome, not just viruses, and he was just the Seragasso Sea. But now the NIH, our National Institutes of Health, is looking at funding, together with NSF, what they would call the Earth Microbiome Project, to actively go out and scour all kinds of different ecological settings, looking to identify all of the bacteria, viruses, and phage in a given community setting. Now, that poses another problem that I'm actually working on in a new book I'm writing, which is, when is a life form a pathogen? And when is it an innocent bystander?
13:51 Bill Nye? A happy germ.
13:52 Speaker 01 Or something happily helping you?
13:54 Bill Nye? Yeah.
13:54 Speaker 01 A symbiote, a commensal, something that actually is digesting your food for you or protecting you by doing combat with other microbes, right? But then suddenly, they will switch and there'll be a pathogen. And we don't know why. We don't completely understand how this happens. It turns out, almost every human being has anthrax in your gut. This is a huge surprise. We only discovered this in the last couple of years. Well, why is anthrax in your gut harmless, but anthrax in the air or on a surface? And as we all learned in 2001 with the mailings to members of Congress and the media, why is that a lethal event? We don't really understand, but in any ecological setting, a plant, an animal, the ocean, the
14:38 Speaker 01 air, there's this mix of microbes, which under certain circumstances are at least neutral, if not beneficial, and in other circumstances are dangerous, and we don't really understand it.
14:50 Bill Nye? But you're working on it?
14:51 Speaker 01 We're working on it.
14:52 Bill Nye? Now, if we did this, before we get to the next query,
14:55 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
14:55 Bill Nye? If we did this Earth Microbiome Project,
14:58 Speaker 01 Hmm.
14:59 Bill Nye? where would the money come from? How would that be funded?
15:03 Speaker 01 That's actually in process right now. You probably know the National Science Foundation has a process where
15:12 Speaker 01 Groups of scientists can come forward and basically say, "We think this kind of a mega project needs to be done." It has to involve lots of different labs and lots of different scientists and a much bigger budget than a typical grant proposal. A few years ago, a group came forward to the NIH and said, "We need a human microbiome project." And that was done, and it unfolded unbelievable surprises.
15:38 Bill Nye? Like the anthrax.
15:39 Speaker 01 Like the anthrax, like finding that there are all sorts of ways that we're actively changing our microbiome that involve things like, "Hi, Mr. Nice, I just rubbed your arm, and now I'm gonna rub my arm, and maybe I just transferred some of your microbiome to me."
15:57 Bill Nye? Well, good for you.
15:58 Speaker 01 Good for me. I can tell.
16:00 Bill Nye? All right, you two biomas.
16:02 Speaker 01 We're gonna biomash here.
16:05 Bill Nye? Fantastic. Careful, it's a family show. All right, Chuck, you got another query.
16:12 Chuck Nice? From Twitter, this is Nate Acevedo, and he's @NateAcevedo, wants to know this. "Research suggests the placenta began with a viral genome by using vaccines. Are we only stunting the advancement of our species?"
16:30 Bill Nye? Wow.
16:31 Chuck Nice? What a crazy question, that's why I read it.
16:33 Bill Nye? Well, it's just, Dr. Garrett, I'm sure you'll give us an earful in this, but that's just taking two nouns and just slamming them. It sounds a little conspiratorial. I just say this all the time about conspiracy theories, everybody, they're lazy. If there only were just six, you know, five dozen people
16:54 Chuck Nice? Right.
16:55 Bill Nye? That are controlling, all we gotta do is find those 60 guys or gals, and then we just imprison them or get all their knowledge, and then we'd be set.
17:05 Speaker 01 Well, you know, I, uh, before I answer this question, let me just tell you, Dan Brown, you know, who wrote, um, Angels and Demons and...
17:13 Bill Nye? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, yeah.
17:14 Speaker 01 What's the one about the conspiracy about the Pope?
17:17 Bill Nye? Well, the Jesus has a descendant and she's running around.
17:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, she's, that one. Anyway, super bestseller. Well, his, his most recent book, the premise is that there's an evil biologist at the Council on...
17:31 Bill Nye? She's pointing at herself, if you're listening to the podcast.
17:33 Speaker 01 At the Council on Foreign Relations.
17:34 Chuck Nice? Uh-huh.
17:35 Speaker 01 Who kidnaps the head of WHO and locks her into the basement of the Council on Foreign Relations and, and then carries out some grand scheme involving trying to genetically change all of humanity. And I thought, oh my God, that is the ultimate conspiracy theory. And now it's actually about me, except that, of course, in the book, because they don't believe women do anything, the bad guy had to be turned into a man.
17:57 Bill Nye? Ah. So, before you do that, uh, this is StarTalk, the All-Star Edition with Dr. Laurie Garrett, a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, joined once again by our beloved Chuck Nice, and I'm your host, Bill Nye, and we'll be back right after this. Welcome back, welcome back. I'm your host, Bill Nye, here on StarTalk, but not just StarTalk. This is StarTalk All-Star Edition, and our all-stars, of course, include our beloved Chuck Nice, man about the planet. And we're joined this week by Dr. Laurie Garrett, who is a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, the, the
18:38 Bill Nye? US's oldest think tank. Now, while you're thinking about, I guess, not about tanks, about big, big ideas.
18:46 Speaker 01 Some people there think about tanks.
18:48 Bill Nye? As we went to break, a guy, or somebody asked, a cosmic query, inquired...
18:54 Chuck Nice? Are we, uh, by using vaccines, stunting the advancement of our species?
19:00 Bill Nye? Because vacs, because placentas may have come from, uh, virus genes. Yeah.
19:06 Speaker 01 What we know, actually, is that... A baby, an infant, a even pre-toddler.
19:14 Bill Nye? I was, I did that for a while.
19:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, it's funny, we've all kind of been there. We, at that stage in life, they have two jobs. And everything else is done for them. One job is to listen and look at everything and start trying to figure out what is that word mean?
19:30 Bill Nye? Take in data.
19:31 Speaker 01 Taking in data. And the second is to touch, lick, eat, ingest, everything in their environment. You watch a baby and what does it do with a toy? It sticks it in its mouth, maybe in its ear. It rolls it around, it touches and licks the floor. What is that about? Why would we have evolved to such a thing?
19:49 Bill Nye? I say, everybody, if you concentrate for just a moment, you can remember what a kitchen floor tastes like. If I've said that. I don't have to concentrate, that was this morning.
20:00 Speaker 01 Oh, nice. Nice, nice.
20:03 Bill Nye? He's down there with his kids, interacting. Yeah, I've got a two-year-old, so.
20:07 Speaker 01 But there's a reason for that. And we see the same, of course, in all the primates. And there's a reason for it. We're coating our immune system. You know, our immune system's job at that point is to figure out what is foreign, what is dangerous, and what is me? Because the worst thing you could have is for your own immune system to start attacking you because it doesn't know foreign, and it's confused, and it thinks, you know, you are the problem.
20:33 Bill Nye? It's the immune system we're thinking. I know.
20:35 Speaker 01 Well.
20:36 Bill Nye? Yeah, I'm with you.
20:36 Speaker 01 So, so that, for example, you get asthma because your immune system is overreacting against all sorts of things that it ought not to be reacting against. And sometimes even including elements of your own body.
20:50 Bill Nye? So what'd you say to mothers here in the very clean environments of the United States and Canada? Let your kids play in the dirt.
20:58 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And I would furthermore say, you know, all, a vaccine is an infinitesimal version of that daily experience of absorbing everything in your own environment. The amount of what are called antigens. So, you know, what you, if I touch this tabletop right here. And then put it to my mouth.
21:21 Chuck Nice? Which you just did.
21:22 Speaker 01 Which I just did. On that tabletop is a lot of stuff, including proteins. And all those proteins are potentially antigens, which my immune system and antibodies see. Okay, and that's how you program your system. Well, you know, the amount of antigenic exposure a baby has in its environment is orders of magnitude more than what's in a given vaccine.
21:47 Bill Nye? So what about this guy?
21:48 Chuck Nice? No, what so you what you just said to him is, it is exactly the opposite of what he is postulating. It's exactly the opposite. The vaccine doesn't help stunt us. It actually propels us because it's this tiny little thing that it's it's our version of baby putting things in its mouth.
22:08 Bill Nye? Chuck, tell the truth. Testify.
22:11 Speaker 01 Testify. Well, I mean, look, if you're if you're a parent and you have a, say, 12-month-old child, you have two options in terms of one particular nasty microbe called polio. You can either say, eh, you know, I've kind of decided the odds, my child in its environment as it ages, is very unlikely to be exposed to that virus, so I'm not going to vaccinate. Or you can say, you know, this is a absolutely minuscule exposure, but it will program that child's immune system and for the rest of their life, as they travel the world and drink waters all over the world and are exposed to soils all over the world, any one of which
22:54 Speaker 01 could potentially contain polio, my child will grow up fully protected.
22:59 Bill Nye? I remember the polio vaccine was introduced in the 1950s. Is that right? Was it 1960?
23:04 Speaker 01 50s. Nezles was the 60s.
23:07 Bill Nye? I went to elementary school with a guy who had polio.
23:10 Chuck Nice? Wow.
23:10 Bill Nye? And I can tell you, you don't want polio. It's like, it's not in your best interest. And, you know, he was a tough guy and he got through it, but man.
23:18 Speaker 01 Well, you know who the major opponents of polio vaccine use today are? The number one group that actually kills people?
23:25 Bill Nye? Very well-educated.
23:27 Speaker 01 No, for polio, the number one group that's actually murdered more polio vaccinators than there have been children who got polio in the last three, four years, the Taliban.
23:38 Chuck Nice? Wow.
23:38 Bill Nye? Oh, that's great. One more thing to recommend them.
23:42 Chuck Nice? They're normally so progressive.
23:45 Bill Nye? So everybody, you know, if you're listening, you're listening to StarTalk, you're self-selected, you're interested in science. But I say all the time, science is the best idea humans have had so far. And if you don't like the process of science, we'll come up with something that throws that out. And that will actually have been a right result of the process of science. So this anti-science sentiment we have now in the technologically-developed United States is so troubling. And here it is in election year, and we're facing climate change, and climate change is going to allow the advancement of all these microbes.
24:19 Speaker 01 You may remember in our last presidential election, we had a candidate who said on live television that she opposed the use of a human papillomavirus vaccine on the grounds that she was sure that girls got mentally retarded as a result of getting the HPV vaccine. And just this week, we have announcement from independent scientific teams all over the United States, a 64% reduction in cervical carcinoma in young-
24:53 Bill Nye? From a vaccine, preventing cancer from a vaccine.
24:56 Speaker 01 From a vaccine.
24:57 Bill Nye? It's not magic, people. It's science. Chuck, read us another query.
25:02 Chuck Nice? Okay, let's take a query from one of our Patreon patrons. Of course, they support us financially, and so therefore, we like to give them a little shout out.
25:13 Speaker 01 We take their questions.
25:14 Chuck Nice? That's right. So you want influence, you want to influence people, okay, give us some money. All right.
25:20 Bill Nye? Just a little bit.
25:21 Chuck Nice? Just a little bit. And this is from Kilia Silvis. Okay, Kilia Silvis from Patreon wants to know this. She's actually a scientist from Minnesota. And she says, "Do you support proposals to introduce GMO male mosquitoes that could breed genetic defects that kill or sterilize large populations of human-biting mosquitoes?"
25:48 Bill Nye? She says GMO.
25:50 Speaker 01 Genetically modified.
25:52 Chuck Nice? Not GMO, just genetically modifying the mosquitoes.
25:55 Bill Nye? Well, not plants and crops. We're modifying the mosquito males.
25:59 Chuck Nice? Right.
26:00 Bill Nye? So they're, even though they have sex with the girl mosquitoes, they don't.
26:04 Chuck Nice? They're sterile. So they don't make any baby mosquitoes.
26:06 Bill Nye? Right.
26:07 Chuck Nice? And therefore you can't get fit.
26:08 Speaker 01 So, this overlaps with a previous question that I forgot to completely answer. What are the suggested ways of controlling mosquitoes in the face of Zika, Dengue, Chikungunya, yellow fever, and other diseases carried by these mosquito populations? The World Health Organization is very actively, with our Centers for Disease Control, trying to come up with real answers that are proven in the field to work and that involve some of the latest technologies we have available that really go to the cutting edge. Why do we have to go to the cutting edge? Which includes genetically modified mosquitoes, includes mosquitoes infected with a bacteria called Wolbachia, which also sterilizes the male.
26:53 Bill Nye? How do you get a mosquito to get infected with a bacterium?
26:56 Speaker 01 We put Wolbachia in the larva.
26:58 Chuck Nice? Ah.
26:59 Bill Nye? How do you do that?
27:00 Speaker 01 Well, they're just sitting right there, like a soupy mix on whatever watery surface.
27:04 Chuck Nice? So you find stagnant water, you put the, uh...
27:06 Speaker 01 Doesn't need to be stagnant.
27:07 Chuck Nice? Doesn't even need to be stagnant.
27:08 Speaker 01 That's the problem with this particular mosquito, Aedes aegypti. It actually likes fresh water.
27:12 Chuck Nice? Oh, my God.
27:13 Bill Nye? You mean if it's in rapids?
27:14 Speaker 01 Drinking water.
27:15 Chuck Nice? Drinking water. Oh, my.
27:16 Speaker 01 That's the problem. See, the reason we have this explosion and how it's linked to climate change is it really started in northern Brazil in an area that's undergoing an El Nino-driven drought. And so people think, wait, mosquitoes, they breed in water. How would that be connected to a drought? Well, it's because people are storing drinking water and washing water, especially in the favelas, the poorer communities, where they may not have, uh...
27:43 Bill Nye? Running water.
27:44 Speaker 01 ...a lot of running water into their homes.
27:45 Bill Nye? Or a municipal system with chlorine and all these other fabulous...
27:48 Speaker 01 Or they are storing additional water over and above what they have in the home for washing purposes, for gardening purposes, and so on. And unless they are really sealed tight, these become breeding sites for this mosquito. So, yes, what tools will work?
28:07 Speaker 01 First, let's say what doesn't work, because in 1999, we had the bizarre experience that a disease, a virus, native to the Nile Delta, all the way up to the source of the Nile in Sudan.
28:21 Bill Nye? Which is on the other side of the world.
28:23 Speaker 01 In a completely different ecology, that virus, which is called West Nile Virus, emerged in the concrete jungle of Queens, New York. Yes.
28:34 Bill Nye? Got on a plane.
28:35 Speaker 01 And we're not sure how it got here, who brought it, and so on, but what happened was...
28:40 Bill Nye? It might have been brought by a lot of people, if it's airplanes, over the years.
28:44 Speaker 01 It could have been in cargo.
28:45 Bill Nye? Yeah.
28:46 Speaker 01 A lot of the introductions actually are via cargo. Point is, it ended up that despite very vigorous mosquito control efforts carried out by New York City and state health officials, and... Which freaked a lot of people out, because the government was spraying! And spraying, and asking people to remove breeding sites from the yards, and so on and so forth. Flash forward a few years, and we not only now have West Nile Virus endemic in almost all 50 states, returning every single spring and summer, but it has now reached the point
29:25 Speaker 01 where it's endemic and carried by 60 different species of North American mosquitoes, and has been the key reason that we've seen an obliteration of songbirds and crows all across North America, and is the number one infectious disease cause of death for racing horses, because they bite on horses as well as humans. And not that... So, there we were, executing what we think is state-of-the-art, United States mosquito control, and it not only failed, it failed miserably. We now have a permanent new feature in our disease background in the United States.
30:03 Bill Nye? So, could we have done, could the United States have stopped these mosquitoes? It doesn't sound like it.
30:09 Speaker 01 We had tremendous ignorance at that time. We didn't imagine that it would readily get taken up by so many indigenous species of North American mosquito. Here's something from Africa, how could that happen? And I think they really underestimated a lot of the life cycle...
30:26 Bill Nye? Who's "they"? Aren't you "they"? Aren't you "them"?
30:30 Speaker 01 Well, I don't do the actual field science. That's done by others.
30:35 Bill Nye? Oh, sure. Pass the buck now, Lori.
30:38 Speaker 01 Well, there's another lesson to learn, and that is, right now, in Hawaii, they're in the grips of a dengue epidemic. And it's carried by the two mosquitoes that we're worried about, Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti. The health officials and mosquito abatement officials on the big island in Hawaii have worked very aggressively to try and control this mosquito. But they've had almost 300 cases now of people getting dengue.
31:04 Bill Nye? If you get dengue fever, what do you do? You die, or do you lie low?
31:07 Speaker 01 No, and this is another thing that complicates trying to figure out what's going on with Zika. Dengue is a really strange disease. Before World War II, it was almost unheard of that people died of dengue. It was mostly in its extreme form. Here, we called it break-bone fever. Benjamin Rush, who signed the American Declaration of Independence and was one of the early colonial physicians in North America,
31:34 Speaker 01 you know, labeled it break-bone fever, and it swept through Philadelphia over and over.
31:38 Bill Nye? Do you get so sick your bones break?
31:39 Speaker 01 No, but it feels like they're breaking.
31:41 Bill Nye? Oh.
31:42 Speaker 01 Just unbelievable pain. That's a little wimpy. Nasty. But it was rarely lethal. What happened in World War II was that, it turns out, there's four different strains of dengue in the world.
31:53 Bill Nye? At least.
31:54 Speaker 01 And they're heavily concentrated in Asia. And when we started having troop movements in the Asia-Pacific, and we were moving troops, they're in the Philippine island, and then they're in Guam, and then they're in Hawaii, and then so on and so forth, humans started to be exposed repeatedly to different strains of dengue. And it turns out, if you get exposed to strain one, it's nasty, you feel lousy, but you don't die. Strain two, you feel even lousier, but you probably still don't die. Strain three, you go to viral hemorrhagic fever, and it's sort of like dengue version of Ebola.
32:28 Bill Nye? Yeah.
32:29 Speaker 01 And it is high mortality, in the neighborhood of 50%. And we don't really have much we can do for you, just as we don't have much we can do for you with Ebola.
32:37 Bill Nye? The people who survive it, they have antibodies, right?
32:40 Speaker 01 They do, but-
32:40 Chuck Nice? Why aren't we harvesting the antibodies of the people who survive these? Because there's a lot of people who survived Ebola this time-
32:47 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
32:48 Chuck Nice? Because of, you know, the World Health Organization moving in and- Why don't we take these people?
32:53 Speaker 01 We do, and we have. And the problem is that giving plasma to people, saying, you know, um, "This guy here survived, so we're gonna take his blood and transfuse it to that person," or what have you. So far, these efforts have failed. They have not worked. Um, but there's very, very aggressive work on trying to figure out what's the nature of that antibody response and can we induce it with a vaccine? Back to the vaccines, folks.
33:22 Chuck Nice? Mm-hmm.
33:22 Speaker 01 You know, that really is our ultimate solution-
33:26 Chuck Nice? The vaccine?
33:27 Speaker 01 In every of these diseases.
33:28 Chuck Nice? So, and it sounds to me, because all these problems you, uh, have, uh, presented, comes from us moving around the planet. So, the real answer is stay the hell home.
33:39 Speaker 01 Oh.
33:40 Chuck Nice? Please.
33:40 Speaker 01 I'll tell you something, okay? Here, here-
33:43 Chuck Nice? You've told us a lot of things. Tell us another.
33:45 Speaker 01 80s egypti, okay?
33:47 Chuck Nice? This is a mosquito-
33:48 Speaker 01 This is a mosquito that is the main carrier of all of these key viruses we've been talking about. You know where that came from originally?
33:55 Chuck Nice? No.
33:56 Speaker 01 And how it got to the Americas?
33:57 Chuck Nice? It's named egypti. Okay.
33:59 Speaker 01 So, it originally came from Africa.
34:01 Chuck Nice? All right.
34:01 Speaker 01 And it got to North America and South America via slave trade.
34:07 Chuck Nice? Oh, of course. Blame the slaves! Of course.
34:10 Bill Nye? Hey, you guys, this has been Star Talk, the all-star edition. We have our beloved Chuck Nice here, a man about the earth, and, uh, Dr. Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow of the Global Health Council on-
34:24 Speaker 01 Or something like that. Council on Foreign Relations-
34:27 Bill Nye? Global Health Council on Foreign Relations, the oldest think tank in the United States. And I've been your, I am your host, Bill Nye, and we'll be back right after this.
34:44 Bill Nye? Chuck, you know what time it is?
34:45 Chuck Nice? As a matter of fact, I do, Bill.
34:48 Bill Nye? It's time for that day in science.
34:50 Chuck Nice? That's right. It's not this day in science. It's that day in science. And that day in science was roughly September the year 1347. Does that ring a bell to you?
35:03 Bill Nye? Yes, it does. It was a while ago. I wasn't there. But that was when the Black Plague, the first signs of the Black Plague showed up in Europe. This would be the bubonic plague. Uh, the first signs were present around the fall of 1347. And in the span of just three years, Chuck, the Black Death killed one-third of all the people in Europe. Imagine one-third of the people you know just dying, disappearing.
35:30 Chuck Nice? If I picked the right people, that would be a good thing.
35:32 Bill Nye? If only we could, you can't. The Black Death stands out as the most dramatic and lifestyle-changing event during this century. And a lot of other stuff went on, but that was a big deal.
35:42 Chuck Nice? That is a big deal. So let me ask you, what do you think culturally? I mean, you know, you're a person as a scientist who pretty much encompasses it all. What today have we taken from the Black Plague or the Black Death? What today have, uh, how does it resonate today?
36:03 Bill Nye? Well, people ask me, "Bill," they say, "nigh, what is the most significant invention of all time?"
36:10 Chuck Nice? Yes.
36:11 Bill Nye? And people have this some expectation about a smartphone or internal combustion engine or fuel engine. No, it's a sewer.
36:20 Chuck Nice? The sewer?
36:21 Bill Nye? Yes. If you, once you have hygiene, once you have a way to get rid of your waste, then you have a chance of reducing the number of rats running around and the number of fleas, uh, feeding on the rats and infecting you with something like the bubonic plague.
36:36 Chuck Nice? Wow.
36:37 Bill Nye? That's my, I mean, bear in mind, that's my opinion, but as is so often the case, my opinion's correct.
36:45 Bill Nye? This is where civil engineering goes so far back and people talk about the success of the ancient Romans. They had, uh, clean water for an enormous number of their people.
36:56 Chuck Nice? Right.
36:56 Bill Nye? For a lot of their populace. And you gotta have... It's very fashionable right now Chuck, if I may wander off before we get back to something substantive with respect to this particular StarTalk episode. Yes. It's very fashionable now for people who are wealthy to say they're libertarian. True. Right, it seems like it's a fad. But everything's fine, you say, "Well, you should have your own sewer system, you should have your own clean water supply, every person should be wealthy enough to filter their own water and this and that." But what if your neighbor is infected with something? Mm-hmm.
37:36 Bill Nye? And he or she is exhaling, and he or she has rats that have fleas, and you get infected. You don't want that. This is where you have to have a community working together for the public good. You have to have public works and sewers- I was about to say, they call that "public works." And so sewer is the classicest example of that. You know, "Everybody should have their own fire department." But what if your neighbor's roof is on fire and the embers are blowing onto yours and so on? So, disease control writ larger is a classic example of using public works for the public good. Wow. Suppressing these horrible mosquito populations that Dr. Garrett's talking about,
38:18 Bill Nye? and controlling so that everybody who's young gets vaccinated against every disease that we have vaccines for, and spending public resources to develop new vaccines, these are all for the public good, these are public works. And so this thing where people want government to disappear, to be small, get rid of government entitlement, "The government's bad." Right. It's not all bad. I'm sorry, it's not all bad. Yeah, because sewers are pretty dang good. And you want a government-run sewer, and you want the people who run it to take pride in their work, and you want them to be compensated in such a way that they do a good job, and you want to have civil engineers come out of civil engineering school, and
39:00 Bill Nye? you want people, the workers there, to make a good wage and maintain the sewers properly, and this is what makes cities livable and clean and reduces the number of plagues. Nice.
39:12 Chuck Nice? Sewers, who would have ever thought sewers?
39:15 Bill Nye? That's my opinion. Now, while we're at it, you know, we're living at an exciting time.
39:20 Chuck Nice? Yes.
39:21 Bill Nye? Not just because we could all die of some new infection that Dr. Carrot's talking about, but also, we could discover life on another world. And I say this would change the course of history. This is my opinion.
39:32 Chuck Nice? Okay.
39:33 Bill Nye? The Black Plague, one out of every three people died.
39:37 Chuck Nice? Yes.
39:37 Bill Nye? That's just astonishing, right? Uh, but that, uh, we still sing Ring Around the Rosie, which is a rhyme that dates from the 14th century.
39:46 Chuck Nice? That's correct.
39:46 Bill Nye? Goodness. Uh, so it's had a huge effect on us, uh, both literally and culturally. By literally, I mean, uh, we're still, many of us are still alive. Uh, those genes, the people that lived through it passed their genes on. But, um, uh, if we were, that's, uh, shortly thereafter, in centuries' terms, people realized the earth was round.
40:06 Chuck Nice? Mm-hmm.
40:06 Bill Nye? And went around the sun.
40:07 Chuck Nice? Right.
40:08 Bill Nye? People in Europe realized it, run around the sun. And this changed the world. It allowed international commerce.
40:13 Chuck Nice? Yes.
40:14 Bill Nye? Which led to all these amazing discoveries in science and, uh, commerce and, uh, navigation around the world's oceans. All this is made possible by planetary exploration. If we were to discover life on another world, everybody would think differently about what it means to be a living thing on this planet. Everybody would feel differently about being alive in the cosmos.
40:39 Chuck Nice? So, speaking-
40:39 Bill Nye? Profound, Chuck. Profound.
40:41 Chuck Nice? Speaking of life on another planet, and if we were to discover life on another planet, and let's just say, we were able to encounter that life on another planet. Now, the Black Plague, when people traversed the globe, they exchanged some nasty stuff-
40:57 Bill Nye? Yes.
40:57 Chuck Nice? And one-third of Europe died.
40:59 Bill Nye? Yes.
41:00 Chuck Nice? So now, we meet some people from another planet. Who's gonna kill whom?
41:05 Bill Nye? It's unknown, Captain.
41:06 Chuck Nice? Yeah?
41:07 Bill Nye? Speculation. But I'll give you this. If, if we go to Mars, if we, uh, if we go to Mars, we will contaminate it. If humans walk around on Mars, as diligent as we try to be-
41:18 Chuck Nice? Right.
41:18 Bill Nye? We're gonna contaminate it. But, the surface of Mars is exposed to ultraviolet light. All Martian day, all the time. And it's crazy cold. And it's extraordinarily dry. Yes, there's a little water around, but it is super dry there. So it's very reasonable to me that our spacecraft, which have been on the surface of Mars for years- Are effectively sterile.
41:41 Chuck Nice? Ah.
41:42 Bill Nye? And so, we could, in good conscious, conscience, drive one of them up to one of these weeping walls, these craters that have liquid water flowing out of them, apparently in the Martian summer. And we could, with the instruments that are on, let's say, for example, Bill shooting from the hip.
42:00 Chuck Nice? Right.
42:00 Bill Nye? The Curiosity Rover, or the 2020 Rover, which will have many of the same instruments, launching in what year, Chuck, do you think?
42:07 Chuck Nice? Uh, going to Mars?
42:08 Bill Nye? Yes, the 2020 Rover, what do you think?
42:10 Chuck Nice? I'm gonna go, I don't know, 2017.
42:13 Bill Nye? Uh, it's close, 2020. And so, we could make instruments that would drive up to one of these features. Uh, we could leave it on the surface of Mars for a couple of years, just to feel better about sterilization, drive up to one of these features, and perhaps make a discovery that would change the world. And we, the discovery would be very much akin to the discovery of all these microbiomes, all these ecosystems that are alive in our gut, and all the genes that we have that are apparently a result of interaction with viruses here on this planet. It's all of a piece. It's science, Chuck. Basic research to change the world for the betterment of all humankind.
42:53 Chuck Nice? And at that point, change the solar system. We're not just changing the world.
42:57 Bill Nye? That's right.
43:02 Bill Nye? Welcome back, welcome back. I'm your host, Bill Nye, here on StarTalk's special All-Star Edition. And one of our All-Stars, of course, our beloved Chuck Nice, and also Dr. Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health, the Council on Foreign Relations, the oldest think tank in the United States.
43:20 Speaker 01 You got it.
43:20 Bill Nye? And we're talking about germs, parasites. And I'll just say, from an evolutionary standpoint, germs and parasites are the bad guys. It's not lions and tigers and bears, that's nothing. It's germs and parasites.
43:34 Speaker 01 They're good guys, too. You can't exist without them inside of you. Outnumbering your cells tend to win.
43:39 Chuck Nice? Wow, that sounds like a germ love song. I can't exist without you.
43:43 Bill Nye? You outnumber me 10 to 1.
43:47 Bill Nye? Little germ.
43:49 Speaker 01 Well, a hundred to one if you count the viruses.
43:52 Bill Nye? Is that, but seriously, that's all? A hundred to one? So how many cells do we have on the order of a trillion?
43:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, so it's many trillions.
43:59 Chuck Nice? Wow.
43:59 Bill Nye? Wow.
44:00 Chuck Nice? That's, that's amazing.
44:01 Bill Nye? That is amazing.
44:02 Chuck Nice? Well, you know what?
44:03 Bill Nye? It's a cosmic query. You have a query.
44:04 Chuck Nice? We have another query from our cosmos and um, this is um, Justin uh, Les Nowinski wants to know, what is the nastiest virus we can expect to show up? That would be like a doomsday virus. So is there anything on the books right now? That could possibly?
44:27 Bill Nye? Well, they all are.
44:28 Chuck Nice? I mean, but, but that has the ability to wipe us out. To wipe us out.
44:33 Speaker 01 This is the zombie question and I always get the zombie question.
44:36 Chuck Nice? Yes.
44:37 Speaker 01 Um, is there, is there something out there that will turn everybody into?
44:41 Bill Nye? Brain.
44:43 Speaker 01 And so the answer is, well, yes, we already have it. Uh, but it's moving in slow motion. It's HIV.
44:50 Bill Nye? Uh huh.
44:51 Speaker 01 Um, in the absence of antiretroviral therapy, HIV is a hundred percent lethal event. The
44:56 Bill Nye? Great.
44:57 Speaker 01 The percentage of people that are somehow capable for reasons we don't fully understand to survive and be long-term
45:06 Speaker 01 carrying the virus in their bodies without becoming deathly ill is infinitesimal in terms of the large mass of, you know.
45:14 Bill Nye? So if you like to worry about something, human immunodeficiency virus is.
45:18 Chuck Nice? That's it.
45:19 Speaker 01 It's proven. It's already happened. It's already out there. Seventy-five million people. Now, the thing is it
45:24 Chuck Nice? Seventy-five million?
45:25 Speaker 01 That's since nineteen seventy-nine. But here's the thing, it's in slow motion. It takes ten years to reach a stage of post-infection on average before you develop what is called AIDS.
45:38 Chuck Nice? So not, not to anthropomorphize um, you know, HIV, but it sounds to me like it's the smartest virus ever. Well, if I'm, if I'm going to
45:47 Bill Nye? Design a virus.
45:48 Chuck Nice? Design a virus. If, if, if I'm a virus, I get to live in you for ten years as you're my host before you die. I'm living rent-free for ten years.
45:58 Speaker 01 Well, I'll give you better because the way it gets away with it is that. HIV is what's called a retrovirus. It makes a reverse copy of itself and sticks it in your DNA. And that's why you can't get rid of it. Because to build an immune response against it, you'd have to attack your own genes.
46:14 Bill Nye? So how do the retrovirus viral therapies work?
46:17 Speaker 01 Well, they try to interrupt various aspects of the life cycle inside of a cell of the virus. And there, you take a kind of combination of them and they kind of hit the virus at each of these life cycle stages.
46:32 Bill Nye? By them, you mean these drugs?
46:33 Speaker 01 But now, here's the thing. Actually, it turns out, as we finished the Human Genome Project, which was completed in the year 2000, 2001, sequencing the entire human genome, and then since then, analyzed, you know, millions of people's genomes, we're appreciating that a heck of a lot of what we, in our, you know, species arrogance, think is unique to us.
46:57 Bill Nye? Right.
46:58 Speaker 01 Right? I'm a human. These are my genes, right? Turn out to be originally viruses. So actually, we have been absorbing viral DNA into our DNA as long as we have existed as primate, and probably our ancestral primates, and their ancestral primates, and their ancestral primates were sucking up viral DNA into our genome. And some of it turns out to be very important, and some turns out to do nasty things like cause cancer.
47:26 Bill Nye? Gotcha. So it just depends. So you, I know in nature-
47:31 Speaker 01 All the proverbial dice.
47:32 Bill Nye? Right. And so I know in, uh, last year, there was a paper published showing that genes go from one plant to another, carried by viruses. And so genetically modifying plants or crops is not that different from what nature does. And you're saying this whole thing's been going on for millennia, or-
47:52 Speaker 01 Well, how do you think it all started? In the microbial soup. You know, the first little bits of genetic material formed and were surrounded by some kind of something that was protein goop to protect them. This, and it-
48:05 Bill Nye? Now, look at us now.
48:06 Speaker 01 Step by step by step. And here we are, the most elaborate protein goop on the planet.
48:10 Bill Nye? With that said, thank you so much for coming. This has been StarTalk, the all-star edition, and you've been listening to Chuck Nice, our man about the planet. And this week, special insights from Dr. Laurie Garrett, the Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. And you go around the world telling us about- All these germs and parasites that are out there with whom we have to deal.
48:36 Speaker 01 And I just want to say a special thank you, Bill, for the work you do to try and make the people of the world understand how idiotic it is to be anti-science and to absorb bogus theories and notions of how our planet works. You do a great service that we honor.
48:52 Bill Nye? Wow, bring it on.
48:53 Chuck Nice? That is true.
48:54 Bill Nye? Thank you, Lori. This is fantastic.
48:55 Chuck Nice? Say something nice about me, please.
48:57 Speaker 01 You're very nice.
48:58 Bill Nye? Both descriptively and by surname. So, thank you all for watching StarTalk, the all-star edition. We will be back again next week. I've been your host, Bill Nye. Let's change the world.
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