Robert Frost once wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice."
But what if it ends in everyone pooping their pants and vomiting blood?
Fear drives epidemics by making people do things that don’t make sense.
We need to realize that there is one world and one health.
Did you know that you can catch measles being in an elevator two hours after someone with measles has been in the elevator?
There is no boundary for antibiotic resistant bacteria.
These illnesses can spread like wildfire through the unvaccinated population.
Remember the black plague? It was like, the biggest bummer of the 1300's.
See that dip in the graph of the world population?
That’s how many people died,
you can actually see it on the damn graph.
Then in 1918, not that long ago, like, cars existed at this point,
the Spanish flu killed over 50 million people in a single year.
That’s more casualties than World War One.
To this day, scientists don’t understand what made this one strain so destructive and contagious.
Then in 2009, 200,000 people worldwide died from swine flu.
Unless I really missed something, none of those diseases managed to wipe out all of humanity.
In the developed world, so far, we've stopped disease epidemic on three fronts:
Vaccines, antibiotics, and the simple fact that certain really bad bugs are near extinction.
But those safety nets could be breaking down.
Here’s what vaccines are up against.
We do not need that many vaccines.
The most vulnerable things you can do to a child who doesn’t have an immune system is give them a shot.
Now, obviously I trust venerated medical professionals like Rob Schneider.
But I went to talk to a real doctor just to double check.
This is Dr. Emily Landon.
She’s the head epidemiologist at the University of Chicago medical center,
working to prevent the spread of disease within the hospital.
Do you want to know what the most infectious disease known to man is?
Tell me.
Measles.
In fact, one in a hundred people with measles end up dead
or in the hospital with a serious consequence from their measles.
And measles can spread through communities faster than any other infectious disease.
Of 10 people who have contact with someone with measles, 9 of them will get sick if they are not immune.
Whenever you see an outbreak of measles in these communities where they fear the vaccine more than they fear the disease,
the ones who die are small babies who couldn’t of even had a chance to get vaccinated.
So, It’s not just the person who skips their vaccine that’s going to get hurt,
it’s everyone else.
Is there any chance that that could come to a catastrophic level where it's an end of the world type thing?
Absolutely.
Probably more for it—there’s always going to be some people in the United States that get their vaccines,
and they're going to be protected for the most part, right?
But for people who don’t get their vaccines, there’s an absolutely reasonable risk if the unvaccinated population
grows and grows and grows
that these illnesses could spread like wildfire through the unvaccinated population.
But it isn’t even measles or anti-vaxxers that really scare Dr. Landon.
So, while I think that pandemic flu or measles are pretty bad things and could sweep their way through a community,
It’s bacteria that are really causing the majority of the problems these days.
We’ll get to antibiotic resistance in a minute, but remember in our last episode when that
documentarian guy talked about how disease epidemic is actually linked to climate change?
The relationship between humans and these microbes has always been mediated by climate,
and as the climate changes, that’s an area that people are keeping a close on.
In 2016 in Siberia, there was an unexpected outbreak of anthrax.
90 people were hospitalized and 1 died.
A 12 year-old boy.
But the first victim?
A reindeer who died 75 years ago.
Its corpse, frozen in the ice.
A heat wave melted that ice,
releasing the reindeer’s corpse and the anthrax that corpsfied it.
But, we’ve got to worry about stuff way older than 75 years too.
Scientists found an 8-million-year old bacterium, frozen, deep in the ice,
and were able to bring it back to life.
I’m pretty sure that’s literally an X-Files episode.
What this all means, is that contagions are incredibly resilient.
They want to survive just like any other living thing,
and we’re trying to kill them with antibiotics.
Lots of people think bugs are developing a resistance to antibiotics.
But Harvard Doctor, Francois Lebreton suggests many bugs already had it for thousands of years.
What we found in that particular study is that some of the bugs that are leading causes of hospital infection
probably have acquired some traits as early as 400-500 million years ago.
And even though the bugs are very different, they have acquired some capabilities from those ancestors
and they have kept those capabilities because they were useful through times.
And now since about 10 to 20 years
we are entering a different era where we see the emergence of virus bacteria
that are resisting to multiple antibiotics and even some bacteria that are resistant to all antibiotics.
We need to realize that it is one world and one health.
In other words, if there is a problem of antibiotic resistance in a country that has very poor hygeine,
this bug can spread.
There is no boundary for antibiotic resistant bacteria.
So this bug can spread to the U.S.
There is a lot of tourist activity on the planet,
a lot of flights, people are traveling all around the globe and the bacteria are traveling with them.
So, we’re having trouble convincing people to take vaccines and everyone’s taking way too many antibiotics.
Humanity, get your shit together.
We totally did get our shit together on smallpox.
It’s completely dead.
Except for two samples.
One in Russia and one held by the CDC in the United States.
The World Health Organization has been like, ’get rid of this stuff.'
But like nuclear weapons, both Russia and the United States have refused.
In 2011, Kathleen Sebellius, then the Secretary of Health and Human Services
said that we need to keep our samples of smallpox on hand incase something does happen.
Because having the samples means we can do the research necessary to prevent a giant outbreak.
Sebellius also said, it's totally possible that samples of the virus we don’t know about still exist.
In 2014, some bottles labeled 'smallpox' were found in an abandoned government building.
Seriously!
They were tested, and they had trace amounts of the virus still in them.
But let’s say something does happen and there’s an outbreak of any disease,
what would that be like?
Well, it’ll be a little bit slow at first.
You’ll hear about a few cases of an illness, you know, where they know a little bit about it and it’s spreading through
a community somewhere.
But you might see it start to spread to other communities and then you’d start seeing it travel by air to further distant communities.
That’s where things start to get really dicey.
They go from being like, ‘oh that’s no big deal, it’s nowhere near me I’m not worried about it'
to ‘I’m terrified of this, I want everyone who has a cold to be locked in their house forever.'
Fear is the enemy of these sorts of things.
In fact, fear drives epidemics by making people do things that don’t make sense, they mistrust information,
they don’t believe things that they hear, and then they do things that are dangerous.
But there is some good news.
Beyond the amazing medical developments that doctors, like Dr. Landon and Dr. Loubetin have helped to develop,
bacteria and viruses need us to survive.
The ultimate goal of the bacteria is just like us survive to the conditions that surround them.
So your hosts need to thrive.
Without us to breed in, disease is powerless to survive.
You know what else would need us to survive?
Next time.