Afternoon. Welcome to the ninth annual present vessel of books. My name is matt russell. Im the ceo a public munication and it is my pledge to moderate the session this afternoon. Id like to think cost indications for sponsoring this venue. Mr. Mcneil is sponsored by Research Corporation for science advancement and mr. Sorkin sponsored by the bio five institute. The presentation will last an hour, including questions and answers, please hold your questions to the final part of the program and we will manage the questions from the floor. Immediately following the session, mr. Mcneil will autograph his book in the sales and dining area and the bookstore in the town at the mall, booth 141. Books are available for purchase at this location and take special note, mr. Mcneil note, mr. Mcneil will be 20 minutes late due to the signing due to a live interview following the program with the spin. I want to say hello to our cspan audience that is watching life. Hope you enjoying the possible and will become a friend by texting friend 2520100 as shown on the sign at the front sign. Of course, your gift makes a difference in keeping the festival programming free of charge and supporting critical literacy programs in the community. Out of respect, i ask you to turn off your cell phones as i introduce our panelist this afternoon. Joel sirkin is the author of the invisible fire, the story of mankinds triumph over the ancient scourge of smallpox. The book came out in 1979, although you might have seen mr. Sorkin speak about his latest book, true genius the life and work of richard garvin, the most influential scientist never heard of. A lot of people now have heard about it and theyre talking about it today. Hes a freelance writer in baltimore a former Science Writer at the inquirer and part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for covering 3mile island in 1979. That same year he won the National Association of science teachers best Childrens Book an award for his book jupiter, the started field. He has ten published books and he taught journalism at stanford university, university of california santa cruz and the university of alaska fairbanks. Were also privileged to have Donald Mcneil with us has written a book because, the emerging epidemic. Donald mcneil is a science and a reporter for the New York Times, specializing in plagues and pestilences. [laughter] he covers diseases for the world core including aids, ebola, malaria, wine and, wine and bird flu, mad cow disease and sars. He joined the times in 1976 as a copy wife and has been in environmental reporter, theater, nest and an editor. Id like another hour for the session please. [laughter] he has won awards for cities that have successfully fought aids, about monopolies that keep drug prices high in africa, and about diseases that cannot be eradicated. This afternoon were talking about epidemics, old and new around analyst afternoon. [applause] gentlemen, before we really dig into these diseases id like to invite you to offer some introductory remarks about your work that were talking about here and what you set out to accomplish with them joel. Is a wellknown phenomenon among the medical writers syndrome, when you write about a disease you become have all the symptoms of it. You must have a helluva life smart. [laughter] i wrote the book about smallpox at the time when they announced that have been eradicated. It turned out they were wronged by a couple months mother what the hell. Smallpox was one of the worst epidemics in history. We think as many half a billion people died from it. They did not die nicely. It was a terrible disease, sometimes sometimes it would be in and out in for three days. Youd be perfectly while walking down the street and then you are dead the next evening. It carried by a virus called variola to this very day there is no cure. Fourthly, there is no disease. One of the things i like the book because it was a lot of fun to write. Im sorry, but it was. I managed to go to somalia where i interviewed the last person to have smallpox. There was an accident in a laboratory in london a couple years later that killed several lab workers and the lab chief committed suicide shortly thereafter. The somalia was the last human being to catch smallpox. I have a son who is 47 who has the same scar that i have, well i had it someplace. The smallpox card to child in america had, in the western world, my fund is five years younger has no such scar because they stop that vaccination. The virus itself still exists, if any deepfreeze in atlanta, in in cdc and the russians have a sample but no one knows exactly where. As long as its day in the deep freezers it safe. If it gets out, were in serious trouble. Donald, do you have the scars of a medical writers syndrome . I had been feeling really lousy and went to the doctor, recurring fevers every afternoon and id come back from columbia where i was covering the government and i thought, i could not have gotten so unlucky. I started to talk about this and the doctor for me cough and said get up on the table. Took one listen to my chest and said its nothing exotic, youre going for an xray. It was pneumonia. I had diagnosed it up course as the cuff and a whole list of other diseases i could diagnose it with. The book ive written is about like a diseases of the worlds poor since 1997 when seven when i was a correspondent in africa i started covering aids they are. Thats how i shifted from being a correspondent to science news person when i came from overseas. About ten years ago a colleague and i rode with theories about diseases on the brink of eradication, this is germane to this discussion then zika. Zika is beginning in this organization. It will be a long time before anyone eradicates zika. Been to diseases eradicated, nobody remembers the second one but its winter. No one knows about it because its an animal disease that killed animals. That may not seem absurd but if youre in east africa in the 19th century when the disease reached africa from asia, with shalinis troops it wiped out all the postgame and cattle in west africa and a third of the horn of africa needed them. It was eradicated a few years ago by hardworking veterinarians finally realize that they had to stop tackling the cows to back vaccinate them. Between the herders who wander across northern somalia to the go to the first and stick them with the vaccine my partner and i wrote about polio any worms, and those be eradicated any, measles, and iodine deficiency. When you go to eradicated disease when you have a good working vaccine that provides last longlasting protection, what you have a good solution, its relatively easy to get the first 99 of the disease. It takes years, sometimes decades, weve been fighting polio its been rotary international in 1988 and it was going to be there millennial gift to the world and back then they raise 200 million for the fight and they got it down to 99 , but were still fighting polio. Okay to read about a billion dollars in the year. Its like squeezing jello to death. You think youve gotten it and it pops up. Two years ago we thought it been eradicated in africa but more cases popped up in nigeria last year. The reason is the diseases persistent places where people are poor and war is going on. You cant go into the testing and see if people have it. We know theres a pocket of polio in northern nigeria, where the Nigerian Government is fighting out. We know that is on the border of pakistan and afghanistan in the no go areas around there. Its a combination of war and bad luck, sometimes. There are very few pockets of the world but only recently i made the jump over to people into dogs. People were tossing fish got to talk. The doctor picked up any worms and now they have more cases in dogs than they do in people. The dogs reinfected Drinking Water where people pick it up from. Theres a whole new struggle over that. You can see is a long gated discouraging effort. Every disease is different but its fascinating to write about them. Were going to get to the heart of the battles with the diseases in just a bit. I think this is all the makings of a hollywood thriller and youre going to hear theres even some lying, cheating, stealing that has gone on in the course of that. Lets start before the pen hit paper. Joel, the first first case of smallpox was reported thousands of years ago with eradication and victory declared fewer than 40 years ago. Im curious, how did you get your head around researching this disease that literally changed history . That was my job. It fascinated me. Smallpox is actually an easy disease to eradicate, relatively speaking. It has several characteristics of polio that does not have that zika does not have. I was watching television and they made a brief announcement that smallpox had been eradicated and i said theres a book there. There was a book in there. I traveled all around the world to record it and i must say, i had a good time doing it. We spent some time in northern india demonstrating to the people who live there that vaccination was painless, it wasnt a big deal and that you can stand up in the back of jeeps, go like this and stab your arms. I am now about the most immune smallpox man. Pretty darn close to it. It was a challenge and the people involved were challenges well. I should. Out that the book is controversial. The virus is not the enemy, the people were the enemy. We kept running up against the bureaucracy. I should add da anderson, the man who iran the smallpox program who died just a couple months ago, by the way, blames me and my book were not getting a nobel prize for medicine. I hope hes not right. They honestly deserve it. What about you donald. It didnt hit the global scene from 1947 in uganda. One might assume you have a bit of advantage over to all that you only had 70 years of stories. What i like smart short stories. They had noticed, discovered in 1977 any monkey. In a cage wasted in a tree and an impenetrable forest. It disappeared and there werent test for it for a long time. It came on the radar a couple of years, few years ago when it started to somehow left asia and crossed the South Pacific there was an outbreak on yap island and that the cdc investigated. Yap island is one of the island that we fought over in world war ii in the japanese. There are some services that the United States still provide to the micro islands. There were no serious side effects. They didnt notice anything. It was a mild disease. Then it turned up in polynesia back in 2013 and there it was pretty well investigated. A race of the population 66 6 of the population were infected in six months and they did notice and uptake in cases of temporary blouses. But terrifying paralysis. They did notice anything about babies. It was only when the disease got to brazil that it the brazilian some month problems going on. Then they were relieved. The health administered that this was good news. It turned out to be zika and were not worried, thats a mild disease. It was only in late august, Early September in the northeast where they had a tremendous epidemic of zika, nine months before the doctors that worked in the intensive care unit, it began to talk to each other and say theres a mother and Daughter Team that worked in hospitals and said hey, i normally see one or two sick babies and i have five in my word right now. Her daughter said i had seven. They called other doctors and realized that something had happened. They looked at the mothers and said that a lot of them head zika symptoms five months before. In my case, i had heard heard of zika two or three months before because i got a phone call out of the blue from a population person for the university of Texas Medical Branch and he said hey, theres a doctor here would like to talk with you about bengay. I should be writing more but they been around more and i have a lot of things to do. He said theres this other disease called zika. Thats a catchy name. What is a . I ended up talking to the doctor and he told me that some of the background of asia in front polynesia and the fact that theres but theres no mention of microsoft list. As i took notes and i signed them, dated dated them put them in my head file of things im going to get to when i can get to this file which is a must do it now pile and it was in the week after christmas last year and a slow news week and i was waiting for an item that id read 300 word column i read read every week along with every other coverage and saw out of brazil a notice saying the Health Administration asked women stop having children. That made my antenna stood up meanly. You never hear that kind of thing. Yes, china had the one child policy but i never have another country asking the mothers do not have children. The thought policy you want to have. If you keep it up there wont be any more brazilians. I called the only doctor i knew in brazil and asked if this was true. Its terrifying and we dont know what it is but we have a horrible el nino year, last year and lots of lots of mosquito bites and we dont know what disease zika is caused, we dont know what other disease is the mother had we dont know much about diseases. Were still trying to figure it out so i wrote a story that day, december 209 and we called our bureau tree and he and i collaborated a day later. Thats how we got off the back sounding the alarm and the battle cry. We won the smallpox battle in the late 70s and its said that the engagement was more like conventional warfare. Can you talk about that chris martin one of the weaknesses is that the animals have no reservoir. It goes from persontoperson. It doesnt hide in birds, or animals it doesnt fly around with mosquitoes. If you could break the chain between one infection and another, you stop the infection. The standard way of doing it was to vaccinate everybody around. Give some thought to the idea that vaccinating everyone in india, vaccinating everyone in back bingo or nigeria clearly doesnt work. It works in western countries. Smallpox was unheard of by the middle of the 20th century and most of the western countries. Some of the smallpox spectators, mostly but not entirely, were american. They figured out that you didnt really need to do that and that it was impossible to do that. They found out that if you had a case of smallpox, you would find every person who had contact with that person and then you drew a circle around them and vaccinated everybody within that circle. So if you had somebody with back smallpox in town a then you didnt bother about town bc and d. Thats how it was on. They also had several other advantages that other diseases do not have. The vaccine itself goes back to 1769 and Edward Jenner discovered that jerry made with sores on their hands had cowpox. While they had cowpox they never got smallpox. What would happen if you took the material from the source on their hands and gave it to someone through the skin would that give them immunity as well and it turned out it did. He did it with a seven yearold boy with his mothers permission, i thoroughly hope. He injected he injected the cowpox in the kids arm and deliberately put virus from the smallpox into another wound later on to watch what happened. What happened was nothing. He was immune. A, you had a very good vaccination. The second of all you could freezedrying this vaccination. It did not need refrigeration, you could carry it for months in the desert without having to worry about electricity. They also invented a different type of needle that goes up, look like a you want top. You didnt have to inject it. They would put fluid containing glycerin in the dry vaccine they put fluid on your arm and then they go like this just to break the skin and thats all it required. Emotionally doesnt hurt, i can tell you from that from experience. We learn to smile as we did the. [laughter] those characters do not exist in any other disease. Once they got those things organized and wants the people from cdc and the World Health Organization figured out the way of isolating potential victims thats what they do. Thats the war that was one. Worse still, donald engaged in war with zika. Two days ago the cdc updated its travel guidance that recommended that pregnant women not travel anywhere there is zika virus. What is todays bona fide and zika look like chris mark. Is a little unclear because its still cold. We been through your one from my. Of view we did very badly, were feeling zika. The advice to women to simply wear deeds and long sleeves is not enough. Not a single city in the western hemisphere except miami is like blowing flog out of the back. The mosquitoes live in very close proximity with people. You have zika about 200 miles of the south of tucson. Sometime in the near future it will be here. It may be a race between the virus in the vaccine. Its mostly a mild disease but it is completely devastating to fetuses. Its extremely dangerous for pregnant women to get it. What upset me is that neither the cdc nor the who would clearly speak out and say, if you can avoid getting pregnant during the high season of zika transmission in your town, please avoid it and we will help you avoid it by getting new contraceptives. The cdc was actually speaking contraceptives and puerto rico in large amounts but it wasnt saying anything about it. It said that they should talk to their own doctors. Many women dont have doctors before they get pregnant. Its actually true that its difficult for women, teenagers to prevent any pregnant. Its never been true that its been impossible for every buddy. The other thing they should have talked about with abortion. There are countries in the hemisphere where abortion is legal and for the mothers you may have seen a story in the New York Times today, she spent time with three mothers who had zika babies and these babies cannot make eye contact, they will never have anything like memory or thoughts, they often are cramped up like this, theyre actually at a fair risk for death because of aspiration, pneumonia, or constant seizures. Had those had those mothers been able to choose, some may have chosen and that should have been made clear and available to them. No one should force anyone to have contraceptives or abortion but it should be discussed. Those agencies refuse to do that. I think of the real Public Health failure. I dont know anyone whos been able to back as the case in these battles, were talking about the whole as a disease. How ironically, they find themselves battling with the science itself. Well get to who in a minute but i want to get back to that but lets talk about the World Politics play good bad or otherwise in the smallpox eradication. Thi