Are We Ready for the Next Pandemic
00:29:
(Matt Thompson)
100 years ago, a flu virus devastated the world, killing off as much as 5% of humankind.
00:36:
(Matt Thompson)
There have been a number of medical advances in the intervening years, but the viruses have advanced as well.
00:42:
(Matt Thompson)
Would the world effectively unite against another global pandemic?
00:47:
(Matt Thompson)
Or would it rip us apart?
00:49:
(Matt Thompson)
This is Radio Atlantic.
01:05:
(Matt Thompson)
Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.
01:08:
(Matt Thompson)
Here with me in the studio are two Atlantic staff writers, both science writers, Sarah Zhang.
01:15:
(Matt Thompson)
Hello, Sarah.
01:16:
(Crosstalk)
Hello.
01:16:
(Crosstalk)
Hello.
01:16:
(Matt Thompson)
Ed Yong.
01:17:
(Matt Thompson)
Hello, Ed.
01:18:
(Matt Thompson)
Hello, hello.
01:19:
(Matt Thompson)
You last heard Ed Soner's tones perhaps reading E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops.
01:24:
(Matt Thompson)
As your rent-a-brit.
01:25:
(Matt Thompson)
Yes.
01:26:
(Matt Thompson)
So great.
01:29:
(Matt Thompson)
Quick programming note.
01:31:
(Matt Thompson)
Jeff and Alex are both off gallivanting this week, but they will be back soon.
01:37:
(Matt Thompson)
So, Ed, Sarah, we have talked about a lot of different threats on Radio Atlantic.
01:42:
(Matt Thompson)
Threats to liberal democracy, nuclear threats, concerns about terrorism and technology and more.
01:48:
(Matt Thompson)
However, there's one giant global threat that always seems to get underweighted next to the tremendous risk that it poses us, pandemics.
01:57:
(Matt Thompson)
As we speak, in the year 2018, it's a century since a horrific flu virus swept across the world's population in 1918, killing as many as 100 million people.
02:10:
(Matt Thompson)
It's unimaginable.
02:11:
(Matt Thompson)
5% of the world's population died in that 1918 flu.
02:16:
(Matt Thompson)
Ed, you recently traveled around the world looking into the band of scientists protecting us from such a catastrophe today.
02:27:
(Matt Thompson)
So I just wanted to ask as a wide open question, how much safer are we from the pandemic than we were in 1918?
02:37:
(Ed Yong)
Well, okay, let's do the good news first.
02:42:
(Ed Yong)
Obviously, in a century of progress and advancement, we have a lot of advantages that the good people of 1918 did not.
02:52:
(Ed Yong)
We have...
02:53:
(Ed Yong)
We have better ways of treating people.
02:56:
(Ed Yong)
We have the infrastructure for creating flu vaccines.
03:02:
(Ed Yong)
We have surveillance systems that allow us to monitor what is going on with influenza viruses around the world in people and in animals.
03:11:
(Ed Yong)
So in many ways, we are better prepared and much safer than we were before.
03:16:
(Ed Yong)
100 years ago.
03:18:
(Ed Yong)
That being said, there are a lot of causes for concern too.
03:24:
(Ed Yong)
For example, the world is changed.
03:27:
(Ed Yong)
Back then there were, what, 2 billion people, probably just over that.
03:32:
(Ed Yong)
Now there are more than 7 billion people around the world.
03:36:
(Ed Yong)
And
03:37:
(Ed Yong)
Those people are now living mostly in urban centers where humans are very densely packed and where diseases can more easily spread.
03:48:
(Ed Yong)
We live in a world of intense air travel, of globalization, where it's very, very easy for people from any part of the world to get to any other part of the world within a day or so.
04:00:
(Ed Yong)
That wasn't true back in 1918.
04:03:
(Ed Yong)
So the ability of diseases to spread now is much greater.
04:09:
(Ed Yong)
And unfortunately, the number of diseases that we have to worry about is, if anything, increasing.
04:16:
(Ed Yong)
So there are all kinds of new contagions that we have only recently learned about.
04:23:
(Ed Yong)
Things like Ebola, like Nipah, Hendra, MERS, SARS.
04:29:
(Ed Yong)
And flu, that age-old adversary, is still very much around now.
04:33:
(Ed Yong)
in lots of new and constantly shifting guises.
04:38:
(Ed Yong)
Flu is a constantly evolving adversary.
04:41:
(Ed Yong)
And since 1918, it has triggered several pandemics, none of which were quite as bad.
04:49:
(Ed Yong)
But that shouldn't lure us into a false sense of security.
04:52:
(Ed Yong)
A flu pandemic has
04:53:
(Ed Yong)
caused by a strain that was as lethal as the one in 1918 could cause immense devastation even today.
05:03:
(Ed Yong)
And we only have to look to 2009, less than a decade ago, to understand how we might be taken off guard.
05:12:
(Ed Yong)
So the 2009 flu pandemic happened despite the fact that flu was the disease we were arguably best prepared for.
05:21:
(Ed Yong)
Our surveillance networks, our ability to spot new strains of flu, were concentrated in East Asia at H5N1 bird flu that was seen as the biggest threat then.
05:34:
(Ed Yong)
It missed the rise of new strains of H1N1 swine flu in Mexico.
05:40:
(Ed Yong)
So those strains were only detected after they'd been circulating for months and after they started sickening some people in California.
05:50:
(Ed Yong)
So right in our backyard, we fail to realize that these new strains of potentially pandemic flu were developing.
05:59:
(Ed Yong)
When they circulated around the US, hospitals were stretched very thin.
06:05:
(Ed Yong)
They weren't overwhelmed, but pediatric units were stretched thin, intensive care units were stretched thin, a lot of equipment that put people on life support that were in short supply.
06:20:
(Ed Yong)
And this was for a pandemic that many saw as sort of a dress rehearsal for something bigger, a training wheels pandemic that really wasn't actually that powerful.
06:32:
(Ed Yong)
And finally, our infrastructure for making vaccines wasn't able to rise to the occasion.
06:40:
(Ed Yong)
We do have flu vaccines.
06:42:
(Ed Yong)
That is something we don't have for the vast majority of new diseases that could potentially threaten us.
06:47:
(Ed Yong)
And yet, those vaccines need to change on a regular basis because flu is such a constantly shifting adversary.
06:56:
(Ed Yong)
And back in 2009, our ability to make vaccines against the pandemic strain was too slow.
07:05:
(Ed Yong)
By the time the first doses rolled out, the peak of the pandemic had already passed.
07:12:
(Ed Yong)
So we were effectively vaccinating survivors.
07:15:
(Ed Yong)
which is not really what you want to do.
07:18:
(Ed Yong)
This year, the seasonal flu, which wasn't even a pandemic strain, managed to stretch the healthcare system to a concerning point.
07:32:
(Ed Yong)
And I think this just goes to show that even for something like flu, which we know well, which we understand well, and which we are arguably readier for than anything else, that can still cause us problems.
07:43:
(Matt Thompson)
You traveled all across the world basically reporting this story, looking at what would happen if a plague were to hit.
07:55:
(Matt Thompson)
What did you find on the other side of the world?
07:57:
(Matt Thompson)
What did you find in the Congo?
08:00:
(Ed Yong)
Yeah, so I went to this city called Kikwit in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which experienced a devastating outbreak of Ebola back in 1995.
08:11:
(Ed Yong)
And it was that outbreak that was one of the reasons that Ebola became the infamous menace that it is today.
08:18:
(Ed Yong)
I think it was...
08:20:
(Ed Yong)
The second or third, depending on how you count it, outbreak that the Congo had experienced.
08:25:
(Ed Yong)
And certainly the first one that was captured by journalists and news crews.
08:31:
(Ed Yong)
And then it showed what an Ebola outbreak truly would be like.
08:34:
(Ed Yong)
And I wanted to see how the country had moved on from that, you know, almost two decades on.
08:42:
(Ed Yong)
So I saw the hospital that acted as one of the epicenters of the outbreak.
08:48:
(Ed Yong)
I went to the site of the mass graves where people were buried.
08:53:
(Ed Yong)
I talked to people who had survived the outbreak and found out what their lives had been like since.
08:58:
(Ed Yong)
And what I found was in many ways similar to what I learned talking to people in the US.
09:06:
(Ed Yong)
Many of the themes on this issue of preparedness were the same in the two countries, despite the fact that there is a vast gulf in their wealth and the amount of resources they have.
09:19:
(Ed Yong)
People in the Congo were talking about how subject preparedness is to political attention and to this cycle of panic and neglect.
09:31:
(Ed Yong)
How after the Kikwit outbreak, surveillance systems were put in, protective equipment was widely distributed.
09:40:
(Ed Yong)
And then as time passed, all of that preparedness dwindled.
09:47:
(Ed Yong)
People started to forget.
09:49:
(Ed Yong)
Resources started disappearing.
09:51:
(Ed Yong)
They were taken away for other purposes and they weren't replaced.
09:56:
(Ed Yong)
So to this date, people in the Congo are very, very savvy when it comes to Ebola and a lot of other diseases that vex them locally.
10:06:
(Ed Yong)
They know what to do.
10:08:
(Ed Yong)
They know what symptoms to look for.
10:10:
(Ed Yong)
But they don't have the resources to actually protect themselves, to investigate potential new outbreaks very well.
10:17:
(Ed Yong)
um you know they they are very good at controlling the diseases in their borders but i think they are still subject to to the psychological problems that befuddle preparedness against diseases across the entire world and and by that i mean things like forgetfulness and short-sightedness and people in the states who i talked to said exactly the same things to me starting from a very very different base point but
10:44:
(Ed Yong)
But but very similar in kind that we go through these crises where things like Ebola happens.
10:53:
(Ed Yong)
We respond to the West African outbreak.
10:55:
(Ed Yong)
We worry about Ebola reaching our shores.
10:58:
(Ed Yong)
Investments rise and then they fall.
11:03:
(Ed Yong)
Zika appears within within America's borders.
11:07:
(Ed Yong)
And again, investments arise, attention peaks, but then slowly they dwindle.
11:14:
(Ed Yong)
And this seems to be the underlying problem that stops us from becoming truly prepared to deal with the disease threats of the future, that these risks operate across time spans that go longer than political cycles.
11:31:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah.
11:32:
(Matt Thompson)
Sarah, do you think that there's any way that we could break out of that sort of cyclicality, given your attention to the vagaries of science and the public response to it?
11:41:
(Sarah Zhang)
Yeah, that's such a good question, right?
11:42:
(Sarah Zhang)
So I think one of the themes that Eds really hits on in his story is that leadership matters and who we have at the top matters.
11:51:
(Sarah Zhang)
But maybe what we really need to be resilient is to build a system where it doesn't matter who it is at the top of the system.
11:57:
(Sarah Zhang)
But, you know, it could be anonymous, you know,
12:01:
(Sarah Zhang)
rather anonymous epidemiologists.
12:03:
(Sarah Zhang)
And they go about their work regardless of who is at the top of directing their attention to it.
12:10:
(Sarah Zhang)
Like, you know, it's just kind of an automatic reflex that's in the system.
12:13:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah.
12:14:
(Matt Thompson)
That illustrates one point that was implicit in your story, Ed.
12:19:
(Matt Thompson)
Anonymous epidemiologists are legion.
12:23:
(Matt Thompson)
Probably not legion enough, but there are.
12:27:
(Matt Thompson)
Toiling in the laboratories of the world, there are all of these individuals who will be called upon to step up in the event of some sort of out-of-control virus.
12:36:
(Matt Thompson)
Who are some of the memorable individuals that you encountered on your journey into our public health supply chain?
12:43:
(Ed Yong)
There are so many of them, and a lot of them weren't even in the piece.
12:50:
(Ed Yong)
I feel like public health folks are the unsung heroes here.
12:55:
(Ed Yong)
The work they do is often not sexy or glamorous, but it's the work that keeps us all alive.
13:04:
(Ed Yong)
I went to a...
13:05:
(Ed Yong)
a public health lab in Wisconsin that acts as a big center for flu surveillance in the country.
13:14:
(Ed Yong)
And back in the 2009 pandemic, they were really working 24-hour days.
13:23:
(Ed Yong)
They were doing the diagnostic tests that actually told people whether they had flu or not.
13:27:
(Ed Yong)
And these are the same people who are also doing screening for newborns and who are checking out food contamination or water contamination.
13:35:
(Ed Yong)
You know, when a pandemic hits, it's not like you can suddenly parachute in this emergency team whose job is to take care of things like you see in movies like Contagion.
13:50:
(Ed Yong)
It's the same people who are doing this hard work day in, day out, who have to rise to the occasions.
13:56:
(Matt Thompson)
You mean that like Ralph Fiennes isn't going to show up?
13:59:
(Ed Yong)
That's right.
14:00:
(Ed Yong)
Or like, you know, Kate Winslet leading like a Who drop team.
14:06:
(Ed Yong)
Yeah, that's sadly not going to happen.
14:08:
(Ed Yong)
This is making the flu seem even worse.
14:12:
(Ed Yong)
And those people are chronically underfunded, and they are understaffed.
14:23:
(Ed Yong)
If you look at budgets that have gone into public health preparedness over the last decade and perhaps longer, or that go into training epidemiologists, to funding public health labs, to getting hospitals ready for future diseases...
14:40:
(Ed Yong)
There's just been a downward trajectory.
14:42:
(Ed Yong)
You know, their funds have started at high points and then have gone down.
14:47:
(Ed Yong)
And that's a problem that, you know, has transcended administration, sadly.
14:53:
(Ed Yong)
You know, it was very prevalent during the last one.
14:55:
(Ed Yong)
It is still a problem in this one.
14:58:
(Sarah Zhang)
So when I was reporting on the Ebola outbreak in 2014, I remember learning and realizing that there are three top biocontainment units in the country.
15:07:
(Sarah Zhang)
One of them near the CDC, one of them near the National Institutes of Health, and the last one in Nebraska.
15:14:
(Sarah Zhang)
One of these maybe just feels like it doesn't quite belong.
15:17:
(Sarah Zhang)
So you actually go to Nebraska.
15:18:
(Sarah Zhang)
How did Nebraska end up being one of the most prepared places in the country for an outbreak?
15:23:
(Ed Yong)
Yeah, so Nebraska has this biocontainment unit, which is this kind of special ward that is specifically designed to deal with things like Ebola, like SARS, bioterror attacks, the deadliest of the deadliest infectious diseases.
15:39:
(Ed Yong)
And I think it's instructive how they became prepared.
15:43:
(Ed Yong)
So after SARS in 2003, and after an outbreak in the Midwest of monkeypox, of all things,
15:51:
(Ed Yong)
One of the heads of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, a man named Phil Smith, decided the hospital really needed to get its act together to create a place that could handle people with these conditions.
16:04:
(Ed Yong)
And it created the unit then.
16:06:
(Ed Yong)
And then nothing happened immediately.
16:10:
(Ed Yong)
You know, there wasn't another SARS, there wasn't another Ebola.
16:13:
(Ed Yong)
This unit sat dormant and a woman named Shelley Schwedhelm helped to keep it afloat.
16:21:
(Ed Yong)
She and her team helped to make the case for why this unit was important and why its existence was paramount.
16:29:
(Ed Yong)
And because of that vision, the unit was ready in 2014.
16:38:
(Ed Yong)
when Ebola actually arrived in Nebraska, when Americans who had been dealing with the outbreak in West Africa had to be medevaced over to the US to be treated with Ebola.
16:52:
(Ed Yong)
And I think it just goes to show that
16:57:
(Ed Yong)
preparedness often becomes this matter of individual will, becomes the result of specific people who understand the need for it and who can make the case for it even if there's no immediate danger banging on their doors.
17:13:
(Ed Yong)
And you sort of need that.
17:15:
(Ed Yong)
You need people to put aside resources and money and physical spaces
17:20:
(Ed Yong)
in the event of something that will happen in the future, even if that event may not happen for years or maybe even decades.
17:29:
(Ed Yong)
And that's a tough investment to justify in the face of all these other health crises that are so in our faces right now.
17:40:
(Matt Thompson)
Just a striking fact came from a conversation with Bill Gates, who said that a simulation that he'd seen showed that a severe flu pandemic could kill, quote, more than 33 million people worldwide in just 250 days.
17:57:
(Matt Thompson)
How would you compare the scale of the public health apparatus that you were able to observe to the scale of potential calamity that's at risk here?
18:09:
(Ed Yong)
I think it's fair to say that those two things feel out of proportion to each other.
18:16:
(Ed Yong)
Public health is something that, as I said, I think is underfunded and underappreciated.
18:23:
(Ed Yong)
And yet it is our bulwark against what seems to be one of the greatest threats that we might have to face in the future.
18:34:
(Ed Yong)
The problem of infectious diseases isn't going away.
18:37:
(Ed Yong)
If anything, it's getting worse as the world changes and the number of new diseases rises.
18:43:
(Ed Yong)
And yet, we just seem psychologically and societally ill-equipped to make the stable, sustainable investments we need to properly defend ourselves against it.
19:00:
(Sarah Zhang)
Yeah, it's kind of a political problem, right?
19:02:
(Sarah Zhang)
Like you don't you don't get credit for preventing a terrorist attack because people don't understand the depth of the devastation that would have happened.
19:10:
(Sarah Zhang)
You don't get credit for preventing a pandemic because people it was hypothetical.
19:14:
(Sarah Zhang)
They didn't realize what could have happened.
19:15:
(Matt Thompson)
But one of the implicit themes there that you've written about a fair amount has been the nature of the public response to science and the politics around science.
19:26:
(Matt Thompson)
And what do you think would happen if a politician were to demagogue the flu, were to talk about the flu the way that sometimes the Trump administration talks about, say, the tiny strand of people that are in MS-13?
19:41:
(Sarah Zhang)
Well, we have seen politicians that have got Ebola, right?
19:45:
(Sarah Zhang)
I think what would be interesting with the flu is that there's so much that intersects with public health and short-term political interest, and they do not always align and, in fact, may often not align.
19:58:
(Sarah Zhang)
So if you see a case where flu is coming from another country and, you know, we call the 1980 flu the Spanish flu.
20:05:
(Sarah Zhang)
It probably did not actually come from Spain, but you could very easily see how a shorthand like that could become like this is a foreign thing, a foreign pestilence that's coming to invade us.
20:15:
(Sarah Zhang)
And I think that could be really problematic.
20:17:
(Matt Thompson)
But would there be chances of a politician using this power for good?
20:21:
(Matt Thompson)
I mean, could you imagine someone campaigning on a, I want to eradicate the killer that might fell tens of thousands of Americans this year?
20:32:
(Sarah Zhang)
I see Ed making a pain face.
20:35:
(Ed Yong)
Yes, I do too.
20:36:
(Ed Yong)
I mean, you know, nothing is impossible.
20:47:
(Ed Yong)
Diseases by their very nature are sort of invisible.
20:51:
(Ed Yong)
It's hard to picture in your mind what the threat looks like.
20:55:
(Ed Yong)
It doesn't have a face.
20:57:
(Ed Yong)
And it therefore, I think, makes it hard to really appreciate that.
21:03:
(Ed Yong)
The nature of the threat.
21:06:
(Ed Yong)
I think Sarah is right that the more likely direction is that these threats are used to stoke fear of the other.
21:19:
(Ed Yong)
of people coming in from other parts of the world and bringing diseases with them.
21:24:
(Ed Yong)
We saw this play out during the Ebola outbreak that hit West Africa.
21:30:
(Ed Yong)
A magazine published a cover about how people were going to bring Ebola into the States because they were taking bushmeat with them.
21:42:
(Ed Yong)
All kinds of paranoid thinking emerged and were fanned online by the man who is now in the Oval Office.
21:55:
(Ed Yong)
Trump tweeted about how Obama was crazy and a psycho for not banning flights from the countries that were affected, even though no actual direct flights existed.
22:07:
(Ed Yong)
He mocked the president for sending troops over.
22:15:
(Ed Yong)
He derided him for allowing Americans, who had become infected while trying to help control the outbreak, allowing them back into the country.
22:27:
(Ed Yong)
They should basically be left to die, is what he was saying, that they should suffer the consequences for their altruism.
22:34:
(Ed Yong)
And you could just imagine how that might play out in a future epidemic.
22:44:
(Ed Yong)
When outbreaks like this happen, the things that we need are a unifying spirit and calm, authoritative, reliable information.
22:55:
(Ed Yong)
None of these things were evident during the response to the West African Ebola outbreak from the people who now hold the reins of power.
23:04:
(Ed Yong)
And I think I'm not super confident that those qualities will manifest in the future.
23:11:
(Sarah Zhang)
And to just add one more example, there's a bacterial disease called leptospirosis that is kind of common in deserts.
23:19:
(Sarah Zhang)
And when we were talking about Syrian refugees coming in, this was a thing on right-wing websites.
23:24:
(Sarah Zhang)
They were saying the refugees who bring in this bacterial disease into the U.S.
23:28:
(Matt Thompson)
So it's all entangled.
23:29:
(Matt Thompson)
Our thoughts about refugees also inflect the preparedness for a pandemic, perhaps.
23:36:
(Matt Thompson)
So we can go deeper into the dark times and the political challenges.
23:43:
(Matt Thompson)
But I'm curious, what are the bright spots, Ed, as you've looked into the matter of public health preparedness?
23:51:
(Matt Thompson)
What do you find that you're optimistic about?
23:54:
(Ed Yong)
So I think that we've seen a few moves over the last decade, and certainly since that big Ebola outbreak in West Africa, that are reassuring, that provide some hope that the world is finally getting it.
24:10:
(Ed Yong)
So the US has an agency called Barda, which acts sort of like a venture capital firm within the government.
24:17:
(Ed Yong)
And
24:17:
(Ed Yong)
That has funded the development of countermeasures against future threats.
24:22:
(Ed Yong)
It funded the creation of a vaccine-making plant in North Carolina that has the ability to churn out vaccines far more quickly than previous techniques could do.
24:34:
(Ed Yong)
There is also an organization called CEPI, which is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Interventions.
24:44:
(Ed Yong)
My God, there are a lot of acronyms.
24:46:
(Ed Yong)
in this field.
24:47:
(Ed Yong)
But CEPI is an international alliance of governments and non-profits that is trying to prepare vaccines against deadly potential future infectious threats.
25:01:
(Ed Yong)
For the moment, it's focusing on Nipah virus, MERS and Lassa fever and trying to create vaccines for them and getting them to a point where they could be field tested if outbreaks of these three diseases actually happen.
25:14:
(Ed Yong)
They're also investing in creating what are called platform technologies, which are sort of like plug-and-play tools that will allow you to create vaccines against new unseen threats very, very quickly by taking whatever is new and plugging it into a system that is old and tried and tested and already approved by regulators.
25:40:
(Ed Yong)
Yeah.
25:41:
(Ed Yong)
So the fact, the existence of those agencies suggests to me that this is being taken seriously, as is an agreement called the Global Health Security Agenda, which is trying to get nations all around the world to live up to an internationally agreed upon framework for what preparedness looks like.
26:07:
(Ed Yong)
It's trying to get everyone onto the same page of...
26:10:
(Ed Yong)
where everyone should be in terms of fighting infectious diseases and how different countries can get there.
26:25:
(Matt Thompson)
So there are bright spots.
26:26:
(Matt Thompson)
That is good to hear.
26:28:
(Matt Thompson)
So stick with us in a moment.
26:31:
(Matt Thompson)
We will turn from bright spots to the politics of public health.
27:48:
(Matt Thompson)
We've talked a lot about the infrastructure and the response to pandemics here in the U.S. Sarah, I'm curious what we can learn from other global players.
27:57:
(Sarah Zhang)
Yeah, so I think a good example of this is SARS back in 2002, 2003.
28:03:
(Sarah Zhang)
So SARS started in China.
28:05:
(Sarah Zhang)
And when this was happening, China, you know, obviously did not want to be known as the site of a new unknown virus outbreak.
28:12:
(Sarah Zhang)
So it really did not want to talk about it.
28:14:
(Sarah Zhang)
And for months...
28:15:
(Sarah Zhang)
was not telling the World Health Organization what was going on, was not letting people from the WHO come into the country to investigate.
28:22:
(Sarah Zhang)
And during this time, of course, the virus was spreading and we have airplanes.
28:26:
(Sarah Zhang)
It was, you know, getting all over the world.
28:29:
(Sarah Zhang)
And so it's, you know, we talk about this globalized world.
28:33:
(Sarah Zhang)
And we're also at a moment where the administration US is becoming increasingly isolationist and increasingly suspicious of the global community.
28:43:
(Sarah Zhang)
So we've been talking about how that might affect us in the U.S.
28:48:
(Sarah Zhang)
But when we do not want to participate in a global community, that is bad for the rest of the world as well.
28:54:
(Matt Thompson)
Talk about some of the specific ways in which our instinct, perhaps, to shut down the borders in a crisis actually is counterproductive to protecting folks.
29:07:
(Sarah Zhang)
Yeah, well, I think one of the things that comes up when you have an epidemic is that people are really scared of each other, right?
29:14:
(Sarah Zhang)
Because each person becomes a vector for the virus or for the disease.
29:18:
(Sarah Zhang)
So when we shut down the borders, that is a drastic step.
29:22:
(Sarah Zhang)
This is saying like, if you think this is worth doing, this must be really, really bad.
29:28:
(Sarah Zhang)
So when you stigmatize this illness so that people don't want to go to health officials, don't want anyone to know that they are sick, you're actually driving it underground.
29:36:
(Sarah Zhang)
You're making it harder to figure out what's going on.
29:38:
(Sarah Zhang)
You're making it harder to contain it.
29:40:
(Sarah Zhang)
And you're operating in the dark with much less information.
29:44:
(Matt Thompson)
So is the answer to not be afraid?
29:46:
(Ed Yong)
I think the answer is to realize that no single country can deal with this problem alone.
29:56:
(Ed Yong)
This is a global issue that the world needs to work together on and things like
30:01:
(Ed Yong)
travel bans, border shutdowns, they're just deeply ineffective and also very counterproductive.
30:12:
(Ed Yong)
If America had not sent people to West Africa during that big Ebola outbreak, the outbreak would have become even bigger than it actually was, which would then have increased the risk of people traveling to other parts of the world and for the thing to really start raging out of control.
30:30:
(Ed Yong)
And if you shut down travel and if you close your borders, you're also saying to people within your country, do not go and help people abroad because you won't be able to get back in.
30:43:
(Ed Yong)
And that also increases the risk that outbreaks elsewhere in the world will rage out of control.
30:48:
(Ed Yong)
I think the simple fact is that in this globalised world,
30:52:
(Ed Yong)
you just can't stop diseases from spreading through things like walls or travel bans or whatnot.
31:05:
(Ed Yong)
The best way to do it is through global cooperation, is by rich nations helping poorer nations to shore up their own defences, to increase their ability to
31:17:
(Ed Yong)
to deal with and control their own outbreaks, to help them set up labs, train epidemiologists.
31:25:
(Ed Yong)
And this isn't even a case of nations like the US sort of parachuting in to help out when problems are afoot.
31:33:
(Ed Yong)
It's about building local capacity.
31:35:
(Ed Yong)
And we've seen really good examples like this all over the world.
31:40:
(Ed Yong)
Thanks to investments from the US and other countries, Uganda, for example, is now very good at doing surveillance for Ebola and other viral hemorrhagic fevers.
31:50:
(Ed Yong)
Their outbreaks used to spread to hundreds of people.
31:54:
(Ed Yong)
Now, there have been many, many outbreaks whose case numbers you can count on a single hand.
32:00:
(Ed Yong)
In Nigeria, there were huge concerns that when a Liberian-American man arrived in Lagos, the most popular city in Africa, that this was going to trigger a huge and devastating new phase of the Ebola outbreak.
32:18:
(Ed Yong)
But Nigeria already had this incredible health infrastructure for eradicating polio.
32:23:
(Ed Yong)
And all of those people and those resources could be diverted to dealing with Ebola.
32:29:
(Ed Yong)
And so that outbreak never happened.
32:33:
(Ed Yong)
Ebola was brought to heel in what many feared would be the nightmare scenario.
32:40:
(Ed Yong)
So there are so many examples where investments from the US and other rich nations have already paid off around the world.
32:46:
(Ed Yong)
And those are the investments that we need in order to make everyone safer.
32:51:
(Ed Yong)
This idea of America first cannot translate to America alone when it comes to diseases.
32:59:
(Ed Yong)
Even if you don't really buy into the moral imperative of helping other countries, from a purely selfish standpoint,
33:09:
(Ed Yong)
Still, the best thing to do is to help other people, like other nations.
33:13:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah.
33:15:
(Matt Thompson)
Sarah, how do we get better as a population about dealing with things like the flu?
33:23:
(Matt Thompson)
You've written recently about the dynamics of recent flu outbreaks, and I'm curious, how should individual people think about their own preparedness?
33:31:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah.
33:32:
(Sarah Zhang)
I think I heard this from my colleague that there's nothing they can really do as an individual.
33:37:
(Sarah Zhang)
I don't mean that in like, you know, we're all helpless, but that the things that we need are systemic.
33:45:
(Sarah Zhang)
You know, so one of the problems that happened with the flu this past year is
33:48:
(Sarah Zhang)
We ran out of IV bags, you know, very simple intravenous solution because they were being manufactured on Puerto Rico.
33:55:
(Sarah Zhang)
And when the hurricane hit, they stopped making them.
33:59:
(Sarah Zhang)
And, you know, you literally had stories of people, you know, learning things they had to doing things they hadn't do in 30 years, like slowly injecting fluid into someone's body because they had run out of this very, very simple thing, IV bags.
34:12:
(Sarah Zhang)
There are networks of people that need to be in place.
34:17:
(Sarah Zhang)
There are supply chains that need to be shored up.
34:20:
(Sarah Zhang)
These are all things that we can anticipate because we've been through them before, but there just needs to be the will to do them.
34:26:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah.
34:27:
(Matt Thompson)
Ed, from your observation, traveling to different spots, how good is the network of global coordination and collaboration around the potential of a pandemic or around the viruses and outbreaks that we have seen?
34:43:
(Ed Yong)
I mean, I would say that it varies depending on the place.
34:49:
(Ed Yong)
There are lots of parts in the world that I think are working very well together to build up their own defenses.
34:57:
(Ed Yong)
I got to go to the Congo because a team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, led by Anne Ramoyne, an epidemiologist,
35:10:
(Ed Yong)
had established a long working relationship there.
35:14:
(Ed Yong)
They were friends with Congolese virologists and epidemiologists.
35:19:
(Ed Yong)
And the Congo, I would say, is a place that actually hasn't had that substantial an investment from the US and other Western nations.
35:31:
(Ed Yong)
But I think this ethic of creating those connections is vitally important because with those connections comes trust.
35:42:
(Ed Yong)
And that's crucial in an outbreak situation.
35:45:
(Ed Yong)
You need to know who you can rely on.
35:47:
(Ed Yong)
And if there are already established working relationships, those can really be brought to bear on a new crisis.
35:55:
(Ed Yong)
And I think that's a thing that is imperiled at the moment.
36:00:
(Ed Yong)
A lot of those relationships have been very slowly built up over time.
36:05:
(Ed Yong)
Many of them are still quite new.
36:07:
(Ed Yong)
The CDC, in the wake of the Ebola outbreak, used large pots of money that were committed to fighting Ebola and towards the global health security agenda to increase their presence in a lot of countries around the world, to build those relationships, to help shore up those local defences.
36:26:
(Ed Yong)
But those events are now drying up.
36:30:
(Ed Yong)
Trump's budget for 2019 would entail a 67% cut to the money that's been used so far for the global health security agenda.
36:41:
(Ed Yong)
And that lack of money translates into lack of jobs, lack of people on the ground.
36:47:
(Ed Yong)
The CDC and other agencies will have to pull back their presence
36:52:
(Ed Yong)
in other parts of the world where these disease threats are very much alive.
36:58:
(Ed Yong)
And if they do that, what that means is that those relationships on the ground, that trust that it's been built up, will start to fray and break.
37:09:
(Ed Yong)
And that's a problem.
37:11:
(Ed Yong)
If anything, we need to double down.
37:14:
(Ed Yong)
We need to make those relationships even stronger than they have been before.
37:18:
(Ed Yong)
I think that our ability to prepare for these threats is, as Sarah said, a systemic thing.
37:28:
(Ed Yong)
It has to do with travel routes and supply chains.
37:33:
(Ed Yong)
But on top of that, it also boils down to these very individual relationships.
37:39:
(Ed Yong)
It's two people who know each other and who know how to get the job done.
37:43:
(Ed Yong)
But those two things feed into each other.
37:47:
(Ed Yong)
Our lack of political will, our lack of sustainable investments translates into a lack of relationships and trust on the ground.
37:56:
(Matt Thompson)
And so I ask again.
37:59:
(Matt Thompson)
Why is this not treated as a sort of big let's get the world together?
38:05:
(Matt Thompson)
There's this hypothetical that we've discussed on the show and we discuss – you'll hear this around like dorm room conversations for kids in college.
38:16:
(Matt Thompson)
If aliens were to invade the planet.
38:21:
(Crosstalk)
Mm-hmm.
38:22:
(Matt Thompson)
Would that drive humankind apart or would that bring humankind together?
38:29:
(Matt Thompson)
And why in the face of such an enormous potential devastating population level threat?
38:36:
(Matt Thompson)
Why isn't that more of a galvanizing force to draw more investment and focus?
38:43:
(Ed Yong)
I think you're right.
38:44:
(Ed Yong)
It should be a unifying force.
38:47:
(Ed Yong)
I often think of pandemic threats as like the squid monster from Watchmen.
38:54:
(Ed Yong)
Spoiler alert for anyone who's not read Watchmen.
38:58:
(Ed Yong)
This unifying threat that affects everyone and they really ought to bring together warring, polarised, partisan factions.
39:07:
(Ed Yong)
But I think the problem is that unlike, say, natural disasters, which are caused by these abstract, external, almost mythological forces like volcanoes and earthquakes, which make it easier for people to rally against, infectious diseases spread through people, through the microbes that we carry in our blood and our breath.
39:32:
(Ed Yong)
And
39:33:
(Ed Yong)
So other people become vectors.
39:37:
(Ed Yong)
They become sources of contagion.
39:40:
(Ed Yong)
And it's been said to me by several public health people that while disasters can bring communities together, diseases often tear them apart.
39:48:
(Ed Yong)
They turn people against their neighbours.
39:51:
(Ed Yong)
And they have this sort of inherent divisive quality to them.
39:55:
(Ed Yong)
And I think that's why it's so important to counteract that with a spirit of unification that needs to be
40:03:
(Ed Yong)
portrayed by our leaders and that needs to be woven into the way we deal with the rest of the world.
40:10:
(Ed Yong)
In many ways, this global zeitgeist of xenophobia and nationalism is exactly the opposite of what we need to deal with infectious disease threats.
40:22:
(Ed Yong)
A woman named Padi Sabeti, who works at Harvard and who has been involved in dealing with Ebola,
40:30:
(Ed Yong)
You said to me that viruses really are in many ways the one unifying threat.
40:37:
(Ed Yong)
They should be the thing that humanity takes a global stance against.
40:43:
(Ed Yong)
Whether we have the wisdom and the foresight to actually do that or not is an open question.
40:48:
(Ed Yong)
I think you're right that they ought to unify us, and we can't stop them if we're not unified.
40:58:
(Matt Thompson)
Sarah, one of the things that drives us apart, as we saw in the West African Ebola outbreak several years ago, is just pure blind panic, not knowing what to do and confronting something incredibly scary.
41:13:
(Matt Thompson)
What is the role that panic plays in the spread of an outbreak?
41:17:
(Matt Thompson)
And how do we talking about the psychological approach to to dealing well with the possibility of a pandemic?
41:25:
(Matt Thompson)
How do we prevent panics from breaking out?
41:27:
(Sarah Zhang)
Yeah, I think what's so scary about an outbreak isn't just that people get sick or die is that it really tears apart the fabric of society, right?
41:34:
(Sarah Zhang)
Like, it changes how you interact with people.
41:38:
(Sarah Zhang)
There are photos of, you know, the 1918 flu epidemic.
41:42:
(Sarah Zhang)
Like, court is being held outside because everyone is afraid of being indoors.
41:48:
(Sarah Zhang)
With the Ebola outbreak, you see that people, it was spreading because of their funeral practices.
41:54:
(Sarah Zhang)
And, you know, this is something that was very deeply felt in the community, but they had to stop it.
42:00:
(Sarah Zhang)
I think panic is useful if it can help us in the prevention.
42:06:
(Sarah Zhang)
I think once the virus is spreading, it taps so much into our primal fears that it makes us suspicious of each other.
42:15:
(Sarah Zhang)
And I hope that the maybe slight sense of panic we can get from reading Ed's piece makes us slightly more prepared to deal with that.
42:23:
(Ed Yong)
And misinformation flies around.
42:25:
(Ed Yong)
Yeah.
42:26:
(Ed Yong)
And I think it heightens some of our worst instincts like racism, like xenophobia.
42:35:
(Ed Yong)
You know, when Ebola fears were at their peak, people were told to go home to take sick days as kids were sort of pulled out of school.
42:47:
(Ed Yong)
And often like...
42:48:
(Ed Yong)
with no reason.
42:53:
(Ed Yong)
People were told to go home because they had just come back from different parts of Africa that had nothing to do with the outbreak.
43:00:
(Ed Yong)
The poor sense of geography coupled with this sort of growing tendency to mistrust people from different backgrounds or different skin colours, I think, definitely has caused problems before.
43:17:
(Ed Yong)
during outbreaks past and will likely do so again in the future.
43:22:
(Matt Thompson)
What do you think an effective political response is to that?
43:27:
(Matt Thompson)
Tell me an example of a politician doing the right thing.
43:32:
(Ed Yong)
A woman named Mary Bassett, who was New York City's health commissioner,
43:38:
(Ed Yong)
She, I think, exemplified how to deal well with a crisis like this.
43:45:
(Ed Yong)
So when Ebola fears were at their height and a doctor named Craig Spencer arrived in the US having been involved in controlling the outbreak in West Africa…
43:59:
(Ed Yong)
and was diagnosed with Ebola.
44:01:
(Ed Yong)
Bassett regularly appeared in the press as this...
44:05:
(Ed Yong)
I think she was described by the Times as a palpable force of calm.
44:10:
(Ed Yong)
She reassured people.
44:11:
(Ed Yong)
She spread the correct information because she had access to...
44:15:
(Ed Yong)
her own scientific background and also strong evidence-based advice.
44:21:
(Ed Yong)
She went to places of business that Spencer had also visited to show that there was no risk of being infected just by being in those spaces.
44:32:
(Ed Yong)
I think she ate meatballs with New York's mayor to this restaurant.
44:36:
(Ed Yong)
And she really importantly held town halls with the Liberian community to make sure that they weren't being stigmatized, that they weren't subjected to xenophobia and hate as a result of misplaced paranoia.
44:51:
(Ed Yong)
I think that just shows that it's not impossible to maintain goodwill and togetherness during an outbreak.
45:00:
(Ed Yong)
It can be done, but it does require having leaders with that unifying spirit.
45:06:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah.
45:07:
(Matt Thompson)
I imagine one other dimension that plays into the way that we underprepare for, underweight the possibility of the pandemic is just that every year it seems like it's something else also.
45:20:
(Matt Thompson)
I mean, we've gone through – it's Zika virus one year, Ebola virus the next year, bird flu, swine flu, mad cow disease.
45:29:
(Matt Thompson)
How –
45:32:
(Matt Thompson)
First of all, why does it seem like every year there's another big potential public health danger?
45:40:
(Matt Thompson)
And how can we kind of be appropriately attuned?
45:46:
(Matt Thompson)
What's the right way to think about the different seasonal new strains, new infections, new viruses that come out?
45:54:
(Matt Thompson)
What's the right way to think about that without minimizing the potential dangers?
45:58:
(Sarah Zhang)
Oh, well, there are a lot of bad things out there that are trying to kill you.
46:02:
(Sarah Zhang)
That was not the calming part of the answer.
46:09:
(Sarah Zhang)
But I think, like, you know, as an individual, you don't need to be panicking about every single disease that crops up in some corner of the world.
46:17:
(Sarah Zhang)
Most of them are unlikely to reach you.
46:19:
(Sarah Zhang)
I think there definitely is a panic and neglect cycle.
46:24:
(Sarah Zhang)
As I said, I don't think it is your job as an individual to worry about this.
46:29:
(Sarah Zhang)
It is the public health agency's job, it is the CDC's job to be on the front lines of all of this.
46:35:
(Sarah Zhang)
I think as an individual, it's just a matter of not hiding anything if you're worried about being sick, going to the doctor.
46:45:
(Sarah Zhang)
I think public systems work when there's a spirit of trust and working together and generosity.
46:54:
(Sarah Zhang)
So I think if we could cultivate that kind of spirit where everyone is trying to do the right thing, that is maybe the way to think about how to fight an epidemic.
47:03:
(Matt Thompson)
Is there anything I should be listening for?
47:05:
(Matt Thompson)
Like, is there something that is a tell that, oh, no, this one really, really is worth paying attention to?
47:11:
(Ed Yong)
I mean, I feel like the common thread to all these threats is that they are inherently unpredictable.
47:19:
(Ed Yong)
There are a lot of viruses and other infections out there.
47:25:
(Ed Yong)
There are thousands, perhaps millions that we don't know about that await discovery and
47:31:
(Ed Yong)
And I think some people feel that we might get to a point where we can reasonably predict which are most likely to jump into us.
47:41:
(Ed Yong)
Other virologists, and I think I, would also argue that such events are so stochastic, so unpredictable, that our chances of doing that reliably are very negligible.
47:56:
(Ed Yong)
All we can do is to spot new outbreaks when they happen and to do our best to control them.
48:04:
(Ed Yong)
But fortunately, I think a lot of the solutions cut across diseases.
48:10:
(Ed Yong)
They are societal and political solutions.
48:13:
(Ed Yong)
They are a commitment to stable funding.
48:18:
(Ed Yong)
They are a commitment to vaccinology research projects.
48:21:
(Ed Yong)
regardless of the specific vaccine against the specific disease you're trying to make.
48:26:
(Ed Yong)
They are about training epidemiologists, ensuring that public health labs are adequately funded and resourced.
48:34:
(Ed Yong)
All of those defenses cut across diseases, whether you're talking about Zika or Ebola or flu or anything else.
48:41:
(Ed Yong)
If you get the infrastructure correct and if you get the political will in place and the trust and relationship set up, then
48:51:
(Ed Yong)
You know, that's our best defense against the things that we don't know about.
48:54:
(Ed Yong)
And assuredly, the things we don't know about are the things that are going to hit us in the future.
49:00:
(Matt Thompson)
Well, Ed, thank you for traveling around the world to tell us about some of those things and people that we didn't previously know about.
49:06:
(Ed Yong)
You're welcome.
49:07:
(Ed Yong)
Sorry I couldn't be the bringer of better news.
49:10:
(Matt Thompson)
You know what?
49:11:
(Matt Thompson)
You know what?
49:12:
(Matt Thompson)
I'm happy to know how many people there are all around the world, underfunded or not, fighting the fight against the bad virus.
49:22:
(Ed Yong)
There definitely are.
49:24:
(Ed Yong)
There definitely are.
49:24:
(Ed Yong)
I was going to say there's no shortage of them, but that's actually the opposite of what's true.
49:30:
(Ed Yong)
There are a lot of them.
49:32:
(Ed Yong)
And I think everyone, including them, would love there to be more.
49:35:
(Sarah Zhang)
So maybe the answer, if you want to do something, is become a public health official.
49:39:
(Ed Yong)
Right.
49:39:
(Ed Yong)
I mean, yeah.
49:40:
(Ed Yong)
Or maybe like hug your local public health official.
49:43:
(Matt Thompson)
Figure out who your local public health official is and hug them.
49:47:
(Ed Yong)
Right.
49:47:
(Ed Yong)
But maybe not hug them.
49:48:
(Ed Yong)
That's... Yeah, true.
49:50:
(Matt Thompson)
Face bump.
49:50:
(Matt Thompson)
That's right.
49:55:
(Matt Thompson)
With that, let us turn to our closing segment, Keepers, in which I ask, what have you read, heard, seen, watched, listened to, experienced recently that you do not want to forget?
50:04:
(Matt Thompson)
I'm going to start with a keeper from one of our listeners, Julie.
50:09:
(Julie)
My keeper is, a couple weeks ago, and I know it's not this week, but a couple weeks ago, my aunt...
50:17:
(Julie)
My 87-year-old favorite aunt took myself, my wife, and my 13-year-old grandsons to dinner and told them stories and passed along memories to them that some I didn't know, some I did know.
50:32:
(Julie)
And my keeper is, is at the end of it, when I took them back home to their parents' house, my grandsons were thrilled to tell their father about the story about the day when their Nana was born.
50:47:
(Julie)
And to me, that was just amazing.
50:51:
(Julie)
Cause you know, 13 year old boys listening to an 87 year old woman tell stories not happening very often in this day and age.
50:58:
(Julie)
So that's my keeper.
50:59:
(Matt Thompson)
Wonderful.
51:01:
(Matt Thompson)
I would definitely put in a plug for the family stories.
51:05:
(Matt Thompson)
I record stories with my parents as often as I can.
51:09:
(Matt Thompson)
And some of those stories are fantastic.
51:12:
(Matt Thompson)
And I never would have known if I did not designate a time to sit down with them and ask them to tell me stories, particularly about the time before I came into the world.
51:23:
(Matt Thompson)
Sarah, what is your keeper?
51:25:
(Sarah Zhang)
So I've been trying to read more fiction to unwind.
51:28:
(Sarah Zhang)
And over the past two months, I've read three books during World War II and one after the apocalypse.
51:34:
(Sarah Zhang)
So I'm going to talk about the book that's after the apocalypse.
51:36:
(Sarah Zhang)
It's called It's a Theory of Bastards by Audrey Shulman.
51:40:
(Sarah Zhang)
And it's about a bonobo researcher.
51:42:
(Sarah Zhang)
And she is studying bonobos in a facility in the Midwest.
51:46:
(Sarah Zhang)
And the modern world starts falling apart, basically.
51:48:
(Sarah Zhang)
And it's such an interesting and compelling story about human nature and evolution and free will.
51:55:
(Sarah Zhang)
But I also found it intensely frustrating at places as someone who writes about science.
51:59:
(Sarah Zhang)
So I am mentioning this because I really want to talk about it.
52:04:
(Sarah Zhang)
So please at me if you have read it.
52:06:
(Matt Thompson)
Awesome.
52:07:
(Matt Thompson)
Awesome.
52:07:
(Matt Thompson)
Say it again.
52:08:
(Matt Thompson)
Say the title of it again.
52:09:
(Sarah Zhang)
Theory of Bastards by Audrey Shulman.
52:11:
(Matt Thompson)
Fantastic.
52:13:
(Matt Thompson)
Ed, what do you want to keep?
52:15:
(Ed Yong)
Oh, man.
52:16:
(Ed Yong)
I recently wrote a story about these incredibly old, beautiful trees called baobabs.
52:23:
(Ed Yong)
They're sometimes called the upside-down trees because they look as if someone has just like yoinked a tree out of the ground and turned it upside down and planted it back again.
52:31:
(Ed Yong)
The branches look like a root system.
52:34:
(Ed Yong)
And sadly, a lot of these trees are dying, like some of the oldest and biggest ones have died suddenly in the last few years, last decade or so.
52:47:
(Ed Yong)
And climate change seems to be the most likely explanation, which is very tragic.
52:54:
(Ed Yong)
But the story sticks in my head because I think about just how much
52:59:
(Ed Yong)
these trees have experienced.
53:01:
(Ed Yong)
The oldest one was, I think, 2,500 years old.
53:07:
(Ed Yong)
You know, how many empires have risen and fallen in that time?
53:11:
(Ed Yong)
You know, how much history has gone by while this thing was growing and before it eventually fell?
53:18:
(Ed Yong)
And I think that's, it's sort of a haunting and beautiful metaphor for the ways in which we are changing the world around us.
53:26:
(Matt Thompson)
Absolutely.
53:27:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah, the Baobab trees are
53:28:
(Matt Thompson)
My earliest memory of the baobab trees came from the little prince.
53:32:
(Crosstalk)
Yes, me too.
53:33:
(Crosstalk)
Yeah.
53:36:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah.
53:36:
(Matt Thompson)
It's a sad thing to think that climate change is threatening them.
53:40:
(Matt Thompson)
I'd say our majestic.
53:43:
(Matt Thompson)
My keeper this week is log rolling.
53:47:
(Matt Thompson)
I want to shout out the 160 Years of Atlantic Stories project that our team has put together over the past decade.
53:55:
(Matt Thompson)
Several months since the beginning of November of 2017, when The Atlantic celebrated its 160th birthday, our audience team has day by day been posting to the site.
54:11:
(Matt Thompson)
A story each weekday from a different year, a different successive year in the life of the Atlantic.
54:21:
(Matt Thompson)
It's a compendium of stories, some of which were interesting.
54:27:
(Matt Thompson)
Incredibly prescient, some of which relate deeply to the world in which we now live, some of which read very differently in light of history than they did when they were published at the time.
54:39:
(Matt Thompson)
But nonetheless, it is quite a trove.
54:43:
(Matt Thompson)
I'll mention a few pieces in particular that stood out just in reviewing this archive over the past few weeks.
54:52:
(Matt Thompson)
There's a story from August 1965 by Mrs. X called One Woman's Abortion that is quite a stunning read now.
55:02:
(Matt Thompson)
There are several pieces from the early 70s and then again in the early 90s about job discrimination against women and gender discrimination.
55:15:
(Matt Thompson)
One piece by Wendy Kaminer called Crashing the Locker Room, which was from 1992, right around the time of the Clarence Thomas trials and the testimony of Anita Hill.
55:28:
(Matt Thompson)
Once again, it's one of those pieces that sort of reads so interestingly now in light of what has happened in the years since.
55:37:
(Matt Thompson)
So we'll throw a link to this project in the show notes.
55:42:
(Matt Thompson)
But it is just a tremendous record of journalism to sit with for a while.
55:46:
(Matt Thompson)
So I highly recommend to all of our listeners to go and check it out.
55:49:
(Matt Thompson)
Do you know what's not in that record?
55:52:
(Matt Thompson)
What is not in that record?
55:54:
(Ed Yong)
The 1918 flu.
55:56:
(Ed Yong)
We have no pieces in our archives about this incredible disaster that we started this show with.
56:03:
(Ed Yong)
And I think that's really interesting.
56:05:
(Ed Yong)
Especially given the prominence that infectious disease has in the collective consciousness and the news today.
56:13:
(Matt Thompson)
We totally did miss the boat on 1918.
56:16:
(Matt Thompson)
However, I will shout out a piece by Justina Hill from the March 1944 issue, which is in the 160 Years of Atlantic Stories trough called How Bad is the Flu?
56:27:
(Matt Thompson)
I'll note, one of the things about that story that's kind of remarkable is that they think that they are on the precipice of just solving this problem.
56:38:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah.
56:38:
(Matt Thompson)
In 1944.
56:44:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah, the story ends.
56:46:
(Matt Thompson)
Not to spoiler alert.
56:49:
(Matt Thompson)
The story ends with the sentence, influenza and pneumonia are sometimes killers.
56:54:
(Matt Thompson)
We have learned much about them.
56:56:
(Matt Thompson)
We are bound to learn more.
56:57:
(Matt Thompson)
The possibility for their control seems brighter than it has ever been.
57:00:
(Matt Thompson)
As Theobald Smith said, among other aims adopted for the post-war period might well be included freedom from respiratory disease.
57:10:
(Ed Yong)
So close.
57:11:
(Matt Thompson)
So close.
57:13:
(Matt Thompson)
Nearly there.
57:15:
(Matt Thompson)
Just a few weeks more.
57:16:
(Matt Thompson)
Oh, man.
57:17:
(Matt Thompson)
May the optimism of the American spirit live eternal life.
57:19:
(Matt Thompson)
And with that, Ed, Sarah, thank you so much for joining us and not scaring us too much.
57:29:
(Matt Thompson)
Thanks for nothing, guys.
57:30:
(Matt Thompson)
And thank you for the tremendous reporting from you both.
57:34:
(Matt Thompson)
I feel if I'm not unterrified, I at least am more knowledgeable, which is something.
57:40:
(Matt Thompson)
That's all I ask.
57:45:
(Matt Thompson)
That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.
57:47:
(Matt Thompson)
This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.
57:52:
(Matt Thompson)
The executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts is Catherine Wells.
57:56:
(Matt Thompson)
Our theme music, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, immortalized by the legendary John Batiste.
58:02:
(Matt Thompson)
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58:04:
(Matt Thompson)
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58:05:
(Matt Thompson)
Give us a call at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail.
58:11:
(Matt Thompson)
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58:13:
(Matt Thompson)
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58:18:
(Matt Thompson)
Catch our show notes in the episode description.
58:20:
(Matt Thompson)
And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.
58:27:
(Matt Thompson)
Most importantly, thank you for listening.
58:30:
(Matt Thompson)
Spare a thought for those unsung heroes that keep us safe every day.
58:34:
(Matt Thompson)
And if that's you, thanks.
58:37:
(Matt Thompson)
We'll see you next week.