Would like any information on the coronavirus or any other science topic you should really check out our podcast so you can get it wherever you get your podcasts you can also find us at. Ford slash science. Because at 19 pandemic has exposed weaknesses in the worlds ability to track and respond to major Infectious Disease outbreaks. The 2014 to 16. 00 it total are epidemic in west africa short of long standing weaknesses in the International Health system and how for that it was for a major outbreak. For years on and even countries thought to have strong response capabilities failed to detect the early signs of. Corona virus outbreaks all respond quickly enough meant that Community Transmission of the virus was already well established before governments could react. Think tanks and Public PolicyInstitute Like have been pushing for massive investment in outbreak response and care capacity. Demick preparedness has been described as a Global Public good. And yet globally its been left up to National PublicHealth Systems to carry the largest burden of cases and the boke of the costs. Outbreaks and resurgence is of coronavirus cases are stretching public Health Systems the world over local and National Governments keep having to make drastic measures for to prevent services being overwhelmed they have to act fast to get ahead of this virus. Stagnation in a place where people would normally be having fun this is not how big had imagined things his fair had only just opened when he had to close it down again because of a drastic increase in corona numbers in the west philly and city of ham. Wouldnt every have to drag a sick feel weve put our heart and soul into this weeks of work its really tough its shocking we havent earned any money or year and now were having to write off potential income. And all of this because of a single wedding celebration where more than 100 people were infected with the coronavirus. Were not to blame as far as anyone can tell there hasnt been a single instance anywhere of numbers going up in any way around a temporary leisure ground nonetheless or the 1st to feel the full impact and its frankly depressing that we are the ones who always end up paying the price of. The closure of the funfair was only one of the measures ordered by mayor. In a bid to get infection rates under control he says hes now looking at how private festivities can be better monitored. Were keeping a 150 as the upper limit in how because we dont want anybody to start canceling a wedding or a Silver Wedding anniversary. But up to 25 people these occasions dont have to be registered from 25 to 50 there must be advance notice so that we know whats happening and where and from 50 to 150 they are subject to approval and well be taking a very close look. Many and ham are asking themselves how the couple in question could have been so reasonable. So far not everybody who is infected has been tracked down their mayor is relying on volunteers who trace possible victims people like retired doctor. Or a truly great really pushes you to your limits especially for people working at the local Health Offices who are organizing this whole operation its a real pity that its had to come to this i personally believe it could have been avoided. Meanwhile fairground operate it really is now faced with the dismantling of his fare. I just hope we can get back to life as normal that we can take part in the fun fairs and other festivals as we always have and i hope we can help make people a little bit happy. For now though phone is on hold. So we can now speak to dr emanuel who is a professor of Health Care Management at the university of pennsylvania in the u. S. Well in months into this pandemic now dr emanuel and global Health Systems are they now in a better position to cope with the coronavirus outbreaks or theyve been weakened by these months of sickness no i think in general certainly and in the advanced countries they are better able we know how to manage patients better we know not to into bait them to give them high flow oxygen we know how to use anticoagulants we know to use to actually met the sun so we have a lot more knowledge about how to manage these patients and which ones really need to be in the intensive care unit nonetheless if you have a large number of cases you will can overwhelm the system and i believe the french are you know teetering that problem right now yeah what do you think i mean. Advanced countries any more ready for a 2nd wave than they might have been for the 1st time particularly saying that some of these 2nd occurrences are coming with even small cases than the 1st time round. Yes that is worrisome they say look the systems can be overwhelmed if you have too many a cases we do i think have again better management but we also need to have better Search Capacity the ability to quickly put up temporary facilities in you know mobile units or tents and thats going to be necessary we you know we predict that youre going to have repeated waves here for the you know influenza of 1809198 also extended to 1020. 00 that were you know 4 waves of it actually more small echoes of it so weve got to be prepared for that to happen and part of that preparation is Search Capacity during the course of this pandemic have we seen sense styles of public Health System that are working better than others its. We have i mean systems that were able to quickly implement. Testing. Contact tracing and suppression theyve kept the number of cases very low you can look at taiwan singapore south korea japan has real models here germany itself did a remarkably good job of keeping the death rate extremely low so there are places that have done well but even places that search like italy they were able to put Public Health measures in place the social distancing the avoiding crowds the facemask wearing the closing of not essential businesses and then 8 or 10 weeks they were able to bring the numbers very very low and that does show you that even without a vaccine using Public Health measures you can actually bring the case numbers low and then begin to open up the economy its very important you know once you have the case numbers low life can resume not completely to normal but watts of freedoms can be reintroduced under those circumstances. On the Health Systems on the other side of that though weve actually seen performing less well than we thought they might have under these conditions yes the United States is a really good example of that weve just done a terrible job at in large measure the terrible job has been the fact that weve had you know were a very big country of 4 times the size of germany for example and weve had a haphazard response so some states are doing a very good job of closing out essential businesses wearing face masks this and say well other states like georgia and florida just arent and once that happens people travel they bring the virus with them and it reignites cases so we saw it go from new york to the south and the west and then up the midwest in the United States and its raging where were back up to double the number of cases we had in june because states like wisconsin and missouri in the middle of the country are just having large scale spread because they ignore the Public Health measures its been very tough for the United States doctors they kill emmanuel thank you so much for joining us thank you for. Now its time for one of your questions to ask science correspondent Derek Williams today comes from someone calling themselves eric cartman. How do you make a vaccine for something that mutates. I get asked this a lot to answer we have to look at the process of evolution not just like with living organisms the genetic code that governs how a virus is made changes from generation to generation sometimes in small ways sometimes in big ones the progeny if they survive eventually will become separate strains that are distinct from their common ancestor their genetic code has changed and and that can change how they look at their structure and also how they interact with potential hosts for example whether they can cause more or less severe illness whats key to creating a vaccine is the speed at which these changes occur in viruses like the ones that cause influenza for example which have genomes that are less stable or the rate of change is so rapid and random that we need a new vaccine to fight them every year we have to play catch up with flu bugs all the time fortunately due to the way that sars cove 2 makes copies of itself its genome remains relatively stable as far as we can tell a worldwide there isnt a lot of genetic variation yet among all the Novel Coronavirus is circulating in different parts of the planet and because those groups are so homogeneous theoretically a vaccine that can prevent one should be able to prevent them all whats interesting and kind. The scary is that is that when we start to prevent infections with a vaccine will also start forcing sars cove to change in ways that will allow it to get around the vaccine but but thats a different question. And we will have more questions to our science correspondent Barry Williams next time around now lets have a look at how the world is doing in terms of coronavirus cases. Look at take it from 209 countries and territories over the past 4 weeks tells us the number of new cases has doubled or worse in 35 countries they also increased though to a lesser degree in a further 77 countries 6 countries have seen case numbers rising at around the same rate 61 countries have seen their new coverage 19 positive cases go down by anything up to half and 21 have seen them in more than half of meanwhile 9 countries have reported no new cases for 4 weeks in a row. This is the graph compared with the last few weeks remember the battle is won when that entire chart is blue we still have a long way to go. But we will eventually get that thats all from this coming 19 special if you want from more from us as a dedicated section of the that we dot com. You square this as it seems. To understand the world better we need to take a closer look. Experience knowledge to borrow to. The to. Allow ourselves to. Live on clouds. And tears. Thinking of the world in a more poetic. B. R. D. And exclusive interview. To say no. 13. Every 2 seconds a person is forced to flee their home. The consequences have been disastrous our documentary series displaced depicts dramatic humanitarian crises around the world. Forgetting we dont hate them and think i didnt go to university to kill people i dont know i think the fact that man yeah. People feel for their lives and their future so they seek refuge abroad but what will become of those who stay behind. Displaced starts october 16th on g. W. d the fingerprint is unique to an individual a pattern of ridges and follows that can reveal more than just your identity. When a finger makes even just in contact with the surface at least traces of sweat fat salt and proteins that can now be analyzed using new technology. That helps scientists identify someones eating habits the diseases they suffered from or whether they took drugs even centuries after the fact. Following fingerprints into the past and rediscovering history welcome to tomorrow today the science show on d w. d books repositories of knowledge centuries old books can teach us a lot about the past as long as we can decode them cryptographers have yet to decipher the 15th century vine it manuscript for example. That historical bookstore molecular as well as intellectual secrets. Secrets about the people who wrote them touched them and left their traces in the form of proteins these molecules are found in every single cell of the body and each type of protein is made up of a sequence of amino acids folded in a human equation scientists have only recently learned how to read this data hidden between the lines of old books. The socalled marco polo bible is almost 800 years old tiny slivers of the parchment are all biochemist giorgio riggins he needed to look into its past getty speciality is proteomics the study of the range of proteins in organisms here. Examines documents paintings clothing traces of proteins and they can be thousands of years old the bible belongs to the Laurentian Library in florida its named after markopolos because he was thought to have taken it to china to the court of kook like khan but what kind of parchment is it made of back then paper had not yet been invented. The surface had been examined with instruments like spectrophotometer using ultraviolet and infrared light and so on but then we were proteome assists came along and examined the proteins there was a theory that bibles from the period were written on parchment made from the skin of lamb fetuses it turns out this one was really noncash skim. Brigade he says its a type of parchment that was only used until the middle of the 13th century and the south and from this new method together with textual analysis have revealed the bibles origins no one at the Laurentian Library had ever heard of proteomics before. That we have it i mean this was absolutely new to us to get he told the academic world our researchers of experts on manuscripts something that was completely unknown to them something wed always wanted a physical analysis of our documents. Physical. But righetti had a problem he needed some pills for his person analyses and most libraries and museums refused to allow precious works to be damaged in any way but his solution was found to rig a problem and it came from israel. In a tele beefs. Silverstein originally from russia conducts personnel mix research. As soon as he heard about were guess hes worked with the markopolos bible he wanted to get involved. If you immediately i think you or would you. Extract the result of the result destruction of which would run think think. What are you considerations means a. Good solution will prove to some people its not bush and therefore he said if we want to keep on examining Cultural Heritage we simply cannot continue to use these destructive technologies results not just like a renaissance genius he keeps coming up with avant garde ideas. Silberstein has invented plastic films containing blades of charged resins that general proteins and other chemicals from objects that placed on the extracted preachings can then be analyzed and the laboratory his latest coup an examination of one of jack im ok the novus manuscript its. Great for so long for. This molecule portrait. Of a little insight. From casanovas memoirs to the shirt and one checkoff was wearing when he died little by little silverstein and his team are working their way through the literary canon. Another exciting discovery is what he found on a manuscript by russian writer and make our book out of. Always was a cute really curious what was a source of search. For months or more character the answer was found in traces of sweat on the manuscript jugs read chose the highest concentration green the lowest. Price. The people. Object to information. 3 so for tracks. Its. Rippers. Silberstein sent the extract of pershings to regret in milan in his lab at the Polytechnic University the plastic films a dipped in a chemical solution that detaches everything that has stuck to them. The enzyme trips and breaks down the proteins into smaller peptide fragments which are then analyzed by a mass spectrometer. A major breakthrough by the protein historians had to do with the history of milan itself half the citys residents died in a plague epidemic in 1630 were getting he wanted to find out what the death registers still in existence and kept in the state archives might reveal. With silversteins films he examined the lower right margins of several pages and found that they bore traces of sweat bacteria tobacco and food. But peter that of course we examined proteins associated with plague bacteria but we also found out that not everyone died of the plague 2 percent of the victims died of anthrax with this research in which we identify proteins we have in a sense brought a dead battery to life through our risen from the grave in which they were buried 400 years ago weve brought them back to life for me its quite incredible theres a good amount of cars that will be here. Says person historians could rediscover all of World History in an antiquarian bookshop in florence he recently found this book published in venice centuries ago. Would probably fire. All kinds of bacteria epidemics traces of cholera typhoid who knows you know some. Pretty omics could become one of the most exciting sciences of the future by casting a new look at the past. The. Scribes publishes and read is have left information about themselves as traces of proceedings on the pages of bedbugs. Pres he means are found in the sweat the body produces when its under stress and proceedings may play a role in the somewhat pension smell of sweat but in fact stress plays a vital role in human survival. Since prehistoric times stresses help humans to survive when a predator approaches our brain sounds the alarm releasing the stress hormones are trying ellen and cortisone adrenaline gives our body a sudden energy burst our heart rate and Blood Pressure rise that comes more blood to our muscles the stress hormone cortisol is released soon afterward it acts as a stimulant raising blood sugar levels suppressing the need for sleep and reducing our sensitivity to pain but in the long term it can ravage the immune system adrenalin and cortisol give us an energy rush and activate the fight or flight response afterwards our body needs to rest and recover to the stresses different often it just doesnt stop this constant state of high alert can lead to chronically high levels of cortisol that can make us sick and weaken our immune system. And it can also promote obesity out Blood Pressure and heart your vascular disease. And. d the good news is theres plenty we