JACK: It was just one of those cases
that gets in your head and clears your calendar.
In all my years as a disease detective,
I'd never seen anything like it.
Oh! What are you?! And how do I get rid of you?
I needed to get to the bottom of it.
Why don't you talk to an epidemiologist?
An epidemidolo...? What?!
An epidemiologist. You know, a disease detective?
(SIGHS) Don't worry. I've got this one.
I mean, there's a door over there.
This is a different game now.
Delta is really changing the rulebook.
As soon as you've got one escaped variant of concern,
you can't wait for nine days.
Yep, if there's one profession we've got to know more about
over the past one year, six months,
three weeks and two days - not that I'm counting -
it's this one.
An epidemiologist is a person who studies incidence,
distribution, and possible control of diseases,
and I've come to meet a real one.
Hi, Emma. WOMAN: Oh, hello.
So, you are a real disease detective. That's me.
One thing to understand about epidemiology
is that we're not all the same.
We come in different flavours.
So, I'm kind of like you - I'm the detective epidemiologist.
So, I spend my time going around looking for clues
and working out the patterns of things
and seeing who committed the crime, so to speak.
So, what's the last year been like for you?
Well, it's been really, really busy, as you might think,
with everything that's going on with COVID and everything.
For a long time, people didn't know what an epidemiologist was,
and we were kind of like a hidden profession,
but suddenly, with everything that's happening,
people are getting more and more curious.
While this pandemic stuff might be new to us,
it's not the first big disease outbreak
the world's ever seen.
In fact, we've been dealing with them
ever since humans started living in big groups,
although it took us a while to figure out how they worked.
Oh, it's the miasma, the bad plague air!
Here, sniff this! Mm, no, not quite.
But that's what people thought for a very long time -
that diseases were spread by evil spirits, angry gods,
or even bad scents.
Viruses weren't identified until the 19th century,
although, a long time before that,
a few clever doctors were trying to fight plagues
with things like lockdowns, social distancing,
limiting shopping to one person per household,
and quarantining.
One of the biggest leaps forward in epidemiology
was brought about by an English guy named John Snow.
(ENGLISH ACCENT) Winter is coming.
He stopped a cholera outbreak...
Cholera is coming!
..by realising it was caused by dirty water
from a particular pump.
From the pump!
Cholera is coming from the pump!
So, what he did was he did some really rigorous studies
and he managed to convince them to do something about it,
which was essentially just turn off the pump.
And guess what. That really helped.
Of course, epidemiology has come a long way since then.
Now we can actually see the germs that cause disease,
and we understand more about how they work.
Epidemiology combines that knowledge with an understanding of statistics,
health science, and political and social sciences,
making it a pretty interesting thing to study.
WOMAN: In epidemiology, we're studying a lot of statistics,
so that's, like, understanding graphs
and information about how and why people get sick.
It is a really exciting time to be a student at this time
during the pandemic because you get really instant learning
from immediate circumstances
of, like, what intervention can do for the public.
And it's not just about
once-in-a-century catastrophes like COVID.
Epidemiologists also help to fight health problems
like obesity or heart disease
while making sure we're ready for the next big outbreak.
And it's good to know there are disease detectives
working behind the scenes looking for some answers.