At one point, pigs were running loose through the villages, sometimes abandoned villages. Like a nightmare scenario but it really happened, like something out of early Cormac Mccarthy or the book of exodus, infectious pigs running wild to the countryside, coughing. One fellow called at the 1mile barking cough because you could hear the sick pigs coming in due new york pig farm would be next. Real story. Nissan encephalitis is this disease in humans. This is what the disease scientists do, they go out and try to solve the ecology and evolutionary biology of these new diseases. Where does the virus live, what is the reservoir host, how do humans come in contact with the virus, what are they doing . And ecological disruption that causes the spillover. It gets into sometimes and eating intermediate animal, pigs, in australia a virus falls out of back and get into horses. Pigs or horses are referred to as the amplifier host, the virus reproduces abundantly in them. They showed lots of virus and then it gets into people. In australia the virus is called hendrick after a suburb of brisbane which is a racing suburb. 1994, horses suddenly started to die. Why are they dying . Did they get poisonous feed . A veterinarian, horse trainer and stable hands tried to save the horses, the stable foreman got sick and went home thinking he had a bad flu. The trainer got sick, went into the hospital. The veterinarian never got sick, the trainer died. They isolated the virus from his organs and from the horses and found a new virus they named hendrick after the suburb. They did the disease detection. Where did it come from . A fellow who was chief detective on this case doing his phd in ecology, sample all sorts of animals, kangaroos, wombats, rats, mice and insects and things, he didnt find the virus. Finally he sampled fruit bats and found the virus that matched what had killed the horses in the trainer and they gave it its name. Another of these cases, hasnt killed many people and doesnt pass from human to human but is a knock on the door, a reminder to us where these things come from, how they emerge, why they spillover. The fact they are not all independent cases but are part of a pattern in the pattern reflects things we humans are doing on the planet and they get into humans and in some cases they cause a local outbreak which is easily controlled or comes to a end, and in other cases cause widespread suffering and death. Hiv being a case in point. I might stop there if people have questions. There are a lot of other points i can touch on but let me hear from you and see what you would like to hear about my name is rick. First a comment. I have a toasty warm memory of swimming at bozeman hot springs. That you have been their too. A great place. The other is a question about viruses. I imagine it is a small number but does anyone know what percentage of viruses are pathogenic . Nobody knows how many viruses there are. We hear talk about it wilson or other people trying to estimate how many living species there are, nobody knows how many species of vertebrate and invertebrate animals and plants and fungi there are with any precision to make estimates ranging from 8 million to 30 million to 100 million species but when you add the viruses and bacteria nobody knows. A small percentage. The small percentages that are pathogenic to humans may be a small percentage but the ones that are the exceptions are consequential. Thanks for your question. I enjoyed your book song of the dodo very much. When i was a student in a South Pacific island. I had a question about the study of the genealogy of these diseases and i was curious. Using the human genome from the deep past where there is evidence of stuff that killed a lot of people may be caused a bottleneck in the human population but is now totally harmless because all the survivors of reproduced down the generations and that is all that is left. Looking back in time for old pandemics and to trace the disease that way. Havent seen much on that. One of the things that is very interesting to me is tracing in the human genome something they call endogenous retroviruses. Hiv is a particular kind of are in a virus. They inserted themselves permanently into the human genome and we dont know exactly, in some cases they have functions or what used to be called junk dna but there are records in the human genome of past infections and they can be recognized as belonging to this virus family or that virus family so that is one thing that is there. In terms of the darwinian relationship between the infections of the deep past in the human genome as it has survived, very interesting. I cant point to any particular work on this. It has probably been done. s would have to be speculative to a certain degree. I really cant tell you much more than that. I have a question. So far we have heard you speak about different diseases that cause death. Usually in the examples you gave, dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands but the reactions seem like the local government was overreacting when trying to solve the problem. Just recently for example in texas there was a west nile virus detected and they started spraying the swampy areas with airplanes. My question, are we doing more harm when trying to solve these issues where hundreds are dying, there are other diseases that kill millions, these are such exotic diseases, we get into shock, the reaction seems to be harming the population. I hear you asking two questions. Are we doing something that cause more harm than good . Are we taking these things out of proportion to the damage they do. Let me answer the second one first. I ask the same of a fellow who studies the virus in bangladesh, it has a different story in bangladesh because bangladesh is a Muslim Country and there are not big pork farms, doesnt pass through pigs as amplifiers in bangladesh. It is transmitted into broad date palms that people drink, because of the way it is tapped, drink from the pots and leave their waste in the parts and people drink and get the virus so i talked to this fellow who is seconded from the cdc. There are hundreds of thousands of children in bangladesh dying of bacterial diarrhea, bacterial pneumonia in bangladesh, he was placed devon in the colorado hospital, these have been murderous in bangladesh for centuries. I asked him why bother with need for which killed a few dozen people each year when you have all these other diseases and he told me this is such a nasty disease with such potential that we cant ignore it simply because it is now small. It could be large. It is important to take these other diseases, more oldfashioned gardenvariety diseases like cholera, it is very important to take them seriously and keep this in perspective but it is also very important to be vigilant about new emerging diseases because after all, in 1981 we had a disease emerge called aids. The influenzas emerge a new each year and influenzas are capable of killing millions of people. That is the response i have heard from experts about the small boutique diseases to be taken very seriously, you never know when one of those will be the next big one. In terms of the things we do to try to stop, contain, or prevent these spillovers, in some cases we probably do more harm than good. Spraying for insects depending on what they are spraying with would be an immediate candidate for that if you want to think about it. We have done so much, so much futile damage trying to spray insects out of existence and it just doesnt work but there are cases when governments have taken vigorous action and it has been very important and beneficial. When stars emerged in Southern China, hong kong, very nasty virus passed by the respiratory route, killed 10 of people that it infected, from hong kong to toronto, beijing, hanoi, and singapore, affected a total of 8000 people, killed 900, better than 10 and it was stopped. I heard somebody say why does he take sars so seriously, it burned out . It did not burn out, it was stopped by scientific work in the field and very firm Public Health measures, containment of cases, isolation of cases, getting the right equipment, the right personal protection to the healthcare workers so that it didnt go further and one of the things i always wonder about when i think about sars, if that disease had emerged from a different place in Southern China and gone to different cities than toronto, hanoi, beijing, and singapore might the history have been different . Those are command and control cities with a lot of strong government, a lot of good Public Health, affluent facilities. If that disease emerged in the province of the democratic republic of the congo, i love the congo but had a lot of disadvantages would have been probably consequential if Something Like sars had come out of there. You have spoken about the wildlife aspect. Comment about the role of the livestock industry in terms of control and prevention of these diseases but also potential spread . Factory farming, huge operations like pig farms in malaysia are part of what makes this more urgent and dangerous, part of what makes us, the human population and our extensions a forest of dried tinder waiting for a spark. I mentioned the case in malaysia, the fact that pigs were kept in outdoor compounds and were arranged in a particular way with fruit trees was part of what resulted in that spillover. Huge aggregations of wildlife represent populations in which a bug can even all. The more abundantly a virus replicates the more likely it is to new tape. If it is an rna virus as opposed to double helix dna viruses mutation rate will be particularly high, generate a lot of change, a lot of genetic variability as it replicates itself. That is darwinian Natural Selection so are in a viruses evolve more quickly than other pathogens and if you let them build up huge populations so that there are many hosts that are infected and each host contains many many virus particles then you provide abundant opportunity for evolution to function in for some particular strain to come out that is really transmissible among humans and that represent a danger. Mass production of livestock is only one aspect. There are other aspects that i am less aware of, part of what makes us particularly jeopardized by the situation as it is. In your experience following scientists to areas where there is a high rate of crossover or spillover, have you noticed efforts to educate the local human population on how to modify their lifestyle so as better to avoid crossover and spillover . There are efforts. In bangladesh they are trying to educate people not to drink rod date palm sap that potentially contains neta virus. If you cook the stuff you can kill the virus with people like to drink it rock, sort of a seasonal treat so there are things like that around the world. In Southern China they crackdown on the big wet markets at least above ground. They have gone underground. There is a black market but the big wet markets were all kinds of wildlife are sold live for food, there is a fashion in Southern China, they call it wild flavor. It is a vote for eating wildlife, not because people need protein for subsistence but because they have some money and this is considered robust and tasty food. One other thing on that in terms of education of local people i mention the original spillover of the pandemic strain of hiv occurred in southeastern cameroon. I went there to retrace the root it probably took out of southeastern cameroon down a river system to the main stem congo and eventually to the cities of leopoldphil, that is where it really started to have a higher rate of transition, sexual more as were different, population more concentrated, there are other factors i described. It began to crackle and it went to haiti and to the world. I went to southeastern cameroon to see what i can learn about human relations with chimpanzees there now, people still killing and eating chimpanzees and exposing themselves to other spillovers of the simian virus that became hiv and it is true they are. I heard from a confidential source about a tribal initiation practice which involves rituals that include the eating of chimpanzee arms so people are still exposing themselves to the viruses chimpanzees carry. In one office. In office of the Wildlife Department in the southeastern corner of cameroon i saw an aids awareness poster. In french, french is a colonial language most people still speak. Trying to educate people on the danger of aids, the red diary and what the poster said was not practice safe sex, use condoms, dont exchange needles. What they say is dont eat the apes. Dont eat the chimps, dont eat the gorillas. Thank you for being here. I am doctor sam hancock. With the Transportation Systems supply chain within 24 hours viruses can be around the globe. One of the most underfunded Public Programs is Public Health and this is something massive amount of money has been drawn out of and put in specialty health. Are there any best practices you have seen in various countries you have traveled to about how to build up the Public Health system so they can more easily identify these pathogens and viruses and respond to it or is it always reactive . Thank you for your question. There is some very interesting initiatives of vigilance going on and you may have heard about them. One that comes to mind is the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative alone named nathan will, a young disease scientist based in stanford, he worked in cameroon for years doing fieldwork on transmission of viruses by way of bushmeat from African Wildlife into hunters and the bushmeat hunters and their families. Nathan worked on this long time. Has a big grant from google and has expanded this operation into a Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. Recently called the global viral and just one sample of the kind of work that is being done, he and his people send little tips out with the people, usually men who do the bushmeat hunting from central africa, little kids that involve filter papers, the kind used for medical purposes, not that different from what you filter your coffee with. Ziploc bags, they pay the hunters to collect samples for them. A. Of blood on filter paper then placed in a ziploc bag can be used as a sample in the laboratory, a week or two later you can extract enough dna or rna to identify a virus. That is what they do and it is a big advance over what used to have to be done. You would have to capture an animal, take a blood sample from it and put the sample on liquid nitrogen address it back to the us, liquid nitrogen, you would freeze it. The dots of butter at room temperature, they dont have to be kept cool. This can be done, they use Pcr Technology and a lot of other fancy laboratory things to extract not live virus. You cant extract live virus from a sample like that but you can extract dna and rna to identify what was there. That is what nathan wolf and his people are doing. The idea being to spot the next big one at a very early phase before decades past, before we realized hiv was in the human population, try to catch the next big one earlier than that. How do these deadly animal viruses tends to eat all . Do you think they will continue to weave all at the rate they have done in recent experience of monitoring and trying to control them . Two things can happen if you are a virus. Picture yourself a virus living in a monkey in central africa, humans are coming in, tearing down your habitat, tearing down the monkeys habitat, killing the monkey for food, building villages, settlements so the horizons, prospect of that particular virus are shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. When the monkey reaches the break of extension it could go extinct along with the monkey or make a leap to another host and viruses dont have purposes, i dont want it to sound tedious logical, they dont make choices. Ablution is not ideological anyway. Things just happen and they have consequences. If a monkey is killed and there is no spillover the virus goes extinct but if the virus gets into a human, by chance, by opportunity and finds itself able to replicate and adapt to the human by mutating and undergoing Natural Selection to be better adapted to the human both to replicate in the human and be transmitted to the next human than that virus has won the sweepstakes, it has passed from species of host with a shrinking prospect to an species of host that is the most abundant species of large vertebrate animal that has ever existed on this planet, us. Thousands or even millions of these viruses that have the potential to then evil into and into a dangerous killing virus . Transmitted the safest answer is yes presumably. We are just scratching into that area. Some of the scientists i talked to say we dont know how many species there are in the tropical forests. We know there are millions. We can assume each has at least one unique virus. We ran out of questions and ran out of time. [applause] thank you very much, thank you for your questions. You are watching a special edition of booktv airing now during the week, members of Congress Working in the district because of the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight a look at crime. Joshua hammer told the story of blackmarket animal smuggling operation and reports unrelated international and Domestic Trade regulations. University of texas journalism professor kate dawson looks at the life of edward heinrich, americas first forensic scientist. Jack goldsmith, former assistant attorney general in the george w. Bush administration recalls the life of his stepfather who was an associate of jimmy hoffa. Join booktv now and over the weekend on cspan2. Let me tell you about our other this evening, David Randall is an author at reuters, he covers everything from cannabis to knock knock jokes. Is two previous books are the New York Times best of the dreamland, the science of sleep and the king and queen of malibu which is currently on the television series, he was on