Domestication right now than in the last 10,000 years of domestication until 1960 combined. Huge numbers of livestock that were keeping right now, and many of them live in these factory farms. We have a million or more individuals crowded together. So theyre basically, the animal equivalent of urban slums. This similarly allows pathogens to amplify and change to make them more virulent. One example of that Avian Influenza virus, normally live in waterfowl. But when the viruses drop into these factory farms where captive animals are come together, they start to change and replicate and mutate. That is what viruses do. They become more virulent. We have problems with more virulent forms of Avian Influenza. Some involve ways that can infleck humans. They started carrying these pathogens found in more efficient way. That is something cholera took advantage of. That was steam travel. We started streaming across the atlantic. Also with clipper ships, steaming up and down all of our rivers an
Pathogensof avian coming out of the middle east and the whole range of airborne pathogens, dengue, of mosquito borne pathogens, dengue, chikungunya, and zika of course. So the question i wanted to ask is how do Microbes Turn into pandemiccausing pathogens. You think of an microbe is a little thing with no locomotion, but it can cause these huge amounts of death and destruction. I wanted to look at that was a twopronged approach. First i looked at the history of one of our most successful pandemiccausing pathogens. That is cholera. It has caused seven global pandemics since it first emerged. The latest one is still going on off the coast of florida and haiti. With reporting from places where new pathogens were coming up. Went to places like new china and south china and new delhi to try to see how cholera could shed light on where these new pathogens might be going. Choleraearned is that emerged in many ways in the same way a lot of the new pathogens are coming out today. It came out of
I went to places like south china and new delhi to try to see how cholera could shed light on where these new pathogens might be going. What i learned is that cholera emerged in many ways in the same way a lot of the new pathogens are coming out today. It came out of the natural environment. Cholera is a bacteria that normally lives in marine habitats. It lives in conjunction with a zooplankton. Some places are full of cholera bacteria. It is half fresh, half salty. This is where the major rivers are draining into the bay of bengal. For the longest time, people did not live in areas like this. They are covered in men growth swamps, tidilylooded twice per day, there are cyclones and tigers. People did not really live in cholerarich environments which all changed in the 19th century. The british decided to turn these into rice fields. Over the course of 19 centuries, 90 of the aurea of the area is settled. And our bodies, it does not perform very you ecological function but it can kill p
That is to say, you would see outbreaks or what looks like outbreaks of schizophrenia following outbreaks of influenza and other viruses. If you look some four to seven years out with autism, you would find examples there, too. We were able to model this with mice. That if you could examine mice that were halfway through gestation, the animals would be withdrawn in the cage, as opposed to the animals that had some sort of a normal just two thirds of the way through gestation, these animals become hyperactive, running all over the cage. Indicating that, what was important is not so much the infectious agents per se, but the host response to infection. The other thing that we have begun to learn a great deal more about is the micro biome. There is an excellent exhibit presently literally across the park at the museum of natural history. Here, we try to cover through the course of this, to understand something through that micro biome, the implications of disease. We have begun to underst
Thousands of families to start again. Israels Supreme Court has sentenced former Prime Minister olmert to 18 months in prison in a bribery case. It partly reverses a lower Court Sentence to which he was sentenced to 6 years behind bars. He is the first Public Office to be imprisoned. He was a popular Prime Minister when he was in office. Whats the reaction so far to the sentence . Reporter there has certainly been an awful lot of surprise that olmert, an israeli Prime Minister, who will now go down in history, perhaps history he doesnt want go down in, as the first israeli Prime Minister who will serve a prison sentence. I think already questions are being asked about the term of this sentence, 18 months. There are some sections of Israeli Society who believe that he should have served the full six years that he was initially sentenced to until the 18 months that he has now been given as part of this appeal, an appeal which found that mr olmert was not involved in the way they saw it.