Transcripts For CSPAN2 Booknotes Gina Kolata Flu 20240713 :

CSPAN2 Booknotes Gina Kolata Flu July 13, 2024

I had never heard of anything like this. It was the worst Infectious Disease academic. Guilt he killed so many people and if something came by like that today it would kill more people than the top 10 killers if it came by today and i just found out by looking at the papers by the center for Disease Control that 99 of the people that died in the epidemic were under age of 65 so it was an astonishing devastating epidemic and it was this idea that all these years later almost a century later a molecular biology has advanced so much that someone could have lung tissue that still had the viral genes in their and asked that question about what was this virus, how could influenza virus become such a killer and could it happen again and if so would we recognize it in time. Host one reference in the book that may be as many as 202 met 100 Million People died in 1918 from this fluke . Guest historians keep ratcheting the number upward, 40 million is an underestimate and i heard most recently there was a meeting of historians and they say they think the true number worldwide was closer to 100 million and possibly 20 million died on the indian sub continent host what is influenza . Guest a simple little virus and only lives in the human lungs and while its they are the only job is to take a long cell and make it into a virus factory, so the virus gets in and it takes the cells machinery and forces it to make new viruses and then the cell dies in the virus escapes. Simple little things. Host what happens to the body then . Guest there are four hallmarks of influenza i have heard, one is that you get a fever and take to your bed. You have muscle aches and pains, fever, you have a cough. You dont always have a cough. Host have you ever had a by the way . Guest i think i had it once. Host you dont know what it feels like . Guest i did when i had it, five days of torture and i still remember those muscle aches and high fever. Host back in 1918, where did it start . Guest the first time he came into the us in a big way, it showed up near boston and people thought at the time that it was like germ warfare because they couldnt believe it was Something Like the flu and many people insisted on putting the word influenza in quotations. It was during world war i and there was a rumor that there had been a cloud over Boston Harbor that was killing people or maybe the germans put something into aspirin that would kill people so when it arrived, he was the most horrible thing anyone had ever witnessed. If they had so many Young Children who were dying that they needed special trains to take away the dead. The bodies were stacked up. It was so shocking that the Surgeon General put the contingent of three of the leading doctors in the us to go out and say whats going on at camp at devon. One later roads come i cant even bear to think about this. It was camped devon in the fall, 1918, when the deadly influenza virus demonstrated inferiority of humans. He said the memory was burned on his brain that he wishes he could remove if he possibly could and when he described what happened when doctors were just to see an autopsy they said there were so me dead that they had to step over to the bodies just to get into the autopsy room. Then when they watched an autopsy take place, the military doctor opened the chest of a young man that had died in their work is a lungs filled with fluid, totally useless of man essentially died because his loves head with fluid and a doctor there who had been pretty much nothing could shake him and he turned and said this must be a plague he couldnt believe it. Host in your book you have well, you explain what they are . Guest the bottom picture cracks these are some of the samples of lung tissue from people from 1918. What was this virus and how would we ever knowing what was really miraculous was theres a military warehouse and people have described it like a library of congress of the dead started by Abraham Lincoln and every time a military doctor doesnt autopsy, youre supposed to put some of the tissue in the persons medical record in this big warehouse. There were people who died of the flu in 1918, and at the time doctors took snippets of the lung tissue, sentiment formaldehyde and send them to the warehouse and the doctor, Jeffrey Ellenberger at walter reed finally at the end of the century but in no requisition for people who had died of that food, in essence to find some lung tissue with flu in it and that lung tissue you saw was paraffin wax with lung tissue in and inside the lung tissue after all these years there is but still that flu virus from 1918. Host go back to this Pathology Institute here at walter reed. Have you been there . Guest yes. Host 3 million what, samples . Guest they are in boxes and jars and things and its this a big metal warehouse with cement floors i guess to keep it from burning down and they have these big racks of box after box after box and there is a man they are named al riddick, and his job is if someone once lung samples and what was asked for in this case was people that died from influenza in 1918 and died very quickly because they didnt want the person that had the flu virus and then lingered and the virus left in their lungs had died and so theres actually records of 1917 that have been computerized so get a computer printout of where to look any goes over with his ladders and he takes down these boxes boxes and in them work samples, brain tissue and all sorts of stuff without warehouse and this is lung tissue. Host you said Abraham Lincoln started it. Are there samples from the civil war . Guest right after the civil war, yes, from then on accumulating like a pack rat paradise. It was a brilliant idea because when they started this who knew what you would use it for and at the idea that in 1918, no one found the human influenza virus so the idea someone someday could come back and make use of this material was brilliant. Host i know im jumping way ahead, do they know what caused the influence of 1918 . Guest they know it was the flu virus and there are only eight teams in a flu virus and at this point and three lung samples from people who died in 1918 that have those genes in them and getting them out is pushing the limits of molecular biology and it takes a long time and they describe it as like putting together a detailed mosaic. They have gotten three of the eight genes completely put together now. They chose they are choosing them in order of the likelihood they will get an easy answer to what made the virus so deadly and unfortunately the first three genes told them the flu virus is related to bird and pig virus that we have not provided the answer yet to why it was dangerous a. Host me ask a couple questions about the Pathology Institute. Theres only one person that works there . Guest one person, but im sure there are other. Host did you get any sense that there was a lot of traffic . Guest i was the only person there. Host how big is it . Guest pretty big, this huge like warehouse think. Host right here at walter reed . Guest right near it in maryland, just over the border. Host one thing i must admit that i picked the book up was i did not expect to get out of this book kind of a drama, i mean, there is some personal stories in here that are fairly dramatic. Were you surprised about the competition going on to find this . Guest by the time i started to write the book, new there was a story and i write books for myself. I read fiction for fun and i wouldnt write a book unless i thought there was a story because if you have chapter after chapter like a textbook its not something i would pick up and read just because i wanted to read it, so thats what appealed to me is that there was a drama there and there was competition. Showed all of the weaknesses of the search for scientific data. Host what book is this for you . Guest what depends on what you count commercial or noncommercial, guess commercial, fourth. Host how long have you worked for the New York Times . Four years. Host how did you get the science . Guest you dont even want to know. So silly. I wanted to be a writer but i was studying science and i was sort of changing graduate schools. I was studying mathematics. I was going to get a phd and decided to get a masters instead, so i applied to every place in the Washington Area because i was married then i couldnt just move around and try to get a writing job. Science gave me a job, not as a writer, but as a boring job selecting reviewers for manuscripts and i said i will take this job, but im doing it to warm my way into the writing department. I took the job in shortly after i said now i would like to write an article for you on my own time for free, take it or leave it or do you mind if i do it they said okay and they published it and then i did another and another. Host wearies your home hometown . Richmond. Host where did you go to school . Guest university of maryland. I tried to science. Host Science Magazine is bought by what kind of person . Guest mostly subscription magazine. Scientists and policymakers who usually read it, but they have a new section that is supposed to be written for anyone to read. The idea is to write something so that a physicist who wants to know what theyre doing and molecular biology doesnt have to know any of the stuff that led up to this discovery and is like writing a normal news story. They just have to read it and they will understand. Host who owns it . Guest the American Association for the advancement of science, nonprofit. Host you mention another magazine, nature . Guest like the science competitors, british magazine, very similar, news section written by aussie scientists. Host go back to 1918 again. What was this more devastating flu than the average one that we hear about all the time . Guest theres no comparison. When you just think about the number of dead i think i said earlier 1. 5 million americans would die at this came and in a typical flu season 20000 people died most are very old or have some other chronic medical condition that weakens them in here 99 were under age of 65 so a peculiar death curve shaped like a w. The very young died in people between the age of 20 and 40 died in huge numbers and then at the end old people died. Host i would like to ask you to read page 25 if you dont mind. The authors brother i guess died in this and then thomas wilkes, where did he write this . Guest he was writing look homeward angel and that is fiction but i asked a number of people and they said the description of his brothers death was actually his brothers real name and inscription that was not fictionalized, its really what happened when his brother died. Host would you mind reading this in here and tell us why you put this in the book . Guest can i tell you why first . Host yes. Guest when i talk about the flu or People Living today talking about the flu its almost impossible for us to imagine what it was like. I tried is much as i could to put the words of the people who had been there because when you have been there and seen it has a sort of emotion that i can capture and i dont think anyone else i spoke to have been able to capture, so the reason i put the description and was of all the descriptions i had read about people dying of the flu, this one just really touched me. I almost it almost brought me too tears your queue can imagine yourself in that room watching someone die like this and it was one of the most one of those moments, i mean, i cant forget this passage in thats why i put it in. Both came home to a deathwatch, his brother was lying in the sick room upstairs while family waited for what they feared was inevitable. Wolf went upstairs to the gray shaded light of the room where then lay and he saw in that moment a searing recognition of his beloved 26 euros brother was dying. Heres the quote of how he died, then the long chain of body weight three quarters covered by betting, the god outline was twisted below the covers in an attitude of struggle and torture. It seemed not to belong to him, somehow distorted and detached as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal. The yellowing of his face had turned gray. Death by two red flags of fever, his stiff black threeday beard was growing. The beard recalled the corrupt vitality of hair which can grow from a rotting corpse and then a constant grimace of torture and strangulation about his white somehow dead looking teeth as inch by inch he gasps air into his lungs and the sound of this gasping loud, horse, rapid, unbelievable orchestrating every moment in it gave to its seen the final note of horror in the next day then grew delirious and by 4 00 p. M. It was apparent death was near. He had briefs consciousness, unconsciousness and delirium but mostly delirious. His breathing was easier. Always he returned to this quiet humming to the popular song of wartime, deep, sentimental but now tragically moving, babies prayer at twilight and then ben sank into unconsciousness and his eyes were almost closed with the gray flicker doled the coated with an death. He lay quietly upon his back very straight without a sign of a pain in a curious upturned thrust of his thin face, his mouth was firmly shut. Wolf stayed with ben that night praying even though he thought he couldnt believe in god or prayer, whoever you are be good to ben tonight. Whoever you are, we could to ben tonight showing the way. He heard only the rattle of dying breath and his chronic prayer. Wolf fell asleep and then suddenly woke suddenly calling his family with the knowledge that end was near. Ben lay still the body. To grow rigid before them. Ben in a last gasp he drew upon the air in a long and powerful respiration, his gray eyes opened filled with a terrible vision of all life in the one moment he seemed to rise forward bodily from the pillar without support, a flame, a light, glory and so then ben past unafraid as he had lived into the shade them death. Host does he say in the book what his brother did . Guest i dont know. Host he say i think another statistic Something Like 20 of the American People got the flu that your . Guest kind of amazing statistic is usually only a small percentage gets the flu. Everyone says they have it but usually its another disease so it was amazingly infectious flu, just spread so quickly throughout the population people couldnt understand how it was moving so fast. Then 25 times more deadly than the normal flu and seemed to be killing young people which is why they had such an amazing death rate. Host heres a photograph from 1976 of president ford and his doctor giving him a shot. With the story behind this . Guest in 1976 scientists were afraid in 1980 flu was coming back. They got this 1918 flu is related to a flu that infected pigs at the time because her on the same time that people were dying in the 1918 flu pigs got influenza and started to die. Not sure pigs give it to people or people gave it to pigs, but scientists became convinced it was related to a thought swine flu and in 1976 young 18year old soldier went on a march with his unit and was feeling sick, but he wanted to join and it was a nighttime fivemile hike. He was he collapsed and was brought back to the hospital and died and they discovered he had the swine flu, very strange a Young Healthy guy getting the swine flu and it dying. It takes six months to make enough taxing to protect the population so president ford asked doctors in the country and flu experts what should we do, do you say lets wait until next season to see if theres a problem or do you say this one death is scary enough we should protect everyone and make a swine flu vaccine and give it out to the nation. The decision was understandable and they said we cant take a chance because if we guess wrong in the 1918 flu is back, people will be dying rapidly and we would have no way to protect them, so there was the decision to make a campaign to immunize all americans against the swine flu. It turned out that it was kind of a campaign that didnt work well. President ford in order to try to encourage people to get the vaccine was photographed getting his own flu shot host 135 milliondollar. Guest right. Host didnt turn out that it was that important . Guest turned out there was no flock swine flu epidemic. This guy got the swine flu, but no one knows where he got it. A few other people seem to have antibodies to the swine flu indicating they got it but recovered, but no one died except for him and no one was getting sick from the flu and so they had a vaccine against a flu strain that was not causing any sort of problem and around the same time as everyone started to get immunized people started saying the vaccine is actually killing people making them sick so this was theres a lot of fear of the vaccine and i think it haunted people to this day because today you still hear people say the flu vaccine, they never get the right flu strain and its worse than the disease the vaccine can make you sick and i think that got started after 1976. Host we are in the flu season as we record this going through february. How do they who determines first of all what shot you get . You know a couple months ago when people work the. Guest theres a group of experts, International Surveillance goes on all the time and they look at the flu strain starting to become the predominant one at the end of the Previous Year and then what flu strains are appearing elsewhere in the world because the flu every year it comes to population and birds itself out. In 1918 it did that also it affected everyone that could be affected or whos been exposed to it and then mutates and changes a bit and comes back again and if people are vulnerable it will infect them. Host you said right above Hong Kong China that all flues emanate from there . Guest some people say that every major epidemic, every pandemic around the world in this century has begun in Southern China and theres a reason why they say its a hotspot for flues and that is in order to really sweep the world, you have it a flu that is so different from anything you have seen and that virtually everyone is no world is susceptible and one way is to get a flu thats deemed not to have been seen by human beings before and at birds get infected with the flaw the time. They dont even get sick. It lives in their intestines and bird flu is different than the one that infects people and pigs can be infected with bird flu in human flu and they can be a mixing bow

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