Name: Your next phone could lead to another pandemic
Uploaded: 2020-08-08T23:35:48.000Z
Duration: 7 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

about how different types of minerals and metals

So there's gold, which conducts electricity really well.

Lots of gold is mined in Nevada, Colombia, and China.

Lithium of course, is found in a lot of batteries,

and lots of lithium comes from South America.

But the material we're looking for is actually here.

Or at least we think it's a tantalum capacitor.

Apple makes it really hard to identify parts

But we found some schematics that pointed us

It's a component that stores electrical charges.

Tantalum is an element that's derived from an ore

Tantalum is highly sought after because it's got

a very high melting point and it resists corrosion.

We wanted to get our eyes on this capacitor

It's a piece of a complex web we've all woven

because it could cause the next pandemic.

That's a big claim, so let's break it down.

Some comes from large industrial open pit mines.

The kind of mine we're used to seeing images of.

But most coltan actually comes from much smaller operations.

This is often called artisanal or subsistence mining.

It's often just people digging holes with shovels and picks

Subsistence mining means humans cutting their way

- Yeah, what we're talking about is spillover.

- Our environment reporter Justine has been looking into

all of this and she'll take it from here.

- So basically when humans intermingle with wildlife,

chances increase for something called a spillover event.

This is when a virus jumps from one species to another.

It's how most new infectious diseases emerge,

When one species bites, eats, gets pooped on by another,

viruses from one species might infect the other.

Artisanal mining offers up a lot of opportunities

for spillover between animals and humans.

To get some specifics, I called up Michael Nest.

- [Justine] He wrote an entire book about coltan

and he walked me through the details of how exactly

- You might not have much of a perimeter at all

or rely on people who live the forest to bring them food.

- [Justine] In this case, food is bushmeat,

In the DRC, bushmeat can mean a porcupine, rat--

- [Michael] A bush pig, or part of a gorilla.

- It's a viable way for animal viruses to meet

One study of miners working in the eastern DRC

found that a majority of them relied regularly on bushmeat.

- If you are a poor mine worker and you get the opportunity

to kill a gorilla and eat it because it's free meat,

if you think you can get away with doing that.

Some animals might get drawn in closer by mining.

Bats, for example, might take up residence in mines.

That ups the odds of a miner getting scratched or bitten

They might run into new groups of animals

and those interactions mean more chances for spillover.

- So it's not just the access to bush food,

but it's also the very close proximity to forest

with very little attention paid to health infrastructure

- So far there hasn't been a major viral outbreak

But all the ingredients for spillover are there.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Your next phone could lead to another pandemic

pandemic

deliberate

material

interact