Transcripts For CSPAN2 Books About Pandemics 20240713

Finally sampled fruit bats and found the viruses that killed the animals and they called it hendren a virus. It hasnt killed many people, doesnt pass from human to human but it is a knock on the door. A reminder to us of where these things come from, how they emerge, why they spillover some of the fact that they are not called independent cases that 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 because a local outbreak which is easily controlled or comes to a end on its own and in other cases they cause widespread suffering and death. Is the coronavirus continues to affect the country we are taking a look at author programs about pandemics we have had in our archives. Up next john barry discusses his book the great influenza which discusses the 1918 influenza outbreak. Heres a portion of his book from 2004. Now you have the enemy, the enemy of course is a virus. All influenza viruses are bird viruses. Every one of them. Periodically and through history it has happened 3 to 5 times in a century, periodically and influenza virus will jump species from birds to people and it can do this because it is one of the fastest mutating of any virus in existence. Biologist referred to it and a few other viruses as a mutant swarm because they dont theres no single even a viral some cycle, there is no single virus. Like a swarm of hornets, they are all moving around an average kind of virus and one in influenza virus infects a cell, in about 6 hours that single cell ends up a meeting, or it explodes in between 100,000 and 1 million new virus particles escape from that cell and every one of them is different. Most of them are so different that they are defective, they cant infects another cell. Only one of those viruses but that is still between 1000, and 10,000 viruses from one cell are able to infect a new cell but that mutation rate allows it to jump species. In 1918, was not by any stretch the only lethal pandemic in history of influenza but they are not all lethal. We went through pandemics in 1957 and in 1968, while they killed considerably more people, the normal death toll for influenza is 36,000 people a year die of influenza. 57, 68, double in 68, 57, three or four times the normal amount of people but compared to 1918, it was like a severe epidemic season. Now, the story really begins when the virus jumps from birds to people. Nobody knows exactly for certain where that happens. Most pandemics have begun in asia but there was some overlooked epidemiological evidence that i managed to trip over that strongly suggests that this virus actually jumped species in kansas and that it moved from rural kansas, Haskell County in the Southwest Corner of the state come moved from rural kansas to what is now fort riley and fort riley had been 56,000 troops very closely packed in barracks, they were being trained to kill and as it turned out would be far more effective at killing than anyone could imagine. As i said, this was a war waged by nature against man. Is hit with full force. It took about six months for the virus once it jumped species, it wasnt immediately efficient at infecting man. It had to adapt and that took a while before it really became at home in humans, really became efficient at invading humans but about 6 months after it jumped it became very lethal and all over the world simultaneously it exploded in this lethal form. One of the first places hit by this severe form, the second wave, was during the spring, and outbreak, in camp devens, it is close now, just outside boston and i will read a letter from a physician to another physician describing what was going on. These eventss start with what appears to be an oily ordinary attack of influenza. But it rapidly develops the most vicious type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have mahogany spots over the cheekbones, two hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis, when you start turning blue because of lack of oxygen. You see the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading over the face until it is hard to distinguish the colored men from the white. It is only a matter that is how dark they were turning, spread rumors of black death they worst turning so dark you couldnt distinguish black from white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes. It is horrible. One could stand to see one, 2 or 20 men die but to see these devils dropping like flies, averaging 100 deaths a day, pneumonia means and about all cases death. We have lost an outrageous number of nurses and doctors, it takes special trains to carry away the dead. There were no coffins and the bodies piled up something fierce. Goodbye, old pal, god be with you until we meet again. As this virus spread across the world and throughout the United States, it put extreme pressures on the political system and in fact it is a very good case study that is quite relevant, too relevant to fears about bioterrorism not to mention the possibility of another influenza outbreak and it demonstrated the political system then was not prepared to handle it. Politicians have the wrong priorities. They were so focused on the war and the irony, the unfortunate irony is this hit when we were literally only for 5 weeks away from the end of the war. Virtually every enemy country we were fighting except germany was going to stop. Germany have already started to send out feelers for peace but wilson and the entire administration were so focused they would not do anything for Public Health that might in any way jeopardize the 100 persons war effort, what wilson called ruthless brutality he wanted to infuse the american spirit with and as a result not only the federal officials but Public Health officials and mayors and governors all over the United States essentially lied. First they told people that this was only ordinary influenza. Then they told people that fear kills more people than the disease. In philadelphia Planning Issues liberty loan rally, hundreds of thousands of people were about to be in the streets, this was early in the outbreaks of the general public wasnt aware that there was a problem. Privately, one doctor was warning the Public Health commissioner that this rally would create a readymade inflammable mask. He was trying to get newspapers to prince warnings, they all refuse, the Public Health commissioner refused to pay attention. There were many other physicians saying the same thing. They held this rally again, hundreds of thousands of people, 72 hours later in philadelphia influenza absolutely exploded. To the point that not only did they run out of coffins which happened in almost every city in the United States but they actually used steam shovel to dig mass graves where they simply rolled bodies wrapped in sheets in. A priest literally drove for strong carriages down the street calling upon people to bring out their dead. Very reminiscent of the black death. The same thing was happening all over the country. Very rapidly society began to disintegrate and the reason was people very soon were getting a great disconnect, they could see their spouse was dying in 24 hours sometimes and the bodies lying there, you cant get the body out, nobody will take the body out. Down the street somebody else is dying in a few hours and in a few days, there are emergency hospitals being formed all over the place and at the same time the Public Health authorities in the mayors, the only thing you read in the newspaper is fear kills more than the disease, dont worry, you can keep yourself safe so this ridiculous reassurance they were getting was so conflicted with what they were seeing about them it destroyed their trust in all authority and ultimately society is built on trust and without it as i said it began to disintegrate. Reporter our look at pandemics continues with investigative journalist sonia shah who in 2016 talked about the spread of Infectious Diseases in the past and argued for the need to look at the social and political root causes for them. The first pandemic of color started in 1817 and started to spread into russia into industrialized cities of europe and this is exactly what is happening today with our new pathogens. We are invading Wildlife Habitats or disrupting Wildlife Habitats. Either way we are allowing animals and people to come into novel intimate kinds of contact and when that happens their microbes can jump into our bodies and become pathogenic. From bats we got ebola and a number of other viruses, size as well, candles are probably giving Us Middle East respiratory syndrome. From monkeys we most likely got the cup. From other nonhuman primates we got malaria, hiv, from birds we got influenza. This is how they are emerging as we are allowing them to amplify in our cities and crowds. That started in the Nineteenth Century, people were flocking out of the farms to come for you factory jobs in the city and there wasnt a lot of room to sprawl back then. They didnt have metros to take you to outlying areas so everyone had to live near the possibility of work so places like new york city in the Nineteenth Century had 77,000 people, this meant they were breathing on each other more, touching each other more, their waste was contaminating, their food and water, there is no sewage system in 19thcentury industrialized cities. In new york they had outhouses, there is a rule you had to empty any of that stuff out. People did what they did in the countryside, just let it sit and try to decompose but with 77,000 people per square kilometer that wouldnt happen before the waste ran into the streets, overflowed peoples wealth, contaminated groundwater. Soon as a pathogen like cholera and his an environment like that word spread through contaminated waste it just explodes so that process started in the Nineteenth Century, only reaching it speak now. Just a few years ago humankind lived in cities, that the 7 a few years ago. The majority of us will live in cities by 2030 but they are not going to be cities Like Washington dc and san francisco. They will be more like freetown and monrovia and mumbai. Ad hoc, lots of slums, poor infrastructure, chaotic but 2 billion people will live in slums, that is the prediction and so new pathogens taking advantage of this right now, this massive urban expansion in poor parts of the world in particular. Ebola is a good example of that. We have had Ebola Outbreak since the 1970s but ebola never had infected a place of more than 100,000 inhabitants before 2013. Only in 2013 when it came up in guinea, it had infected three Capital Cities with a combined population of 3 million. That is really important reason it was a huge conflagration. Arguably is ecovirus is also taking advantage of urbanization. We had seek a virus since the 1940s and even before but mostly in equatorial forest in asia and africa and it was carried by a forest mosquito and that forest mosquito mostly bit animals. It didnt bite people that much so people didnt get a lot of zika virus but now zika virus is being carried by a mosquito that specializes in living in human habitations. It can actually breed in a drop of water in a bottle. All our plastic garbage we leave around in our urban areas are perfect environment for this mosquito to breed in and they only bite humans. As soon as zika virus got into that it started to explode. It has expanded rapidly as urban areas especially in the tropics of expanded. And then we carry these things around, we disseminate them. That started in the Nineteenth Century in earnest with the steam engine where we started taking steamships across the atlantic, in the rivers and connected all those waterways by using steam engines to build canals so 1825 the ear he canal had opened just in time for colorado to come from london and paris into canada into the waterways down to new york city and into the entire interior of north america and that happened again and again and again. We do much better today with our Flight Network. We have not just a few Capital Cities with airports but hundreds of airports, tens of thousands of connections between our airports and in fact, this is a map i have in the book, you can make a map of the cities of the world connected by direct flights. If you run a simulated flu pandemic on a map like that it looks like a wave, a pebble dropped into a sea expanding outwards. You can predict where and when an epidemic will strike simply by measuring the number of direct flights between infected and noninfected cities. That is how essential our Flight Network is on the way epidemic spread today. These are the ways i talk about in the book, how modern life increases the risk of these epidemic that is driving pathogens into human populations. The other part of the book is about what we do about it. We dont take these things lying down. We have differences, political defenses, medical defenses, all kinds of things we can do to fight back, to contain these pathogens. An interesting look at what happened in 1832 in new york, we are trying to dissect that outbreak in particular. In 1832 colorado came to canada, the governor sent one of his top doctors into upstate new york to do reconnaissance to see what was happening. Is cholera going to threaten new york . He collected the data that has been mapped and the map appears in the book. It shows a clear picture of clusters of cases all along the hudson river and the erie canal and even a time series, you can see it coming down, heading straight for new york city, very clear picture and nobody in new york wanted to quarantine the rivers or those canals. The canals turned new york city into a bathwater port, the premier port of the country, turns new york into the empire state, it is a huge part of the economy. Nobody wanted to close the waterway which would have been the obvious thing to do to protect the city so doctor back said it might look like cholera is coming down the waterways and looks contagions but it is caused by miasma which is, this is a 2000yearold medical theory that diseases like cholera and other contagions are spread too stinky air, bad smell and they decided to blame those bad smells on the poor and immigrants, especially irish in 1832. This wasnt just badmouth them in the press, there were massacres of irish workers during cholera epidemics in the Nineteenth Century. So i think i am having a senior moment. Of my god excuse me, im going to my notes. Where was i. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. The doctors, the doctors, yes, yes. This is actually, funny that that is where my mind went because this is my favorite part of the story. They didnt want to quarantine the waterways. In fact, there were companies at the time that were distributing cholera contaminated water and making money doing that. The slum in the middle of manhattan if anyone has seen gangs of new york, that is where the worst parts of the cholera epidemic affected that because it was crowded and filthy and that had been built on what was once a pond, the only source of fresh water on manhattan for a long time. The pond had been over the course of centuries filled with garbage and the slum had been built on top of that garbage filled landfill so the ground underneath the slum was really lowlying, unstable. Groundwater was easily contaminated under this slum. All their materials sinking into groundwater. The state of new york touted a company to deliver Drinking Water to the people of new york and that company, instead of having upstream sources of water, the river that was fresh and clean and they knew would taste her, they thought that would cost too much money so they had Something Like flint michigan, decided not to tap the good water, they decided instead to sink their well in the middle of that swamp and they distributed that water to one third of the people of new york and this is through repeated cholera epidemics. This is the good part, the person who maneuvered all this was aaron burr, Alexander Hamilton absent nemesis and murderer. On top of that the company that did this, the Manhattan Company, the reason they wanted to save this money was to start a bank which they did, the bank of the Manhattan Company and that bank still exists to this day. Do you know who it is . Jpmorgan chase, biggest bank in america. That is their early history. I tell that story in the book because i think we dont really look at the political and social drivers of contagions enough and i think it is an interesting turnaround from the past. We had a lot of malaria from the 1600s through the mid1900s and really got rid of it before we had solid Biomedical Solutions by changing our land use policy. We started building dams of course, we had engineers and scientists on the board of these dams to make sure we wouldnt extend the mosquito habitat. We changed housing practices, people started putting screens on windows and doors, we uplifted people out of poverty in rural areas to give them electricity, mechanization, we built it out. This is well before we had ddc or choroquine but then we started developing chemical course, penicillin, ddt and this created a whole new biomedical establishment that became very powerful and potent at curing disease very effectively. Gave over Public Health to the biomedical establishments. What happens now when we have outbreaks of contagious disease we dont look for the social and political roots. We wait for the epidemics to erupt, people get sick and we hope we can throw sufficient vaccine and drugs at it to make it go away. Im not too worried in some cases but what i say in this book is it is not sufficient for new diseases because when new pathogens come up we dont have the vaccines all made up can we dont have the drugs and yet these things can spread exponentially. Were talking about exponential growth of untreatable disease. One example of this, of not looking at the social and political roots is the dengue outbreak in florida in 2009. Dengue came out centered in key west but was in south florida generally. Hadnt been there in 70 years and it was immediately attacked as a biomedical problem attack the insect, attack the virus and thats what we did. But florida, the mosquitoes that carry dengue have been present in florida for a long time. Florida has been surrounded by countries where there is dengue around, that is not new. There hadnt really been any invasion of virus and mosquitoes that needed to be attacked with this chemical onslaught. What happened in 2008 we had the foreclosure crisis at the foreclosure crisis meant we had a lot of abandoned homes and in florida that means a lot of empty swimming pools and so when the rains came these empty swimming pools filled up with water and became giant mosquito hatcheries and no one was home to notice orbit the mosquito inspectors in and a year later we have this unprecedented outbreak of mosquito borne dengue virus in florida. I dont know if addressing the housing crisis would have helped contain the dengue outbreak in florida because nobody tried that. What i do now, arguably, is the biomedical model failed. We are continuing to have dengue outbreaks in florida. It is considered a permanent part of the landscape a. What i want to say in this book, as great as our Biomedical Solutions are, if we can start to prevent pandemics, if we engage with the root causes of them which are more often political and social in which case it is not a question of waiting for the perfect cure, is a question of our own political will. You are watching booktv on cspan2 and we are looking at other programs about pandemics. In may of 2016, doctor ali con of the office of Public Preparedness and response talk about why new diseases keep emerging. We play a role in keeping them from become epidemics and pandemics. A good example would be the recent outbreak of ebola in west africa. It wasnt new. Weve known about ebola since 1976, weve known about the science of ebola since 1976 and i had the opportunity to support that science in the 1990s when i did and Ebola Outbreak. You get infected with ebola usually with a bat and if you are out in the bush you die, 95 of people die. Maybe a Family Member or two will die with you. You are in the middle of the bush, you are done. Say you change that dynamic and decide to seek health care in a hospital. Unfortunately arsenal the of infection control. When you are infected with ebola you have a virus factory. You get infected and if your immune system doesnt kick in your increasing the amount of virus you are producing every minute until you die. When do you have the most hostile virus in your body . When you die. If you go to the hospital because youre sick and dont have more than when you die. I can give you a 10 with lots of big numbers around, hundreds of millions in a milliliter of your blood. You are sick, dying in the hospital and somebody doesnt wash their hands as they go from patient to patient, then youre spreading he bought from patient to patient and hospitals have always served, weve known this for many years as a reservoir for how they spread within their community. Somebody sick at home and you as a Family Member taking care of them you are at risk, we know that. They die and then you decide to wash the body, kiss the body, hug the body, invite all the, one of the practices during this Ebola Outbreak is they would wash the body and then use the water to allow little kids and other people to wash their hands, to take on the attributes of the same dead person who had just died. This is not a good idea. Lets admit that. That is the science, we know the science but the science isnt the issue. When this outbreak occurred, the 20 fourth, 20 fifth outbreak since 1976 many people have thought this will be just like we have seen happening in east africa. You go to see the time, they shut them down with a couple days, they have a system in place to identify the case, teens rush in, they dont need International Teams anymore, the locals know what to do, rush in, test everybody, and they express these outbreaks very quickly answered outbreak occurred in west africa which never occurred before, nobody had seen the disease before and it quickly spread to urban areas, large metropolitan urban areas with slums and the thinking was more of the same, this Ebola Outbreak will go away. What happened . That is not what happened. 11,000 deaths, every one was a needless death and inadequate global response. Inadequate local response obviously but inadequate global response. So politics in our Public Health systems play the biggest role in whether or not this goes from a handful of cases or small outbreaks to whether or not we had was essentially an epidemic across west africa with feeding of cases across the world including what happened in the United States. One of the reasons we had that case in the United States is another social and political factor that plays into Infectious Diseases that we didnt have any 1800s. How many people, i wont nest but the answer is yes have read the work around the world in 80 days . How quaint . 80 days to get around the world. For 22 years i wore a Public Health uniform. On my Public Health uniform was an anchor. It looks very much like a navy uniform and the reason is we started about 200 years ago providing care to merchant marines and one of the chores of the Public Health service was to fly quarantine flags when the ship came to port and someone with yellow fever or smallpox, if it is going to take you 80 days to go from decorated point be by the time you shop in the port of new york city we knew if you had smallpox, we knew if you had yellow fever because incubation period, the time it takes to get infected, to manifest your system was always shorter than the time it takes to go from decorated point be. We turned that upside down so you could go to your mothers funeral in liberia, go to your mothers funeral, engage in the usual acts you would rather funeral home, distraught, your mother has died, youre kissing her, youre hugging her in the next day you get on a plane to amsterdam, to new york city. We have 18, 24 hours, 48 hours, incubation period of 47 days, 3 days after you show up in new york. Ive got a headache, ive got a fever, not feeling well right now, shop at a hospital. If it is a good hospital the number one diagnosis will be malaria one 23 and if it is not malaria and they miss this. It is easy to see how you get hospitalized for something, we see this happen in texas, the same scenario, infected two local nurses. I spent a lot of time in places across the world to let you know that our Healthcare System is not better than what you see in toronto where they had the size outbreak in singapore where they had their size outbreak or hong kong, i spent some time in seal who had an outbreak of mers. Excellent Healthcare System like ours but they are not ready for patients coming in with these viruses so travel has played a big role in how these diseases emerge currently. Let me now i have given you a sense of why you always hear about this but what we can try to do to make things better around social political aspects of protecting people, i did want to spend a couple minutes to talk about the carnegie council, ethics matters. And observation i have recognized my whole life. You think about hiv and who gets infected with hiv is often marginalized populations, as i started to write the book it dawned on me how almost every chapter you can pull out the marginalized population with increased risk, think about hunter viruses, it often occurs in the southwestern United States, the most likely people get infected with original break occurs was among native americans and some of you will remember when the outbreak occurred in the early 1990s a group of young navajo kids who had come to dc or capital tour and they were denied a tour of the capital. You happen to come from the southwest and the infected. Is nothing in anything we knew that says these kids were at risk and they werent. Often these diseases affect marginalized populations and helps increase against marginalized populations. I talked about hiv, talked a little bit about ebola and these marginalized populations in west africa and in todays day and age we are talking about zika. There are pregnant women in brazil, brazil is 1. 1 million cases is what they are calculating now of zika virus, 1500 women who have been infected. Severe illness of babies where they get small brains, underdevelopment of different abilities including hearing loss and what we have learned is zika is essentially a laserguided tool for neurons. It looks for neuron cells and kills your neuron cells and it is not just true in babies. When sonia shah was first described, 20 of people would get sick and if they get sick they get a fever, a little headache, some itching, some red i and they will get better. Very quickly it became clear this was a problem for pregnant women but now we know even for adults because of laserlike focus on neuronal cells, this is a neurologic illness that causes weakness and even in a healthy person zika virus can cause brain inflammation of the coverings around your brain. Even in what we think of as normal healthy adults who are not pregnant this virus is a problem. This virus shouldnt be a problem, okay . The virus is spread by his type of mosquito that is not new to us, the same mosquito that spreads yellow fever that causes 30,000 deaths a year, the same mosquito that spreads dengue. If we were having this conversation 5 years ago we would be talking about this large dengue outbreak that is occurring in south america, and think about 30,000 deaths a year, something around that, the same mosquito that causes a virus that was in the news to her 3 years ago, that want to seem to cause any deaths but because of the failures and facilitys to keep up with efforts to decrease mosquitoes and kill the mosquitoes, and not paying attention to people dying from yellow fever, people dying from dengue, all of us in all up in arms that we have a disease that seems to be infecting pregnant women. This lack of action over the last 40 or 50 years against a known threat that has put us in this current position at least if you happen to be in south america these days and i heard yesterday that katko is not just moved through the americas but is knocking on the door of africa to say hi. Im next, you are next and so think about what is going to happen as the virus sweeps through africa and the risk to pregnant women there in africa. Look at other programs about pandemics concludes with doctor jeremy brown, director of the office of Emergency Care research at the National Institutes of health. Recently appeared on the Morning Program washington journal to discuss his book influenza in the Current Issues we face with the coronavirus. What are the lessons from the 1918 pandemic . As we look at the terrible time, of which there seems to be more overlap now than we could ever imagine, there are some differences and some important similarities as well. We should focus on the differences between what is going on now and 1918 because 1918 did leave us with several lessons, the most important one is understanding what it was that was killing people in 1918, just to remind everybody people have not yet discovered viruses, that would happen over the next couple decades so there was this terrible disease that ended up killing between 50, and 100 Million People worldwide or 675,000 people in the us which in todays numbers would be about 3 Million Deaths and they did not know what it was that was killing them, the worst influenza comes from the latin influence, people thought of the stars and planets that were killing them because they were misaligned and so the most important lesson that came out of 1918 was the Scientific Communitys urgent need to figure out what caused so much destruction not came in very quickly and today we are in a very different place. With about 2 weeks of the first descriptions of coronavirus a chinese team had published the full genome of the coronavirus and published it in a major us journal so it was in english for everybody in the us and around the world to read. And important distance between those two outbreaks and what was the number one thrust of the Scientific Community back then and still is today. Based on what was published back in january are you surprised or not surprised where we are today in early april . I will be honest with you i am surprised. There are often reports of novel viruses that are described. It is not unusual to have cases of new influenza viruses that flare up. We have had several over the last few decades that have claimed the lives of perhaps a couple thousand people in china or hong kong or elsewhere in the far east and generally those who just gone away and we have watched them with curiosity a little bit of concern that i will be honest the rapidity with which this current pandemic spread certainly surprised me and surprised many others as well. From the book in 2018 you wrote the following, quote, just one century is all that separates us from a Global Health crisis that killed more people than any other illness in recorded history. What we learned in the interim is enough to scare and motivate us but not enough to stop another pandemic from happening because of its mystery and its ability to mutate and spread the flu is one of mankinds most dangerous foes. We are in the midst of this coronavirus pandemic and coronavirus is one of the winter viruses, it has a seasonality to generally just like the flu does. We have a flu season that begins in the fall and goes usually too early spring. Coronavirus as a family of viruses cause the common cold many people have had a coronavirus at some time in their lives because they had cold symptoms over the winter and that is very common and usually goes way. What is different about 1918 as it went away in the spring of 1918 having custom devastation became quickly back in the fall. We dont think it was a different virus, it reared up in the fall and caused tremendous devastation through the early winter of 1919. I think the question for everybody is will covid 19 act like a normal virus that doesnt like warm weather humid weather, will it tends to disappear as the warm weather of the spring creeps in . We hope so and hope it will continue to act like a winter virus and the question is what will happen in the fall . Will it disappear having caused its the structuralist come back with a vengeance like influenza did in the pandemic of 1918 and it remains to be seen. Host another flu virus in 1957 affected americans and elsewhere around the world, this is a documentary produced by k dka and the Westinghouse Broadcasting company in partnership with the American Medical Association and what happened in 1957. The man upon his shoulder with the responsibility for preparing the United States for the impending battle with asian influences doctor roy bernie, Surgeon General of the United States. Doctor bernie i imagine you and your staff have been gathering a tremendous amount material on asian flu. Seems to me that everybody i know has talked about influenza but i dont think anyone really knows what it is. It is one of the upper respiratory infections, Something Like a cold only caused by a flu virus and the difference between the asian influence in the influenza we have been having the past few years is this strain, this strain of virus began in hong kong and spread from hong kong to the rest of the world including the United States. Reporter every year influenza is a problem in our community. While we certainly all of a sudden concerned about it now . Thats a good question. We are concerned because in the other countries, the outbreaks weve had so far in this country, the attack rate has been 15 20 in this past in 4 to 6 weeks. In metropolitan pittsburgh approximately 1 Million People, if we had this you would have approximately 200,000 people who would become ill in a 4 to 6 week time in this of course would make a tremendous impact upon the economy of this particular area. Guest that is from 1957 which were originally doctor brown in 2019, most recent figure indicating 16,000 americans died from the standard influenza. Why does it remains such a mystery . Guest the challenge of influenza, i would frame it differently. It doesnt remain a mystery, it remains a challenge. The biggest challenge we have when we talk about influenza is finding a vaccine that we dont have to repeat every year. Your views will know that every year they get a flu vaccine. That is different from mumps, measles, rubella and diphtheria which after one or 2 doses your immune for the rest of your life. The challenge of flu is the virus is a clever shape shifter and while we can become immune to a certain strain of the virus it quickly changes its outer coat and this means new strains that infect us will not be recognized by our immune system so the challenge of the influenza vaccine is to find a vaccine that is a universal vaccine that will work against all strains of the flu, not just the ones in circulation that year and will not have to be given year after year after year. So those are the challenges of influenza. Not so much a mystery as a medical challenge and the way scientists approach this is to find that part of the flu virus that doesnt change between strain and direct our immune system against that unchanging piece of the virus. It sounds very easy to do but in fact it is very challenging. When it comes to covid19 we are building a vaccine from scratch, there will be different challenges but it certainly needs to be figured out whether or not we will need to get a vaccine that will be repeated year after year or if there will be different strains of covid19. All scientists are quickly trying to work out so they can produce some kind of vaccine as quickly as possible. Host our guest from london is the author of influenza, the 100 year hunt to cure the deadliest disease and history. Laura is on the phone from ohio, good morning. Caller my question and comment has to do with all of this but something i havent heard anybody ask yet on any of your shows. I would like to know. I woke up this morning to mike murdock the Inspirational Ministry asking for money again and i keep saying all these evangelical leaders that have millions of dollars, multiple homes, private planes, what are they doing . Are they giving any of their money like the sports franchises have done to go to foreign countries, to help get the ppe, to get ventilators and everything . If anything wouldnt that be the best way to show gods love, and back to the people that given that. Why is no one looking at that, no one is asking that. Ministers having their congregations endangering Peoples Health and stuff and no one is bringing this up, no one is directing i believe that alone is antichristian, antigod. Not really part of your area of expertise, you can comment if you want but about social distancing, did they understand that in 1918 . Guest they did. It was understood after quarantines have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, it was used in the great plague that struck in 1357. We get this idea of 14 days quarantine perhaps coming from the biblical idea of 40 days of lent, moses the on the mountain for 40 days, something magical and mysterious about that 40 day number. Social distancing and quarantine of 40 day or 30 day period has been known for many centuries. It was practiced during the foundations of this country back in the 1620s when the pilgrims were first coming over from england, there was a devastating smallpox pandemic that killed anywhere from perhaps 80 percent95 of Indigenous Peoples in this country and even back then there was a notion that we need to distance ourselves. We have early quarantine laws appearing in the colonies in the 1720s, requiring quarantine and separation so even though we had no idea what was killing us, no notion of viruses and bacteria back then there was certainly social distancing. We have known about this for a long time. In the 1918 flu epidemic it was widely practiced, so was wearing a facemask in public, by the way. We are today using something that has been around for many hundreds of years. Morgantown, west virginia, good morning. I thought that audio clip from 1980 was very interesting, the doctor that was speaking referenced pittsburgh, pennsylvania, 70 miles due north from where i am located in morgantown. What i would like to comment on his early in the show i heard some comments about people talking about what have we done until this point and calling it monday morning quarterbacking. At the moment we appear to have more than two times the number of cases of any other country in the world. It certainly appears with the modeling that we are going to have way more deaths than any other country in the world. They are talking about a potential second wave coming in the fall. I dont believe it is monday morning quarterback and to take a look at what has been done that should have been done differently because it certainly appears as if the situation, once the weather gets warm just isnt going to go away. As our president initially said that it would. It is very discouraging and i dont want to get political especially at a time like this, i dont think we should worry how the horse got in addition that how to get them out but then after that i think we have to take a look at what was done and the complete lack of preparedness that we have had that has been a direct contribution to all of this and will be a direct contribution to the vast number of deaths that we experience in this country. Host we will get a response. Guest that is a very important aspect, figuring out what we could have done better once this is all behind us but as he points out we have a job to do which is to limit the infection, save the people who can be saved to make sure each of us is doing our part to prevent the spread but you are quite right that when this is all done we have to ask some important questions how we locate our resources for scientific research, how we allocate our resources to preparedness and not surprising that pandemic preparedness is often put to the side as more pressing, important ways we have to spend our money come up but when these events strike they are catastrophic, we certainly need to think of the community and the nation about what we can do Going Forward to be better prepared after the terrible flu outbreak in Great Britain and boston in the 1890s there was a parliamentary inquiry in the United Kingdom that led to some important changes in the way things were done there and i think we will see the same here but we are many many months away from that and as you said, right now we have a different priority which is the medical priority. If you missed any of these other programs about pandemics or you want to watch them in their entirety you can visit our website booktv. Org, access our archives by using the search box at the top of the page and search pandemic and books. The president from Public Affairs available now in paper book and ebook, presents biographies of every president organized by the ranking by noted historians from best to worst and features perspectives into the lives a nations chief executives and leadership styles. Visit our website, cspan. Org thepresident s to learn more about each president and historian featured and order your copy today wherever books and ebooks are sold. Sunday night on q and a, wall street trader turned photojournalists chris are not in his book dignity about the plight of those living on the margins of society in america. Sunday morning or saturday was empty because all the semis were gone. And immediately our intelligence just came right through and we spoke for about an hour, half an hour or so and she told me her life which was like a cliche of everything wrong that can happen to somebody and eventually i asked what i ask everybody i photograph which is how do you want me to describe you in one sentence . And she shot back as what i am, a prostitutes and a child of god. Sunday night at 8 00 eastern on cspans q and a. This weekend on booktv, sunday at after words, Andrew Mccabe with his book the threat, how the fbi protects america in an age of terror. I was concerned by what i felt was the corrosive impact in the corrosive impact, and the ability to do their work. If people understood more about the organization, who we are, how we work, what people are drawn to the fbi and how we make the decisions based on specific legal authorities and priorities and politics given to us by the department of justice, not the politics of personal preference. Watch after words this weekend on booktv on cspan2. Donald please is saw rice, former secretary of state in the george w. Bush add manager administration, talks about the National Security threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic. Then we look at the president ial cabinet of george washington, and on afterwards, former fbi Deputy Director Andrew Mccabe. Find more Information Online at booktv. Org or in your program guide. And to kick off the weekend, christian pick lipny locks