Transcripts For CSPAN2 Booknotes Gina Kolata Flu 20240713

I had never heard of anything like this. It was the worst Infectious Disease academic. Guilt he killed so many people and if something came by like that today it would kill more people than the top 10 killers if it came by today and i just found out by looking at the papers by the center for Disease Control that 99 of the people that died in the epidemic were under age of 65 so it was an astonishing devastating epidemic and it was this idea that all these years later almost a century later a molecular biology has advanced so much that someone could have lung tissue that still had the viral genes in their and asked that question about what was this virus, how could influenza virus become such a killer and could it happen again and if so would we recognize it in time. Host one reference in the book that may be as many as 202 met 100 Million People died in 1918 from this fluke . Guest historians keep ratcheting the number upward, 40 million is an underestimate and i heard most recently there was a meeting of historians and they say they think the true number worldwide was closer to 100 million and possibly 20 million died on the indian sub continent host what is influenza . Guest a simple little virus and only lives in the human lungs and while its they are the only job is to take a long cell and make it into a virus factory, so the virus gets in and it takes the cells machinery and forces it to make new viruses and then the cell dies in the virus escapes. Simple little things. Host what happens to the body then . Guest there are four hallmarks of influenza i have heard, one is that you get a fever and take to your bed. You have muscle aches and pains, fever, you have a cough. You dont always have a cough. Host have you ever had a by the way . Guest i think i had it once. Host you dont know what it feels like . Guest i did when i had it, five days of torture and i still remember those muscle aches and high fever. Host back in 1918, where did it start . Guest the first time he came into the us in a big way, it showed up near boston and people thought at the time that it was like germ warfare because they couldnt believe it was Something Like the flu and many people insisted on putting the word influenza in quotations. It was during world war i and there was a rumor that there had been a cloud over Boston Harbor that was killing people or maybe the germans put something into aspirin that would kill people so when it arrived, he was the most horrible thing anyone had ever witnessed. If they had so many Young Children who were dying that they needed special trains to take away the dead. The bodies were stacked up. It was so shocking that the Surgeon General put the contingent of three of the leading doctors in the us to go out and say whats going on at camp at devon. One later roads come i cant even bear to think about this. It was camped devon in the fall, 1918, when the deadly influenza virus demonstrated inferiority of humans. He said the memory was burned on his brain that he wishes he could remove if he possibly could and when he described what happened when doctors were just to see an autopsy they said there were so me dead that they had to step over to the bodies just to get into the autopsy room. Then when they watched an autopsy take place, the military doctor opened the chest of a young man that had died in their work is a lungs filled with fluid, totally useless of man essentially died because his loves head with fluid and a doctor there who had been pretty much nothing could shake him and he turned and said this must be a plague he couldnt believe it. Host in your book you have well, you explain what they are . Guest the bottom picture cracks these are some of the samples of lung tissue from people from 1918. What was this virus and how would we ever knowing what was really miraculous was theres a military warehouse and people have described it like a library of congress of the dead started by Abraham Lincoln and every time a military doctor doesnt autopsy, youre supposed to put some of the tissue in the persons medical record in this big warehouse. There were people who died of the flu in 1918, and at the time doctors took snippets of the lung tissue, sentiment formaldehyde and send them to the warehouse and the doctor, Jeffrey Ellenberger at walter reed finally at the end of the century but in no requisition for people who had died of that food, in essence to find some lung tissue with flu in it and that lung tissue you saw was paraffin wax with lung tissue in and inside the lung tissue after all these years there is but still that flu virus from 1918. Host go back to this Pathology Institute here at walter reed. Have you been there . Guest yes. Host 3 million what, samples . Guest they are in boxes and jars and things and its this a big metal warehouse with cement floors i guess to keep it from burning down and they have these big racks of box after box after box and there is a man they are named al riddick, and his job is if someone once lung samples and what was asked for in this case was people that died from influenza in 1918 and died very quickly because they didnt want the person that had the flu virus and then lingered and the virus left in their lungs had died and so theres actually records of 1917 that have been computerized so get a computer printout of where to look any goes over with his ladders and he takes down these boxes boxes and in them work samples, brain tissue and all sorts of stuff without warehouse and this is lung tissue. Host you said Abraham Lincoln started it. Are there samples from the civil war . Guest right after the civil war, yes, from then on accumulating like a pack rat paradise. It was a brilliant idea because when they started this who knew what you would use it for and at the idea that in 1918, no one found the human influenza virus so the idea someone someday could come back and make use of this material was brilliant. Host i know im jumping way ahead, do they know what caused the influence of 1918 . Guest they know it was the flu virus and there are only eight teams in a flu virus and at this point and three lung samples from people who died in 1918 that have those genes in them and getting them out is pushing the limits of molecular biology and it takes a long time and they describe it as like putting together a detailed mosaic. They have gotten three of the eight genes completely put together now. They chose they are choosing them in order of the likelihood they will get an easy answer to what made the virus so deadly and unfortunately the first three genes told them the flu virus is related to bird and pig virus that we have not provided the answer yet to why it was dangerous a. Host me ask a couple questions about the Pathology Institute. Theres only one person that works there . Guest one person, but im sure there are other. Host did you get any sense that there was a lot of traffic . Guest i was the only person there. Host how big is it . Guest pretty big, this huge like warehouse think. Host right here at walter reed . Guest right near it in maryland, just over the border. Host one thing i must admit that i picked the book up was i did not expect to get out of this book kind of a drama, i mean, there is some personal stories in here that are fairly dramatic. Were you surprised about the competition going on to find this . Guest by the time i started to write the book, new there was a story and i write books for myself. I read fiction for fun and i wouldnt write a book unless i thought there was a story because if you have chapter after chapter like a textbook its not something i would pick up and read just because i wanted to read it, so thats what appealed to me is that there was a drama there and there was competition. Showed all of the weaknesses of the search for scientific data. Host what book is this for you . Guest what depends on what you count commercial or noncommercial, guess commercial, fourth. Host how long have you worked for the New York Times . Four years. Host how did you get the science . Guest you dont even want to know. So silly. I wanted to be a writer but i was studying science and i was sort of changing graduate schools. I was studying mathematics. I was going to get a phd and decided to get a masters instead, so i applied to every place in the Washington Area because i was married then i couldnt just move around and try to get a writing job. Science gave me a job, not as a writer, but as a boring job selecting reviewers for manuscripts and i said i will take this job, but im doing it to warm my way into the writing department. I took the job in shortly after i said now i would like to write an article for you on my own time for free, take it or leave it or do you mind if i do it they said okay and they published it and then i did another and another. Host wearies your home hometown . Richmond. Host where did you go to school . Guest university of maryland. I tried to science. Host Science Magazine is bought by what kind of person . Guest mostly subscription magazine. Scientists and policymakers who usually read it, but they have a new section that is supposed to be written for anyone to read. The idea is to write something so that a physicist who wants to know what theyre doing and molecular biology doesnt have to know any of the stuff that led up to this discovery and is like writing a normal news story. They just have to read it and they will understand. Host who owns it . Guest the American Association for the advancement of science, nonprofit. Host you mention another magazine, nature . Guest like the science competitors, british magazine, very similar, news section written by aussie scientists. Host go back to 1918 again. What was this more devastating flu than the average one that we hear about all the time . Guest theres no comparison. When you just think about the number of dead i think i said earlier 1. 5 million americans would die at this came and in a typical flu season 20000 people died most are very old or have some other chronic medical condition that weakens them in here 99 were under age of 65 so a peculiar death curve shaped like a w. The very young died in people between the age of 20 and 40 died in huge numbers and then at the end old people died. Host i would like to ask you to read page 25 if you dont mind. The authors brother i guess died in this and then thomas wilkes, where did he write this . Guest he was writing look homeward angel and that is fiction but i asked a number of people and they said the description of his brothers death was actually his brothers real name and inscription that was not fictionalized, its really what happened when his brother died. Host would you mind reading this in here and tell us why you put this in the book . Guest can i tell you why first . Host yes. Guest when i talk about the flu or People Living today talking about the flu its almost impossible for us to imagine what it was like. I tried is much as i could to put the words of the people who had been there because when you have been there and seen it has a sort of emotion that i can capture and i dont think anyone else i spoke to have been able to capture, so the reason i put the description and was of all the descriptions i had read about people dying of the flu, this one just really touched me. I almost it almost brought me too tears your queue can imagine yourself in that room watching someone die like this and it was one of the most one of those moments, i mean, i cant forget this passage in thats why i put it in. Both came home to a deathwatch, his brother was lying in the sick room upstairs while family waited for what they feared was inevitable. Wolf went upstairs to the gray shaded light of the room where then lay and he saw in that moment a searing recognition of his beloved 26 euros brother was dying. Heres the quote of how he died, then the long chain of body weight three quarters covered by betting, the god outline was twisted below the covers in an attitude of struggle and torture. It seemed not to belong to him, somehow distorted and detached as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal. The yellowing of his face had turned gray. Death by two red flags of fever, his stiff black threeday beard was growing. The beard recalled the corrupt vitality of hair which can grow from a rotting corpse and then a constant grimace of torture and strangulation about his white somehow dead looking teeth as inch by inch he gasps air into his lungs and the sound of this gasping loud, horse, rapid, unbelievable orchestrating every moment in it gave to its seen the final note of horror in the next day then grew delirious and by 4 00 p. M. It was apparent death was near. He had briefs consciousness, unconsciousness and delirium but mostly delirious. His breathing was easier. Always he returned to this quiet humming to the popular song of wartime, deep, sentimental but now tragically moving, babies prayer at twilight and then ben sank into unconsciousness and his eyes were almost closed with the gray flicker doled the coated with an death. He lay quietly upon his back very straight without a sign of a pain in a curious upturned thrust of his thin face, his mouth was firmly shut. Wolf stayed with ben that night praying even though he thought he couldnt believe in god or prayer, whoever you are be good to ben tonight. Whoever you are, we could to ben tonight showing the way. He heard only the rattle of dying breath and his chronic prayer. Wolf fell asleep and then suddenly woke suddenly calling his family with the knowledge that end was near. Ben lay still the body. To grow rigid before them. Ben in a last gasp he drew upon the air in a long and powerful respiration, his gray eyes opened filled with a terrible vision of all life in the one moment he seemed to rise forward bodily from the pillar without support, a flame, a light, glory and so then ben past unafraid as he had lived into the shade them death. Host does he say in the book what his brother did . Guest i dont know. Host he say i think another statistic Something Like 20 of the American People got the flu that your . Guest kind of amazing statistic is usually only a small percentage gets the flu. Everyone says they have it but usually its another disease so it was amazingly infectious flu, just spread so quickly throughout the population people couldnt understand how it was moving so fast. Then 25 times more deadly than the normal flu and seemed to be killing young people which is why they had such an amazing death rate. Host heres a photograph from 1976 of president ford and his doctor giving him a shot. With the story behind this . Guest in 1976 scientists were afraid in 1980 flu was coming back. They got this 1918 flu is related to a flu that infected pigs at the time because her on the same time that people were dying in the 1918 flu pigs got influenza and started to die. Not sure pigs give it to people or people gave it to pigs, but scientists became convinced it was related to a thought swine flu and in 1976 young 18year old soldier went on a march with his unit and was feeling sick, but he wanted to join and it was a nighttime fivemile hike. He was he collapsed and was brought back to the hospital and died and they discovered he had the swine flu, very strange a Young Healthy guy getting the swine flu and it dying. It takes six months to make enough taxing to protect the population so president ford asked doctors in the country and flu experts what should we do, do you say lets wait until next season to see if theres a problem or do you say this one death is scary enough we should protect everyone and make a swine flu vaccine and give it out to the nation. The decision was understandable and they said we cant take a chance because if we guess wrong in the 1918 flu is back, people will be dying rapidly and we would have no way to protect them, so there was the decision to make a campaign to immunize all americans against the swine flu. It turned out that it was kind of a campaign that didnt work well. President ford in order to try to encourage people to get the vaccine was photographed getting his own flu shot host 135 milliondollar. Guest right. Host didnt turn out that it was that important . Guest turned out there was no flock swine flu epidemic. This guy got the swine flu, but no one knows where he got it. A few other people seem to have antibodies to the swine flu indicating they got it but recovered, but no one died except for him and no one was getting sick from the flu and so they had a vaccine against a flu strain that was not causing any sort of problem and around the same time as everyone started to get immunized people started saying the vaccine is actually killing people making them sick so this was theres a lot of fear of the vaccine and i think it haunted people to this day because today you still hear people say the flu vaccine, they never get the right flu strain and its worse than the disease the vaccine can make you sick and i think that got started after 1976. Host we are in the flu season as we record this going through february. How do they who determines first of all what shot you get . You know a couple months ago when people work the. Guest theres a group of experts, International Surveillance goes on all the time and they look at the flu strain starting to become the predominant one at the end of the Previous Year and then what flu strains are appearing elsewhere in the world because the flu every year it comes to population and birds itself out. In 1918 it did that also it affected everyone that could be affected or whos been exposed to it and then mutates and changes a bit and comes back again and if people are vulnerable it will infect them. Host you said right above Hong Kong China that all flues emanate from there . Guest some people say that every major epidemic, every pandemic around the world in this century has begun in Southern China and theres a reason why they say its a hotspot for flues and that is in order to really sweep the world, you have it a flu that is so different from anything you have seen and that virtually everyone is no world is susceptible and one way is to get a flu thats deemed not to have been seen by human beings before and at birds get infected with the flaw the time. They dont even get sick. It lives in their intestines and bird flu is different than the one that infects people and pigs can be infected with bird flu in human flu and they can be a mixing bowl and come out with the new flu that has bird characteristics and human characteristics. Host how come pigs are not counted . Guest i dont know. Host its only pigs . Guest no, not only pigs. I cant tell you its only pigs i wish i could. Host if it is a heavy pigs saying, do you kill the virus when you kill the pig . Guest yeses. When the pig is dead the virus is dead. You dont have to worry. You eat the picket wont get into your love, but anyway its dead so in Southern China they have a clever way of growing rice and ancient way. They let loose ducks on the rice paddies and the docs only the weeds, not the rice and then when they harvest the rice they put the ducks back among the rest of the farm animals including the pigs pick the pigs can now get the duck flu virus and the people lived close to the pigs of the people can get the virus from the pigs, so you can end up with a new flu there that then spread around the world. This is interesting for 1918, its unclear if the night where the 1918 flu started but one researcher from hong kong who has this idea that is the 1918 flu that started earlier in Southern China and he says he has a Historical Records indicating the people in Southern China were getting sick with something that looked like the flu and chinese laborers were sent to europe to dig trenches so he thinks Southern China started the 1918 flu just like a started every other major pandemic in the century. Host a few years ago you say 1997 hong kong had a big scare and do we know about that here . Guest i knew about it, but i didnt pay a lot of attention as i thought scientists were overreacting and i no longer think that. At the time when it happened, there was a flu in hong kong that seemed to be killing young people they were getting really sick and dying. Host you mention one guest there was one young boy who died. You got sick and died and it was strange because it doesnt normally happen and there was a big investigation, what kind of flu did he have and it turned out he had bird flu and thats weird because bird flu doesnt normally infect people. Immediately through the alarm bells off, the beginning of a pandemic because scientists i was had 18 on their mind. Turned out no one else except for this boy seemed to be getting the flu. His family members didnt seem to get it, no one in the school, and then there was a big investigation and no one knew exactly how he got the bird flu, none of the hospital workers. He died in the hospital. Scientist said okay, we dont know what it was but luckily its going nowhere and a few months later people started to show up in the hospitals of hong kong, young people dying of a flu and it turned out to be bird flu and that was terrifying because it look like something was happening in hong kong. International team of investigators along with able investigators of hong kong did an extensive investigation and discovered that it seemed there was a flu infecting chickens in hong kong and it was going jumping from a chicken to people which is unusual and could be deadly. Didnt seem to be spreading from person to person, but it was a flu even killing chickens and they dont normally die of the flu. So, the big fear was if they dont do anything that the flu with an infected person in the person would also get human flu and in their lungs the two flues merge and out comes a bird type flu that could infect people and we would have 1918 all over again to protect the world, Hong Kong Government ordered every chicken in hong kong be killed, huge number of chickens, over a million chickens because of hong kong people by their chicken from markets where they are killed in front of your eyes. Hewed by a live chicken and see it killed there called wet markets with the chickens are in cages and every single chicken was killed. I think at the time i thought it was weird and now i think it was a good idea. Host how do we get the flu . Guest we get it when someone around us has it. Host how do they get, i mean, how does it start of the very first time zone gets the flu, do they eat it . Guest they breathe it in when they get the virus on their hands and touch their nose or mouth. Has to get into your lungs and usually you breathe it in the reason we tend to get it in the winter we think its because you are inside more often and people are coughing and sneezing and it lives longer in the air when the air is dry, so we get it in our winter in the Southern Hemisphere gets it in their winter. Host is there any way other than the flu top shot to protect yourself from getting the flu . Guest you can barricade yourself somewhere. Host you get it from the air . Guest not much you can do other than stay away from people, washer hands a lot. I dont know. Mainly you need a flu shot. Host you think flu shots are a good idea . Guest i never had one until this year and i wrote the book and i said why was i so stupid. My children are 18 and 20 when i said i went you to get a flu shot and call me and tell me you got it and i thought it was being totally ridiculous and they called and said mom, we got our flu shot. Host your husband got his . Guest yes. Is a mathematician and works for nonprofit society in philadelphia. Host yall live in philadelphia . Guest we live in princeton. Host when you had this idea, what year was it to write this book . Guest like 1998. Host and when you first called did you call your agent guest my agent called me. Have an aggressive agent guest john broxton. Guest he called me and said this flu stuff and i said it may be kind of interesting. I did not know the full story then but i had seen enough pieces that it made me think there was actually a real story to tell, a story that would have a beginning, middle and i was hoping on and to be able to read it like you rely, so can a novel. Host when did you really know you had something you needed . Guest when i got a contract. When they said they were going to publish a. Host i mean, when you are starting to do your research . Guest the virus in alaska. Thats when i realized there was a story here. Host heres a picture of him and what year . Guest 1950 or 1951 when he first went to alaska. Host and then theres a picture above it from where . Guest there are two pictures. Host the one where they are in where is that . Guest alaska in the alaskan tundra and below that is his laboratory. Host what is he digging up . Guest a mass grave almost every eskimo adults in a tiny village in the remote lutheran village had died of the flu and they were buried all. Host how many . Guest i think about 80. Host did the whole village go . Guest 90 of the adults in all the kids were left orphaned. Host 1918. Who is he . Guest a pathologist, he came to this country as a medical student and he was going to study for one year at the university of iowa and he came here and he was a Real Adventure so he decided he and his wife before he started school he would travel to every states, every all 50 states so they got a car and started driving around and ended up in alaska and while he was in alaska he met a paleontologist and he and his wife spent the summer with this paleontologist. Next year in medical school this dean virologist said there was a terrible tragedy in 1918 and the only way we will ever know what happened is if someone can find someone that was buried somewhere where the ground never thaws in their lungs are frozen and maybe we can get the virus and find what was so he said i know how to do this, i know this paleontologist and i can find out where the eskimo villages were and get a map and find out where were their graves where people might be in the permafrost and find a flu victim. So, he did do this, sort of an amazing adventure. He was this young student and he went to alaska, he had three possible villages where he thought he could find some bodies from the 1918 flu. It was like the three bears, the first one wasnt right, the next one wasnt right in the third one in this little village, he he said to the eskimos there was a terrible tragedy in 1918 , and i would like your permission to dig in this grave to find some flu victims to get the virus to make a vaccine and youll never have to suffer like this again they told him it was okay to do it. The story how he did it was an adventure in itself, but he managed to get some along the tissue still frozen from flu victims in 1918 and brought it back to iowa where he tried to grow it and thats the second picture in the lab. Today you think its horrifying to think someone was trying to grow the virus, but he really had not thought carefully about the consequences. He was growing it in chicken age eggs they kept injecting chicken eggs with the lung tissue hoping to grow the virus, but Nothing Happened so he concluded it was dead, that he never forgot that grave in the 1918 flu and always swore one day he would go back when science advanced enough to do something with that tissue and he would try again to solve the mystery of the 1918 flu. Host we of the 1918 flu killed half a million americans. Guest right. Host and in 1951 trip by the scientists. Hes from 51 to present, where is he located . Guest pathologist in the San Francisco area doing lots of other things, still being an adventure but always thinking about this flu and reading everything he could about influenza and wondering when will the time be right for him to go back again to alaska, and try to do something to find the virus. Host jumped from 51 until 1995 . Guest yes. Host you mentioned jeffrey who is in the Pathology Institute. Is he a military man . Guest no. Host hes a civilian . Guest hes a medical doctor md phd greece about a medical doctor and trained phd scientists. He just sort of stumbled into this as a career. Hes a brilliant man who always asks the right question. Hes an outsider to the flu field and he got interested in influenza because in his lab one thing they do in the pathology lab, they answer questions for the people in the military. One of the questions he was asked why why were dolphins dying. One of the veterinarians said dolphins around the world were dying because they were infected with a measles like virus and they asked him if we give you the dolphin tissue can you pull out a measles virus if its there, so his lab got so good at doing this they actually pulled out a measles like virus and he said i wonder what else we could do with our expertise and thats what led him to look for the 1918 flu virus. Host in 1995, so he has the Pathology Institute with 3 million specimens. Guest he had not gone there before. Host and you have johan in San Francisco and you dont even know hes doing this . Guest yes and then he saw jeffreys article in Science Magazine where kellenberger said i have this sample from the warehouse and can pull out these genes and he wrote him a letter and said, i think i could get you another sample. Would you be interested and he sort of carefully explained who he was so he wouldnt think he was crazy and kellenberger roback and said yes, of course im interested. He said i cant to do it this week but i can probably go out next week and the reason he didnt want to say at the time that he didnt want to go out that week was because he had been working for 25 years building a replica of a 14th century norwegian cabin and he had just about finished and he wanted to finish before he went to alaska. Host professor holton. Guest hes in his 70s now. He was 71 when he went up there. Host and doctor kellenberger is how old . Guest about half his age. Host there is a picture missing from your book of Kirsty Duncan. Why no picture of Kirsty Duncan . Guest do you want to know the truth . Host yes. Guest i wanted to put a picture in and of the problem was she kept writing the letters to indicate in order to use the picture she wanted to have some sort of control over what was said. Host i mean, guest i understand she was worried when everything the right, would it be the version she would want to be in there, but as a journalist you cant let someone control of whats said a book, i mean, i want to be accurate and i will check back forever, i will check anything but i cant tell you that you can write it for me. Host tell us what she looks like . Guest waist long hair, very tiny. Host how talk to about 5 feet tall, very little. Host how old is she . Guest i think shes about 30 or so. Host where does she live . Guest windsor, ontario. I think she recently got married. She was living with her parents that she recently got married for the second time. Very intense looking, they are very intense looking. Host you have interviewed her . Guest yes and shes very passionate. Host how did she get in . Guest same idea johan could she wanted to bodies in the permafrost. Host y . Guest she read a book called americas forgotten pandemic about the 1918 flu a historian and she was truly moved to tears she said by the story and if she said shes a geographer. Host where was she living at the time . Guest canada. Host where did she go to school . Guest i dont know. Host i know you mentioned the university of windsor. Guest thats where she was working. She said i think i can find some bodies in the permafrost and get this virus and my primary concern is safety. A michael coke and he was going to go up there by himself and if he found no one he would never tell a soul because he didnt want the eskimos to become part of a media circus so he decided he wanted to make it something everyone knew about that they would understand the urgency for doing this so that she could do this in the safest manner possible because she did not want to unleash a epidemic on the world. Host what year did she start . Guest you would think i remember these years, but she started in the 1990s as well, but i dont remember the exact year. Host the article in Science Magazine came out when . Guest i think 97. Host she had done it before or after . Guest she knew she did not know about johan. She knew jeffrey was onto something while she was doing her story. Host there some kind of committee or something that doctor powell and berger served on. Guest because she was trying to get money from the National Institute of health and they had a big meeting. She found what she thought was the body of seven minors on a tiny Remote Island near the arctic circle. Host how did she find them . Guest she had it was sort of coincidence. She learned it was an area of permafrost and she started to investigate to see if there may be bodies and she found these seven minors that journeyed off from norway to work in the winter in mind on this Little Island and they got sick with the flu on the boat on the way over and died almost as soon as they arrived and that they were buried in marked grades and she learned and got permission to d8 from the norwegian government to dig and try to get the minors bodies so she had to raise money and she was raising money. Host this mean wise. [inaudible] guest she put together an International Team and she was looking for money in one of her team members was unamerican virologist so he was sort of like the lead person asking for money. Host how much money did she need . Guest i dont know. She got several million dollars. She got like a quarter million from them. She got money from the british she got a bunch of money. Host and no one jeffrey had already discovered. Guest it would not hurt to have more samples. Theres nothing wrong with getting more, but she did not know about johan when she was doing this and taubenberger tried to tell her, he said, that they had three samples and for she said his sample from the warehouse didnt count because they were in for aldehyde in something may have happened to the virus are you need frozen samples. He tried to say they had a frozen sample and she doesnt think she quite understood what he was telling her. She wanted to go ahead anyway and she did. Host when little ingredient and not sure of the timing, johan opened guest im sorry, he did dig into the grave again and get a sample. He divided it into four pieces and put it in preservative consented to jeffrey. Everything is sort of on a lowtech scale so he decided it was a precious sample of lung tissue and he didnt want to trust the mail. Host this is a picture of him here just a few years ago where he went back. Guest thats right. Host fiftyone and then went back there because of the Science Magazine article. Guest back at the grave site again getting another long sample and sent it back to holton and they divided into four pieces, one set ups, one Federal Express and i think the other one express and he actually used the mail. Sent it in four different ways and all got to taubenberger and he found the fire viral genes and started working on them. Meanwhile Kirsty Duncan with her multimillion dollar huge exposition went off to this island off the coast of norway with the media intel and film crews. Host how much, did i read 10 cameras there . Guest like 10 camera crews and documentaries being made and it was a very big media extravaganza. Host anyone at all and i probably shouldnt use the word im a suspicious of what she was doing with all the Media Attention and money involved . Guest there was a lot of controversy all along. People were scientists get suspicious when theres a lot of media involvement. I am part of the media so i hate to say this but they do get suspicious when something seems to be blown up like that and all the talk about safety, safety, safety started to seem like hype to a lot of people so there was a lot of animosity and a lot of people angry with her and Kirsty Duncan is a very passionate emotional person. She dresses in a way that doesnt look like a scientists wearing high heels and spandex and stuff which i think also i hate to say it also sort of made people think she wasnt serious i think she was serious about trying to find this virus and was genuinely moved by the story and i think she really hoped she would be able to find the virus. Host jeffrey kellenberger was on that committee and meantime johan goes to alaska, finds the body, gets a sample, since it back. Guest he had that sample when he was on the committee with her, but the problem was he had saved we have another sample, we have another sample, but he had told the eskimos that they would be the ones to determine when he made that announcement. He said he wasnt going to spring the media and world on them and that they could decide how to release this information and so he was waiting for them to give him the goahead to say, we went up there, we got a sample and there was a mass grave. Host did he pay for this by himself . Guest yes, costing about 2000. Host ended it very quickly. Guest immediately, next week with his pick acts sleeping on the floor of the oneroom schoolhouse on an air mattress waiting to dig in the grades and got the permission of the eskimos. In 1951 he did it all by himself in his time he had some teenagers to help him dig which helped a lot. Host go back to norway. Guest right. They had everything. Host did you go to that spot . Guest i was actually on vacation when that happened. Host what year . Guest ninetyeight. One of my colleagues was there. Host writing for the New York Times . Guest everyone was did they could not get near the great because what if there was the virus. They were off in the distance and they started to dig into this gravesite and every day she would issue a press release and what happened was it turned out the ground was not frozen. They had done elaborate radar work ahead of time and said the ground is frozen, permafrost and we see the bodies and it will be fine and when they started to dig they found out the minors were buried above the permafrost and that it wasnt frozen, so she said he issued a press release and said she had soft tissue and people who were there told me that actually what she basically had was skeleton and that they took bone tissue and also some tissue from grain, but no long lung tissue. Host had to have lung tissue . Guest thats where the virus grows and its unheard of for the virus to grow in the brain, but there is one thing about the virus, some people thought that maybe the 1918 flu virus had sparked an epidemic of parkinsons disease, degenerative brain disease where brain cells die and so then they said how would you know and there was a parkinsons disease epidemic after 1918. People with parkinsons disease were people that suppose we got it after 1918, but still if everyone is getting the flu and everyone gets parkinsons disease, why is there causeandeffect . One piece of information was interesting and samoa there was a group of islands where they said we dont want the flu so no ships can dock here and they escaped the flu and another group of islands where the ships docked and they got the flu. The people that didnt get the flu did not get parkinsons and the island where they did get the flu they did have the epidemic, but no one has ever heard of the flu virus in the brain work the proteins are not found in the brain, so as far as anyone has ever been able to show, the flu virus doesnt live outside the lung. She did not get lung tissue then she should not be able to get a flu virus period. Host where their documentaries made . Guest ya. Host and they could not show that actual guest novak did a huge deal, but it turned out to be because it didnt work so well it turned out to also include a lot of the kellenberger stuff. They then made it into a documentary. They were there in the very beginning with Kirsty Duncan when she started to pull her together and say lets discuss the possibility of going to norway she had cameras rolling, but when it did not work so well the documentary became a documentary about the race with kellenberger and holton versus keirsey duncan with an International Team of experts and millions of dollars in the whole world watching host did you reach any conclusions about the way money was generated for this . Guest well, it was very interesting to me that the most exciting work on the flu was being done by the outsiders who were doing it in a very quiet lowkey way and it was really interesting to me that you didnt need these elaborate expensive apparatus to dig into a gravesite and ask if you could get frozen tissue. Host i have to ask another personal thing because you bring up john oxford and his marriage. Was the story and who is he . Guest john oxford is a british by rolla just and he was a member of Kirsty Duncans team and he began to exchange a lot of facts with keirsey duncan that was sort of disturbing his daughter because they sounded her fax to him and phone calls to him sounded so personal and so emotional and also according to john oxfords adult daughter, esther oxford, john oxfords wife was getting concerned. When Kirsty Duncans marriage broke up the first person she called was john oxford for john oxford by that time had gotten her grants from the british and paved the way for a lot of the work. He had a falling out with her. I think he is still a member of the team, but he no longer whatever their relationship is and as far as i know im no reason to believe its anything other than just letters and faxes and telephone calls. I dont believe its anything else, but its not what it used to be. There is sort of a chill in their relationship. Host before i ask about the center for Disease Control, what is your conclusion up to now about whats gone on with all of this . Do we know was all this worth it . Guest yes, i think so. Every time i speak to scientists about the 1918 flu, i say will we see another flu like this and they say yes we just dont know when because theres no way to predict whats going to happen and how the flu virus will mutate. I think its important to understand how a flu virus can turn into such a killer and if they cant find them by looking at all the genes of the virus at the very least they will be able to do experiments to say maybe it will take a hundred chances, but like maybe there is no one change. Maybe theres hundreds, but they can say what can you do to protect yourself and how do you stop the virus. Host what is different in the year 2000, then in 1918 if this kind of pandemic were to start . Guest two big differences, one is vaccine. In 1918 there were no vaccines. The big fear everyone has is if they see a virus like this coming and they have the six months notice which they expect to have to make a vaccine, people will think scientists are just crying wolf and they wont get vaccinated. Host wont have a sixmonth notice for everyone . Guest they hope to well, no as they may not. Host starts somewhere. Guest not everyone will get it, but if they can get vaccine going as fast as they can, you could protect most of the world from the virus and stop the pandemic from starting if people believe the scientists that they have, vaccine peer to the second big difference is antibiotics. A lot of people that died in 1918, many died because of the flu itself, but others got very ill from the flu and while they were sick bacteria came into their lungs and they died a bacterial infection and people still die a bacterial infection today when they get the flu, but we have antibiotics now that we didnt have been and that will make a huge difference in the death toll. Host nancy cox, who is she . Guest she has the Biology Research in atlanta. Host what is that . Guest the National Center where they look at, like the disease detector. Host how big of a places it . Guest like the National Institute of health here, up a campus with lots of big buildings and the federal Government Funds it. Host a lot of money . Guest i dont know, but i dont think its enough. Host you think it should be more . Guest yes. Host she got a call on this hong kong thing in 1987 . Guest yes. Host when do you start to panic . Guest she did as soon as she heard there was a bird flu killing kids and she was really scared she got a call while on vacation in wyoming, and she was tossing and turning. She was really worried. Host you say in the book she was awake many nights worrying. Guest she was. Host what is the worry . Guest they worry you have to get at this thing past and you have to find out what is it, how is it spreading . How easily as it spreading . Where is this virus . Is it only in hong kong, is it elsewhere . What should we do . Should you ask for vaccines to be made . Juju asked for another 1976 type thing to happen . Host is the cdc are defense . Guest yes, they look at aids, ebola, everything we worry about. Host back to the difference between the 1918 flu in the flu we have this year. What happened to the body . Guest well, people very quickly almost overnight would die because their lungs would fill with fluid. You would have a young person who would start to feel sick and within hours or a day they would be gasping for breath and their skin would turn dark because their blood wasnt getting enough oxygen. One person described it as mahogany spots on their cheekbones and then the dark color chart started to spread. You dont see that today the twoday youth appeal very ill and some people are dying, but no one is sort of instant death. Host are you surprised about what you have got in this book is to what you started with . Guest yes, that was part of the reason i really enjoyed working on this book because the more i worked on it, it was like the story just kept Getting Better and better and growing. Scientists and historians were extraordinarily generous with me, i mean, people were amazing. kilbourne, one of the people i reference in the book a lot was a flu expert was there in 1976 and i was calling him constantly to get records from 1976. He would take them down from the attic and finally said im going to put all my files in my living room until you finish your book, that people were willing to go through their old files and give me documents, how they felt, what they said, why. They were so generous that i was stunned looking for Old Newspaper articles, old photographs, all documents, try to do anything he could to help me reconstruct the story and go beyond his memory of what happened. Host we are out of time. Theres a lot more in this. Here in it or this is, it book called flu by gina kolata flu the story of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 and the search for the virus that caused it. Thank you very much. Guest thank you. 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