, the long road to freedom. But look at some of the books that Publishers Weekly is most anticipating being published this spring. Look for these titles and bookstores in the coming weeks and months and watch for the authors on book tv. Good afternoon. Welcome to the ninth annual tucson festival of books, my name is matt russell, im ceo of Russell Public Communications and it will be a privilege for the me to moderate this session. Id like to thank Fox Communications for sponsoring this venue. Mister mcneil is sponsored by Research Corporation for science advancement and Mister Churkin is sponsored by the university of arizona bio five institute. The presentation will last an hour including questions and answers, hold your questions until the final part of the program and we will manage the questions from the floor. Immediately following the session, Mister Mcneil will be autographing his book in the sales and assigning area in the tent on the ball, that is booth number 141. Books are available for purchase at this location. Mister mcneil will be about 20 minutes late to the signing area due to a live interview with cspan following the program and i want to say hello to our cspan Television Audience watching live right now. We hope you enjoy the festival and invite you to become afriend of the festival today by texting friend 2520214 book , at 520214 2665. As shown in the sign at the front of the room or visit the friends of the festival booth number 110 on the mall. Your gift will make a difference in keeping festival programming free of charge and supporting public read critical literacy programs in the community. I have respect for the authors, i ask you to please turn off your cell phone as i introduce our panelists this afternoon. Joel shurkin 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 may have seen mister joel shurkin about his true book true genius the life and work of richard garwin, the most influential scientist youve never heard of. A lot of people now have heard of it and theyre talking about it today. Joel shurkin is a freelance writer in baltimore, a former Science Writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer and was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize recovering three mile island in 1979. That same year he won the National Association of science teachers best childrens science book, an award for his book jupiter, the star that failed. He has 10 published books and taught journalism at stanford university, university of california at santa cruz and university of alaska fairbanks. We are also privileged to have Donald Mcneil with us who has a book zika the emerging epidemic. Donald mcneil is a science and cultural writer for the New York Times, specializing in plagues and pestilences. He covers diseases of the world poor including aids, e bola, malaria, swine and bird flu, mad cow disease and far. He joined the times is a copy boy and has been an environmental reporter, peter columnist and editor. Id like another hour for this session please. He has won awards for stories about cities that have exceptionally fought aids, about patent monopolies that keep drug prices high in africa diseases that cannot be. This afternoon were talking about epidemics old and new, around of applause for our panelists this afternoon. [applause] gentlemen, before we really dig into these diseases id like to invite you to offer some introductoryremarks about your work. That we are talking about here and really what we set out to accomplish with them, joel . There is a wellknown phenomenon among journalists, particularly medical writers known as medical writers syndrome that when you write about a disease, you get all the symptoms. You must have a hell of a life. I wrote the book about smallpox at the time when they had announced it had been eradicated. It turned out they were wrong bya couple months. Smallpox is, was in a sense one of the worst epidemics in history. We think as many as half 1 billion people died from it and if they did not die nicely from it, its a terrible disease. Sometimes or three days or youd be perfectly well walking down the street and you are dead the next evening. It carried by a virus, very old. To this day, there is no cure. Fortunately, there is no disease. One of the things i, one of the reasons i like the book is because it was a lot of fun to write. Im sorry, but it was. I had to go to somalia where i interviewed the last human being to get smallpox. There was an accident in a laboratory in london a couple years later that killed several lab workers and the lab she committed suicide shortly thereafter. The ambulance driver and in somalia was the last human being to catch smallpox. I have a son who is 47 has the same scar that i had, its here someplace. The smallpox scar that every child in america, every child in the world got. I have a son five years later who has no such scar. In the interim a stock the vaccination. The virus itself still exists, its in deep freeze in atlanta at cdc and the russians have a sample, nobody knows exactly where. As long as they stay in the deepfreeze, we are safe. If it gets out, we are in serious trouble. Do you have a scar as medical writers syndrome . I thought it was lousy, i was getting recurring fevers every afternoon. I had come back from columbia where i was covering zika and thinking i couldnt have gotten so unlucky and i started to talk about this and doctor heard me cough and said get up on the table and he took one listen to my chest and said i know what you have, nothing exotic. I had pneumonia but had diagnosed of course as zika and i had a whole list of other diseases they could have diagnosed it as and i wouldnt have worried about it but the book i had written is about zika, ive been covering diseases mostly of the world but all Infectious Diseases 1997 when i was a correspondent in africa. I started covering aids there, thats how i shifted from being a broadway theater correspondent to science news from when i came back from overseas. 10 years ago acolleague and i wrote a whole series about diseases on the brink of eradication. And i said this discussion, then zika is caused zika beginning in the sense for quite a while. I think its going to be a long time before they think about eradicating it but there had been to eradicated in the history of mankind, nobody remembers the second one but it was eradicated a few years ago and people dont know about it because its an animal disease, it kills cloven hooved animals and that may not seem important but if you are in east africa in the 19th century when the disease reached africa from asia, it turns out it wiped out all the, virtually all the game and all the cattle in west africa and a third of the horn of africa start today from the disease. It was eradicated by the efforts of the lot of the working veterinarians who finally realized they had to stop taxing the cows themselves to vaccinate animals and a trained the herders in somalia and north virginia ut other animals to go through the and stick them with the vaccine so it the second disease was eradicated. Doug and i, my partner and i wrote about polio, and guinea worm, those are the diseases that should be eradicated any year now. Measles, elephantiasis and iodine efficiency. And when you go to eradicated disease, once you have a solution, once you have a good working vaccine for one dose that provides longlasting protection. Once youve gotten that good solution, its relatively easy to get the first 99 percent of the disease and is absolutely, it takes years sometimes decades, we have been fighting polio. The fight to start polio was by rotary international in 1988 and was going to be there millennial gift to the world and back then they raised 200 million in the fight and got down to 99 percent and were still fighting polio and bill gates is putting 1 billion a year into the fight below 100 cases. Its like squeezing gelatin, when you think youve gotten it, it pops up. A few years ago but we eradicated nafta and a couple cases popped up last year and the reason is the disease process in places where people are not only poor but theres worldwide, you cant vaccinate through the testing to find out whether people have it so now we know theres a population of polio in Northern Nigeria and the state area where bogle rob and nigeria come out reedit. And we also know that its on the border of pakistan and afghanistan in the. [indiscernable] areas along there. But its a combination of war and also just bad luck. Guinea worm, there are a few pockets in the world but it made the jump into dogs and people were talkingfished us there dogs , though the worms and now they got more cases and often the you and people and dogs reinspected the Drinking Water where the people from so theres going to be a whole new problem back. So its a long, complicated, discouraging effort, every diseases different but its fascinating to write about them. Were going toget to the heart of the battle with these diseases in a bit. Which i think have all the makings of a major hollywood thriller and as youre going to hear, theres even lying, cheating and stealing thats going on in the courts but lets start before the 10 hit paper. Joel, the first case of smallpox was reported thousands of years ago. Eradication victory declared 40 years ago. Im curious, how did you get your head around researching this disease that literally changed history . It was my job. It fascinated me. Smallpox is actually an easy disease to eradicate relatively speaking. Several characteristics of polio for example. We could probably do not happen. I was watching television and they made a brief announcement that smallpox had been eradicated and i said theres a book in there. It turned out there was a book in there, i traveled all around the world to report. So i had an awfully good time doing it. We spent some time in northern india demonstrating to the people who live there that the vaccination was painless, it wasnt a big deal and we stand up on the back of jeeps and go like this and stab our arms. I now am the most smallpox imaging immune human being. It was a challenge and the people involved in it were challenged as well. The book is somewhat controversial, there are times when the virus was not the enemy, the bureaucracy of the Worldhealth Organization was the enemy. And for the lying, cheating and stealing the people in the world kept running up against the World Health Organization and learned to get around the bureaucracy. Da anderson was the man who ran the smallpox program who tried a couple months ago. Blames me and my book for their not getting a nobel prize for medicine. I hope hes not right. Because i honestly deserve it. What about you donald . Zika didnt hit the global consciousness and no 1947 in uganda so you have an advantage over joel since you had to pull only 70 years of stories. And there were very few stories because the disease was noticed, discovered in 1947 in monkeys, reese is number 744. And it was in a cage, in a tree in an Impenetrable Forest and uganda, they disappeared and tested for a long time. It only came on the radar a couple years ago when it started and somehow left asia and started crossing the South Pacific and there was an outbreak on now the island that the cdc investigated, they went there because now island is one of the islands we fought over in world war ii and they have a contract with the state that the United States provides micronesia so they went there to comprises mystery virus of zika but there was no, they didnt notice anything. And it turned outto central polynesia in 2013 and their , it was investigated as raising the population, 66 percent of the population in six months and they did notice an uptick in cases which is a form of temporary paralysis that usually and sometimes fatal but terrifying paralysis but they didnt notice anything about babies. It was only when the disease got to brazil that it took the brazilian some months to figure out what was going on and then they were relieved, the Health Administration so this is good news, we were afraid this was a new strain of dengue but it turned out to be zika and they said that the mild disease. It was only in late august, Early September in the northeast they had a tremendous epidemic of zika nine months before doctors worked in the intensive care units in the pediatric intensive care unit began to talk to each other and say, i think it was a mother and Daughter Team and they said hey, i have, i normally see one or two microcell babies year, i have five and my work right now and their daughters and seven and they started calling up doctors and realize something happened and they started going to the mothers and realized a number of them had symptoms 6 to 9 months before. Thats when the alarm went out. In my case, i had heard of zika two or three months before because i got a phone call out of the blue on the Public Relations person from the university of Texas Medical Branch and he said theres a doctor here scott weaver would like to talk to you about dengue and i said i know i should be writing more about dengue but theyve been around a few years now and i have Different Things to do, im not sure theres anything new and he said theres this other disease called zika, a catchy name, what is it so and up talking about scarlet fever and he told me some of the background about asia and friends polynesia and the fact that there was a connection but there was some mention of microcephaly, it wasnt known and i took notes and as i often do, put them, sign them and dated them and put them in my head scratcher file which is all my guess, i figured i would get to it eventually when i could get through this pile and it was in, it was a week after christmas, where i was at newsweek waiting for a, looking for an item, i wrote a 300 word column every week along with other overages for an item and saw out of brazil , they were saying the Health Ministry and asked women to stop having children. And that made my antenna shoot up immediately. You never hear that kind of thing. Yes, they had one child policy but other than that ive never heard of the Health Policy asking women to stop having children. Its not a policy you want to follow because you keep it up theres not going to be any more brazilians and i call the only doctor i knew at the time and said is this true, are these babies damaged . He said yes, its terrifying. We dont know what it was, we year, lots of mosquito bites. We dont know if the disease zika is causing it by itself, we dont know mothers previous infections for something else. We dont know much about this disease but its devastating and were trying to look it up so i wrote a story that they, november 29 i think and call the small story, we called our rio bureau chief and he and i collaborated on the front page story a day later. And we got off to the races. Signing alarm, the one smallpox model in the late 70s and its been said that the engagement was more like conventional warfare. Can you talk about that . One of the weaknesses of the smallpox virus is it has no animal rivers or. Courage, it doesnt hide in animals, it doesnt fly around with mosquitoes if you could break the chain between one infection and another, you would stop the infection. The standard way of doing it was to vaccinate everybody around. Give some thought thought to the idea of vaccinating everybody in india, vaccinating everybody in bangladesh or pakistan or nigeria, nearly doesnt work it works in western countries smallpox was unheard of by the middle of the 20th century and some of the smallpox vaccinations and they were mostly but not entirely were surely not entirely american figured out , they didnt really have to do that and they deemed it was impossible to do that what they found out was if you had a case of smallpox, you would find every person who had any contact with that person and then youd draw a circle around them, investing everybody in the circle but if you had somebody with smallpox in town a, you would vaccinate everybody in town a and the surrounding, dont bother with be , c or d. That broke it, that was how it was done. They had several other diseases they did not have. The vaccine itself goes back to 1769. With Edward Jenner who discovered that very mate would get sores on their hands called cowpox and when they had the cowpox, they never got smallpox and they figured out what would happen if you took the material from the sores on their hands and gave it to somebody, would that give them immunity as well . It turned out it did, there was a sevenyearold boy named fitz, with the mothers depression i hope. Injected, he took some cowpox in his arm and then deliberately put the vaccine or virus from the smallpox into another wound later on. To watch what happened, so you had a very good vaccinate or, second of all you could freeze dry. They did not need refrigeration, you could carry it from once in the desert without having to worry about electricity. They also invented something called a bifurcated needle which looks this and has a view on top. What they would do is they would put fluid, glycerin into the drive vaccine, put the fluid on your arm. Just to break the skin and thats all it requires. Certainly they tell you that from experience. We learn to smile as we did this. And those characteristics do not exist in any other disease so once they got themselves organized and went to the people from cdc and the World Health Organization, figured out a way of isolating those. So thats the war one but we are still engaged in war of zika. Two days ago the cdc updated its zika travel guidance and recommends pregnant women not traveled to any area where there is a risk of zika and infection so what does todays battle look like on the zika front . Its a little unclear because its still cold, weve been through year one. From my point of view we did very badly. In learning to fight the epidemic and the advice from w