2015 Norman L. Ford Science Literacy Lecture Series - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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Good evening and welcome to the Doctor Norman L.
Ford Science Literacy Lecture series.
I'm Richard Ice.
I am the interim provost of the College of ST Benedict and ST John's University.
Let me give you a little background on the creation of this lecture series A couple of years ago at ST John's Alumnus from the 19 seventies, who wishes to remain anonymous came to us with the desire to endow a lecture series.
He majored in the natural sciences as an undergraduate.
His goal for the lecture series is to engage our students are members of our academic community and the wider public and cutting edge science topics, igniting their curiosity and developing their overall science literacy.
We're deeply grateful to him for this generous gift and creative concept.
He was unable to join us this evening, but has conveyed to us that he is thrilled with the selection of Dr Michael Foster home as the lecture series inaugural speaker.
Having admired Dr Auster home many years at the donor's request, the lecture series is named in honor of one of his favorite and most inspiring professors, Professor emeritus Dr Norman L.
Ford.
We're very fortunate to have Dr Ford in the audience tonight for this inaugural lecture.
Siri's along with his family and friends.
Will you wave your hand your norm?
Dr.
Ford taught biology at the College ST Benedict in ST John's University for 31 years, from 1967 until his retirement in 1998.
He was a specialist in ornithology and was widely published in his field.
As important as his considerable professional accomplishments are, it was Dr Ford, the consummate teacher, who is warmly remembered and admired by the hundreds of students he taught during his years here.
This skill was formally recognized in 1998 when ST John's presented Dr Ford with the Robert L.
Space Teacher of Distinction Award.
The citation that accompanied that presentation really says it says it best.
It said.
It's 7:45 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and Norm Ford and his class have already been at work.
Did hear that students they had already been at work in a 7 45 uh, he came early together with his students in a field and listen to the morning silence, the silence and the bird songs that punctuated it.
He came early to help students tune their ears, train their eyes to notice things the color of a feather, the tone of a mating call, which the rest of us might pass by leaving them unnoticed and unknown for more than 30 years, Norm called his students toe a more perceptive understanding of their world because of his fine crafted presentations and emphasis on critical thought, many students consider Dr Norm Ford to be the finest professor of their undergraduate careers.
On a personal note 26 years ago, Dr Ford welcome me as a young first year professor on this campus, and I classify him as one of my mentors, and I thank you, norm for that.
In many ways, this lecture series in Dr Ford's honor is a continuation of norms.
Mission as our speakers call us to a more perceptive understanding of our world.
And I'd like to welcome to the stage Dr Barbara May, associate professor of biology, to introduce our guest speaker tonight.
Thank you.
It is an honor and a pleasure to introduce Dr Michael Foster home, as are an inaugural speaker for the Norm Ford Science Literacy Lecture, a graduate of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa doctor Ulcer Home, continued his graduate work at the University of Minnesota with the Masters in Science, a PhD and a master's in public health.
His list of accomplishments are vast, and I'm sure I could spend a long time talking about all these.
And I'm just gonna mention a few.
His authored over 300 papers, 21 book chapters and has written a book entitled Living Terrors.
What America Needs to Know To Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe.
I read it a while ago and have have, um, thought about US poster home, and he has been a hero of mine as a microbiologist for a long time.
In all of this work, Dr Bolster Home is known as an advocate for the development of national emergency preparedness for rising pandemics and biological weapon attacks.
Uh, his list of service is long.
He served for 24 years in various roles at the Minnesota Department of Health, the last 15 as the state epidemiologist and chief of the acute disease epidemiology section while at the Department of Health in Minnesota.
Poster Home and his team were leaders in the area of infectious disease epidemiology.
He led numerous investigations of outbreaks of international importance, including food borne diseases, the association of tampons and Toxic shock syndrome, the transmission of hepatitis B in health care settings and the human human immunodeficiency virus infection in health care workers.
His role change slightly in the early two thousands when he became the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota from 2001 to 2005.
He also served as a special advisor to the U.
S.
Department of Health and Human Service is Under Secretary Tommy G.
Thompson.
He advised the national government on issues related to bioterrorism and public health preparedness, his head, additional leadership and advisory roles with other agencies, including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity and the World Economic Forum Working Group on Pandemics.
Currently, he's a region's professor at the University of Minnesota.
He's also the McKnight presidential endowed chair in public health, and he remains the director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
He's also a distinguished teaching professor in the division of Environmental Heil Sciences, which is part of the School of Public health.
Ah, professor in the Technology Technological Leadership Institute in the College of Science and Engineering and an adjunct professor in the medical school.
His reached a vast audience.
Finally, he does have ties to the College of ST Benedict and ST John's University as his daughter, Dr Aaron Holster, whom who is fortunate to be with us today is a Benny graduate.
So it out like I would like to give us, like us all to give Dr Bolster home a warm CSP Stu Welcome as he presents his talk entitled Infectious Diseases of the 21st Century.
A New World order.
Thank you and good evening present, eh?
Mrs.
Other distinguished guests in the room, Professor students and most of all, Norman, Billy and your family.
Um, I've had the good fortune give lectures in many locations under many circumstances, and I can't think of any that honor me more than to be here tonight with you, Norm.
And to celebrate this inaugural address.
Norman, I go back a long, long time.
I never will forget the first time you called me and asked me to come lecture here in my busy schedule.
And I realized why you are who you are because no one could say no.
But more importantly, as was described earlier, Norm is the consummate professor.
You invented the term pay it forward long before anybody else ever thought it up.
Your legacy is in this room tonight, and we'll be here forever long after you and I are gone.
In addition to the fact that he's not just a great professor, Norm defines for me in a new way.
The word class.
I once was told the class can be defined by someone who, because of their accomplishments, could go to the head of the line.
But they never fail to always go to the end of the line.
Norm, you are class, and for me to be here tonight is just such an honor.
Thank you.
It means more to me than I can ever say.
On top of that, as someone once famous, at least you do for my brother.
You do for me, Aaron, my daughter not only was a Benny, but she actually was Norm graduate assistant D.
A.
In his last year of teaching, Norm wrote a letter of support for her application to medical school that today as a father still makes me cry.
Norm.
Thank you.
It is an honor to be here with you tonight.
With that, let me begin.
And I will have a slide here shortly to share with you at the outset.
The reason why you're here and I don't mean for this talk why you're here at this campus or should be at this campus is because it's all about a liberal arts education.
Tonight I'm going to talk about why connecting the dots in a modern world becomes more and more important every day.
I've been in this business for 40 years and I can say with all honesty, more has happened in the last 5 to 7 years and happened in the previous 33 to 35 years.
The calculus of change in this world is working against us to be successful against many, many issues, not just world politics or world economics, but also public health and infectious diseases.
And tonight that's my job is to share with you that and why I am looking to you many of the students in this room for the solutions.
Somebody in this room tonight could very well be the person that provides the answers that some of us old timers haven't quite figured out how to do yet.
Last count.
I had about 55,000 slides in my repertoire of slides, Elektronik slides, and I have to tell you, if I had a slide fire tonight, the one slide I'd save is this one.
This one tells me and tells you about the world that we live in today, probably better than the other slide.
While it's a bit old because it was published in little past 2000.
If you look, you can see first last 150 years, it literally took us over a year to circumnavigate the globe around the world with fast showing bustles.
And by the 19 fifties, with the advent of jet engines, we could do that in little over a day.
Well, I can tell you that that flat part of the line is actually may be the most dynamic part of the line tonight, and I'll show you why and what that's about.
I think about that.
Last Tuesday afternoon, I was in a meeting in Seoul, Korea, one o'clock in the afternoon and I was actually on a conference call back here in Minneapolis at five o'clock that afternoon.
Think about how fast we now travel in Traverse the world.
If you look at world population, think about this from 18.
50 when we were talking about 600,000 people in the world and now we're talking are 600 million.
Excuse me.
Now we're talking about 7.6 billion and some of you may know the U.
N just revised its estimates of the world population increase to now 10.2 billion people by 2050.
We don't even need to wait that long.
Lot of every eight people who's ever lived is on the face of the earth right now.
And guess where they're being born there, being born largely in the mega cities of the developing world, where of Charles Dickens were alive today couldn't radically describe the lack of sanitation and the living conditions that these people have to experience.
If you want to make infectious disease cauldrons, you would invent the developing world's of the modern world and you create the city's air in those developing countries.
That's a big change.
Now, if you look at world population in terms of life expectancy.
We have really had remarkable changes.
Make no mistake about that.
In 1900 Minnesota, the average life expectancy was 48 years.
It took us over 80,000 generations to get to that point.
And since that time, literally in places like the United States, for every three days we've lived in the last 110 years, we've gained one day of life expectancy.
That's amazing.
Now the rest of the world hasn't come along.
Now, why is that?
It has very little to do with modern medicine.
Modern medicine's done very little for that.
It's about a guy named Tesla who all of you now think of the electric car.
Mr.
Tesla actually gave us the alternating current.
He invented, in a sense, modern electricity.
With modern electricity, we could make water pumps and create safe water supplies with water supplies and pump water.
We could create sewer systems with electricity.
We could refrigerate food with electricity.
We could make vaccines.
That's where all that changes come from.
And unfortunately, some of us are very concerned.
We're about ready to tip that that those numbers are not going to continue to increase and you'll see why in a minute.
So don't think that what we've experienced over the last 110 years necessary dictates where we're going.
And I'll explain why tonight and I'll let you be the judge.
If you look at world population, this is from a slide from our World Economic Forum and jobless in February were.
In fact, if you look at world population increase the only CD the organization Economic Cooperation, Development, which is the United States.
You Australia, etcetera, the quote unquote developed countries, you can see world population increase is really quite minimal.
But if you look at the bric countries Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, as well as all the others, look where the growth is at.
That's where the infrastructure is the lease.
That's where we have major challenges and I'll share that with you tonight.
Why the diseases that occur there are going to be very important to you here because you don't have to be there to get those diseases anymore.
And from an infectious disease standpoint, you get nothing else out of this lecture.
Just no oceans, mountain ranges, canyons and political boundaries are irrelevant to microbes today and that's when a very important point.
This is the world we live in today, where the peri urban kind of slum is right there with the modern world.
Just in recent weeks, I've been involved with several cases of high level I t experts from India on consultation basis here in United States, who only found out after 4 to 6 weeks of coughing at their workplace, that they had multi drug resistant TB and everyone had been exposed to it.
It's not just the slums themselves.
It's a spillover that's occurring in the world.
In 1968 when the world decided that they would eradicate smallpox from the world of horrible disease, they were able to do it for two reasons.
One is the disease lent itself to that was only infection in humans.
We had a vaccine that would work.
But the second and most incredibly important thing is the USSR in the United States of America decided we will do it.
And when those two countries decided anything in the sixties with seventies, it happened because every domino behind it was a country, and when soon is one of the two superpowers pushed a button, everybody fell in line.
Today, nobody's in charge.
We don't have a world leader.
We don't have one, so we can't do the same things we once did.
How do you explain to people in Pakistan trying to eliminate polio?
That is good to go to work every day when 87 people have been assassinated in the last two years just trying to deliver polio vaccine to the population that would never have happened 30 years ago or 20 years ago?
Or, for that matter, even 10 years ago?
It is a New World order.
Today we have failed states, something we wouldn't have ever thought of before.
34 countries in this world today are considered in failed states status.
With the Ebola crisis we had in West Africa, I ended up doing a number of briefings on the hill in Washington.
For Congress, guess who wanted to hear about this, not the public health committees with health committees.
It was the intelligence committees in the military committees because they worried the should be bold move eastward across sub across the the central part of Africa.
It would end up in the countries where Boko, Haram and Isis is live and well, who would be in charge, then?
Who would deal with that issue?
How would that further basically undermine the status of the government's there?
So today, trying to deliver these service's air very difficult.
How many of you are aware of the fact that as bad as the crisis is in Syria right now, we have good data to show that many more people have died from infectious diseases that have died from the war itself?
I think about that.
Lack of basic public health vaccines, safe water and food injury related infections.
You never hear about that part.
But that's part of the real world.
The World Economic Forum, which is the International Forum for Economic Issues.
And as minutes in the introduction, I shared the Pandemic Preparedness Committee for that group.
But this report came out from another section of the World Economic Forum this past year, and it's a pretty important report.
It interviewed and followed up from the best minds in the planning and preparedness world, and I don't have a pointer here, but if you look at the legend, you could see on the bottom, likelihood goes from lowest left to right the impact goes from lowest bottom to top.
The two red dots on the top are spread of infectious diseases and water.
Crisis is that's their words, not not us public health people, that is, the world's experts in preparedness said.
That's we have to be concerned about.
Not all the other issues have come up.
Last February, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence for the United States government, issued his annual report a report unlike you've ever issued before, and I say that because it was a whole section on the issue of infectious diseases continues to threaten human security worldwide.
And they highlighted this that this had the ability to under mine whatever governments we had out there and could create literally a colossal global calamity.
Jim Kim, President World Bank gave a very important talk in January of this year, in which the headline says that all the world is dangerous, unprepared for future pandemics.
I've spent my whole life trying to get ready for outbreaks or large global pandemics, and I can tell you we've never been less prepared and I'll give you the reasons why tonight and what we have to do to turn that around.
And why the those students in this room?
I'm counting on you to help us get out of this mess.
And frankly, you don't have a choice because you don't have to get out of jail card.
We've got to figure out how to deal with this.
Bill Gates, someone would say, knows a lot about a lot of things.
I personally appreciate what he did in Microsoft, but I can tell you the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been the bedrock of public health supporting prepared us for the last decade.
But for Bill Gates, I don't know what we'd be doing right now for support for public health around the world.
Amazing!
He wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine this past March that, in fact, the thing that had the greatest likelihood of disrupting the entire world order as we knew it was an infectious disease pandemic, not numerous circular war.
I think of that a pandemic.
And he went through all the reasons why I think he's right.
Now, I'd like to share with you why some of this is the case and what I'm gonna do here if I come successful here.
Old men need their glasses.
See if our guy appears.
I'm trying to get down here.
Well, I may not be able to do this.
What I needed to try to do here was get the point or to take me down to the bottom.
There is our baby.
You guys still here?
Okay, he's not well.
I'm gonna have to try to get us back in here then.
But this isn't working, right?
Thank you, student.
Right.
This will give you a sense.
This was data from basically ah, 2000 and 14.
But these air air flights every day that are occurring around the world.
This is actually 1 24 hour period.
Every one of those is an airplane full of people in an underbody that may be full of mosquitoes or any number of different things.
Now watch.
What happens globally is you find all the time.
They just keep coming and coming and coming and coming and coming.
You want to know for mixing up germs around the world either in people or animals or in cargo holds?
It is now around the world.
That's the modern world we live in today.
Remember?
100 years ago.
This didn't exist for all of time.
So this gives you a sense, basically of what we're talking about today.
Just with airplane travel.
I get it.
Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks?
This is a slide taken from yesterday.
Every hour on the hour, all the major shipping vessels in the world report their location, the weather conditions.
We final this every hour and you can see 62,000 different ships up here.
All big cargo ships.
This is the warehouse of the world.
Any of your business majors in here do not ever suggest the world warehouse.
That's enough to make you go to confession daily because it's a just in time delivery world.
Things that we need right now are on a ship somewhere, sailing from China to the United States that we hope they get here in time for tomorrow's need.
All these ships are under a lie Beanie or Liberian or panna, meaning flagship.
Nobody's really in charge.
Anything it would disrupt.
This would be amazing.
We just did a study several years ago in which we surveyed a group of farmed these doctors and pharmacy this band all the areas of medicine.
We said one of those life saving drugs you have to have every day or people die.
Not not cancer drugs.
Not a lot of those lifestyle drugs.
What do you need?
That's on the crash cart in the emergency room, we found 31 different drugs that we absolutely have to have every day or people die right now.
Now, not tomorrow, not next week.
Now, of those 31 drugs, all of them were generic.
All them were made offshore.
All of them are just in time delivering.
There's no stockpiles anywhere.
That's how vulnerable the world is right now.
So that's what we have to deal with in terms of understanding the global context of infectious disease in the modern world.
If you look a travelers right now, tourism is obviously a booming business.
Over 1.1 billion people cross international border last year just for purposes of tourism.
Next time you take that trip to the Caribbean bottle of this talk later, and I want to ask you about your mosquito mosquito exposure, what that means to you, or what it might mean to you.
I don't want to dismiss a number of important things, like antibiotic resistance and the availability of antibiotics.
Just think of this every time a child is born, we assume it takes him about 20 years to hit a next generation level.
It takes an E.
Coli 20 minutes.
And now we're watching rape as of weapon of war in Africa, be used repeatedly and getting to continue to alter the HIV related transmission issues.
These are not done the issues of even what to do in terms of disease.
Like polio.
We're trying eradicated from the world.
We keep finding hot spots where the virus finds those hot spots before we do in the Ukraine.
Right now, we're very concerned about a major polio outbreak in the Ukraine because less than 25% of the population is vaccinated for polio.
Given all that's going on there, and we now just have cases introduced, look at the issues of something like measles, a disease that we don't even really worry about in this country because we've done such a good job of extending our kids.
Yet in the Congo, we're talking about an outbreak.
This is the last several weeks has killed 400 individuals.
Remember those people travel to somewhere maybe not to the United States, where they travel to somewhere where somebody who is going to travel the United States comes and I can guarantee you if we don't keep our immunization rates up, we're going to find more and more of these illness problems like this.
Then we even have the issue with the refugees and what's happening with worldwide migration Right now, what's happening in the Middle East in Syria is a travesty of humankind.
But one of the issues I mentioned before the number of deaths from infectious diseases as opposed to even just those related to war the risk of infection continues to increase.
And we even see the fear that goes with that which in some cases is totally unjustified.
Yes, they're at risk for themselves, but not to others.
And already our gear.
Colleagues in Norway, who are well known for being some of the most adulterous, tick and socially conscious people in the world, are seeing big increases in public fear about taking refugees in What is that going to mean today?
We also worry about the issue of another disease called monkeypox monkey pox is a virus very similar.
That which called smallpox.
But in this case, transmitted from some human primates to humans, not from human to human.
We never used to see monkey pox problems in Africa.
Why?
Because everybody was getting vaccinated or they'd had smallpox.
And either one protected you against monkeypox.
But we haven't vaccinating for 30 some years in Africa.
We've now created a whole court of people who've been born who have no immunity to either smallpox or monkey pox.
Now, monkeypox, Isn't it all like his sister?
Smallpox, instead of killing 35% of the people who get it only kills 20%.
Still pretty big.
We're worried.
Today we have no plan in place whatsoever for what to do about monkey pox.
We never thought we'd have to be vaccinated again.
We never thought about that.
We thought we were done.
Then that brings me to smallpox.
I just want to mention this.
This was an issue that has been front and center for me.
Probably the most poignant moment in my public health career that I will still never forget.
And it haunts me to this day.
I had the good fortune of serving as a personal advisor to His Majesty King Hussein of Jordan for a number of years on the issues of bioterrorism.
Before he died in January of 1999 I was still at the state health Department.
I got a call from the Jordanian Embassy saying His Majesty wanted to see me right away, which usually meant sometime in the next few weeks we set something up.
No, right away.
To make a long story short.
I was on a plane to London, where he was at his estate Ascot outside of London.
Within four hours, in the same clothes I went to work in, I landed at Heathrow early that next morning, overnight flight I was picked up by the security detail taken to the main house.
Usually, if I would come, I would stay at one of the outhouse areas.
Beautiful large areas, sleep for the day, et cetera.
I went right into his house.
I haven't showered since I went to work.
I'm still in the same clothes.
He comes down in his robe along with the head of G I D.
The Jordanian C I.
A, and pumped me for four and 1/2 hours about smallpox.
I knew he knew something.
Everyone knew King Hussein was at the center piece of every major intelligence information, good guys or bad guys.
Three weeks later, he wrote a very famous letter that dismissed his brother, is the regional heir apparent and appointed his son, Prince Abdullah, to be the new king, which, unfortunately came true just four weeks later, when he died suddenly and what was more telling was most of letter was about a man saying that the thing you worried most was not about war.
He worried about terrorism because of what that would do to ripple effect through the population.
The thing you worry most about with smallpox, and he wrote it all in this letter to this day, the intelligence community's don't know what he knew.
But I have no doubt at that time that smallpox was not just securely in two labs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at the Russian research station at Nova Severe Siberia.
I still don't believe it's true, but we don't even worry about that anymore because here's a disease.
While even though it was only here part of the 20th century and only part of the world that killed 200 million people.
But smallpox is something you can't ever forget.
Day three and a young child day, five days, nine day 13 And knowing that up to 30% of these people will die, a large number will be left blind and other health problems, not a good disease.
There's a young girl from Pakistan who had hemorrhagic smallpox, which is very common in pregnant women.
Ah, and selected individuals where you see the bleeding in her eyes and mouth.
Thes people typically die within about 24 hours.
Almost 100% case fatality rate, not a good disease.
Well, why don't I tell you this?
Because you know what?
Even if somebody doesn't have it out there even if a terrorist is not going to use it Back in the 19 eighties, we had made a decision in this country.
We maybe should destroy the smallpox viruses we have left.
But there's a big debate.
What?
We should keep him because we may need to do research on him now.
We should destroy him.
But everybody agreed we'd publish the sequences.
So back then, before we could sequence agents like we can today major projects undertaken to sequence Ortho pox viruses.
I use smallpox.
Well, this is like sequencing the Grand Canyon.
These air huge, huge viruses.
And nobody ever thought second of it of publishing all the data.
So you can go right now online and find the entire genetic sequence for several smallpox strains.
Well, you know what?
Technology changed.
Just like back in 1980.
I still got on a hard line phone, asked an operator to connect me to a certain long distance number, and that was it.
Today, at my iPhone does face time with me when I'm in Korea with my grandkids very different.
Well, guess what happened.
We now got good taking these genetic sequences in making real bugs.
And 19 night are in 2001 Research group at Stony Brook in New York reconstructed a polio virus to Novo from just taking the published sequences, buying amino acids, now putting them together like tinker toys.
And they made a virus that was lethal.
Well, we never thought we could make smallpox virus because it was a 1600 story genetic building.
It was just too big.
Nobody could make a 1600 storage.
Really?
Just is.
This article says we can today.
I have no doubt it's gonna be just a matter of timing for somebody.
Make smallpox layers.
I don't even know think it's necessary for nefarious purposes.
But if it gets out, we're screwed.
That's part of the modern world we live in that I would never have imagined myself 15 or 20 years ago.
Influenza remains also a lying king of infectious diseases.
Again, for those, and enormous is your bird centric world, where in fact, influenza viruses took up residence of wild aquatic birds many millions of years ago, many millions years before chickens even showed up.
They versatile live in the gutter.
The bird.
They don't have very good receptor sites for gettinto lungs, whether bird, lungs or even human lungs particularly.
But guess what?
Over time, those viruses do fly out of there, and they do get into poultry and they can cost of your disease.
They still have a hard time getting to people, but they can because again the receptor sites, the lock and key just doesn't work very well.
But pigs become the universal recipient and donor pig lung cells actually have receptor sites for bird viruses and human flu viruses.
And when the viruses get together in the same pig cell just by accident, they're the most promiscuous virus you could ever imagine.
They swap out jean material left and right, and they create new strains that are now human adapted but have a lot of the bird characteristics.
That's when we get pandemics.
That's when suddenly influenza wipes through like it did in 1918 killing over 50 million people in this world.
Well, we did worry in 2004 when H five n one type of influenza virus showed up while in birds in Asia caused us some real concerns.
Well, it kind of you can see from the data on the left there.
We had cases in humans, but we never saw sustained human to human transmission, and I don't think anybody haven't heard about this in the media.
Look what's happened in Egypt over the last year.
It's exploded.
We can't explain why it could be more exposure.
But as the virus changed and what we're worried about is over time, this virus is like it's like a drip phenomena boom, boom, boom and pretty soon there's enough water in that barrel to put out a fire or to drown someone.
And what we're worried about is we are seeing these changes now with H five n one after having everybody get upset in 2004 and then by 2000 and they said, Oh, don't bother me with that again.
Is Egypt a harbinger of things to come?
Well, I don't know, but this is the one that even scares me more h seven n nine, another type of flu virus out of birds that we had never even thought of his being a potential risk factor for humans.
And it turned out that in 2013 suddenly started seeing these cases.
By the way, 1/3 of the people who get this die and it was not very good person to person.
Transmission was coming out of somewhere, though, and we turned out that with high path flu viruses like age five and one, they do kill domestic poultry.
Where there's smoke, there's fighter, you know you got a problem.
If your birds start dying, these birds were all fine.
We went in his sample of these birds and guess what?
They were loaded with age seven and nine, and they weren't sick at all.
Not even a slight fever.
We did the studies as part of our center in Minnesota, in which we actually took the viruses from China and put him into quail, chickens, turkeys, et cetera.
And guess we found instead of mostly pooping it out the South End, which is what birds do with flu viruses.
They were blown it out the north end, and they were getting sick.
And initially the Chinese went in and tried to basically take out these flocks.
But there was such an uprising by the population of killing healthy birds that they stopped doing it.
Right now, there's no control rods in the reaction in China.
What's this gonna do?
Overtime?
I don't know, but the case fatality rate remains at 30 some percent.
Is this gonna be the next flu virus?
I don't know.
It could be is primarily located in eastern China.
Get a sense of this.
The average time period from a chicken being hatched until that chicken breast is on your plate is about 35 days, 35 days.
It's the fastest any of anything we have in the food supply for converting energy to protein in the Paley urban region of Shanghai, along just one town, one city in China, 100 million chickens are born every month just to feed Shanghai for that month.
Every one of those is a virus vessel.
Every one of those is another test tube.
That's just one city in China.
The W H O put out a rather strong statement in February this year basically saying warning signals from the volatile world of influenza viruses, the current global influenza situation, characterized by a number of trends that must be closely monitored.
These include an increase on it on an act, the summary statement here.
The diversity and geographic distribution influenza virus is currently circulated in wild and domestic birds on President.
Since the advent of modern tools for virus detection characterization, the world needs to be concerned.
Well, we've been following us since 19 forties with virus detection.
But even if you go back to chicken Flack health studies dating back into the turn of the century, nobody's ever seen this before.
Something is happening in nature, and if I don't know what's gonna keep these viruses from spilling out and causing a pandemic.
Look no further than what happened right here.
Don't go very far from here.
This past summer, we in the U.
S.
Were kind of smug about our quote unquote poultry production capability and our bio security to keep viruses out.
And I say this with kindness because it's not anybody in getting wrongs.
We didn't know better, but it's kind of like the people that buy a submarine, put a screen door on it, never taken underwater for 10 years.
And everybody how whether screen door works from the first time they take it under didn't work so well.
Well, suddenly, with the high path virus, we had 223 different outbreaks of H five in two in poultry in Minnesota, Iowa, and tow a couple of joining states of small numbers.
Almost 50 million birds died or were put down.
This is on President.
This is incredible.
We've never had that before.
We had one small outbreak of a high path flu virus in American poultry back in 1983 and six farms in Pennsylvania, all next to each other, and we put it down.
We don't know if this is going to come back or not, you could again.
We're in total archer territories.
What was really interesting is we had this mindset.
This is this closed mind set that we own today.
This is where our liberal arts students challenges and everything we thought.
Well, this has to be kind of a farm.
Gets infected me like a concentric circle exposure like a bomb.
So, you know, you're this far out this far out.
Well, we now know that's not the case.
We actually did virus sampling outside of these barns, and we look at the spread and guess what?
It was a wind rose.
Meaning it was a long plume.
You could have been one mile on either side of that farm, but if you weren't in the wind plume, you were fine.
But if you were 20 miles down wind, you might have got hit Totally rewriting the world of flu viruses.
So suddenly.
What do we do to create poultry production in this country?
We concentrated them in places like candy.
Oh, hi County.
His ease of production delivering supplies, harvesting.
You know what?
We put our pig operations in the same counties.
Talk about a mixing vessel and rear pigs don't get sick with this virus.
So we don't really know what's happened with virus infection and pigs again.
If I had told you this story last winter, any of you would have looked at me and said, You know, what's he been drinking?
And now is right before us back in the old days, you have to worry about vectors, I'II, mosquitoes or anything else surviving an airplane flights.
You actually Abdin always know you were going to survive.
You know DDT.
Between the DDT and the smoke, you could cover everything that's times have changed today.
Eddie's elbow pickets, which is the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst mosquitoes.
And I say that because they're mosquitoes basically are a nuisance until they can carry a disease and only a very limited number.
Mosquito species carry diseases.
Ones that carry diseases are the ones that to get infected themselves.
So when that guy takes a blood meal there, woman, actually only female mosquitoes feed.
That's a whole other story.
Basically, what's happening is they take blood up into their per viscous.
They then take the virus or whatever else is in that blood.
And if they are susceptible to that virus, that parasite, they then become infected, and it goes basically into their cell very glands.
So the next time they take a blood meal, they don't die from the infection.
When they inject that saliva down at hibiscus to keep the blood flowing, an anti coagulant, That's how you get your mosquito bite.
You're reacting to that material, but that's where the virus or the parasite is, that causes you to get infected.
Well, thank God, most mosquitoes don't carry any diseases at all.
Feasible.
Pick us is the universal donor.
It can be infected by Darner everything.
Look what happened the green areas of the world, where eighties over pickets was historically found through the 19 eighties.
And then we had a major run on used tires for large vehicles because of the world economics around tire and rubber production.
And suddenly we started shipping tires from Asia, Southeast Asian particular that inside of were all these 80 devil pickets eggs, and they landed in ports all around the world.
And look what happened overnight.
Ese el pisco spread around the world, including right here in Minnesota, and it does fine, thank you.
So we suddenly created we put this huge howitzer right in the public square and just said, Dared anybody just, you know, put a bullet in, Go ahead.
So we already have the underpinnings of a potential for a problem before any viruses or bacteria or Paris ever showed up.
It is a gyp.
Die again.
Another famous mosquito of reason Why it took so long to finish the Panama Canal Because, in fact, it kept causing all the people to die from yellow fever work there.
This slide is one we're actually working on right now.
But in the 19 thirties, this is where a double pick, our eighties Egypt.
I was found in the Americas.
By the 19 seventies.
When I got an infectious disease in everybody said, Why are you getting into horse and buggy making you know it's It's old, It's done, It's over with.
They had every reason to say that not only was it only in lesser areas of the Americas, but in much larger numbers.
This is 2000 and we're now in the process of making the 2015 slide, and I could tell you it is Fred.
Even much more through the Americans and the numbers of populations have gone dramatically higher.
19.
32,015 You tell me which will be better prepared to deal with mosquitoes with So again, this isn't just just trying to tell you that things were worse because I want you to be worse.
We have the data to show we're living in a very different world order today this slide, which was made not to be read because it's meant to scramble your brain to think about something, and that is chicken gun.
You, you say, What the heck is that?
It's a mosquito borne virus that basically like another disease called dingy fever, causes people to really get kind of sick.
But not that many people die.
Fortunately, probably 123% at most.
But we're now realizing that 40 to 50% of people that get chicken gun you actually end up having some very serious neurologic and muscular skeletal issues for months and months and months up to 40% or more.
Well, guess what?
In December of 2000 and 13 somebody brought chicken gun.
You infected mosquitoes to ST Martin in the Caribbean.
Since then, all these millions of cases have occurred.
We now know it's millions and millions, and this is what's happened.
It has spread not only through the entire Caribbean, it's in all the Americas and even in the United States we now have indigenous transmission in Florida, including pretty widespread transmission in Dade County and the keys.
38 states have reported people with chicken gun you most of in traveling to the Caribbean for vacation.
So when you think about your vacation spot this winter, I always thought the cold of ST Cloud in ST Johns was not so bad.
This is this.
Remember, this hadn't existed in the end of 2013.
Early in 2014 look words that today millions of cases have occurred.
Other new scans and see here.
This is from our side wrapped website, where we have been very active.
Newssite bajo today just announced 12,000 chicken gun you cases in studies being done looking at actual cases versus reported.
We think your reporting is about somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 80 fold of the actual cases, so we report a 1,000,000 cases you can read and assume that that's 50 to 80 million police cases.
That's pretty significant.
This is a paper that I published in Lancet Ah, major Medical journal a few years ago 2011.
It's the worst paper I've ever published in my life for heartache.
We have been very involved.
The 2009 inch wins a pandemic in our group, and we took onto a study to look at just how well the flu vaccines work after that.
And we thought it would take us a couple of months and, well, how well prepared we be for the future.
Well, the more we peel back the onion, the more we peel back the onion.
And more we found wasn't the case in this paper.
We found that we had been grossly over selling how well flu vaccines work in the public and that it best 59% was the average, particularly for younger people, and that we had a real absence of data for older people.
And yet we've been pushing this last year this was really brought home where, in fact, originally it was 23% in the end, and the bottom slide, you can see here.
Overall flu vaccine was just 19% effective.
No evidence of protection of those over 65.
And yet I bet most of you didn't know that.
Now we hope we're gonna do better this year because we've actually put to train changes in, but it's still not going to be optimal.
Well, what's going on here?
We need flu vaccine seasonally, but more important, need him for pandemics.
We looked at the issue of the pandemic in 2009 that we had, which was quite mild one by all standards.
And if you look here, what you see, that blue line actually is the number of percent of visits for influenza like illness on this right bar, basically really detail.
In the second wave of the 2009 pandemic, which really peaked in mid to late October, vaccine didn't arrive until October.
Most of didn't get here until November December.
And if you look at the numbers, we're still talking about 16 80 million doses.
But most of these doses winning kids, which was a to dose regimen.
So there you have to cut it in half and people that really have vaccinated.
The whole world experienced this.
Most world had no vaccine at all.
Even the new modern cell culture vaccines using the old technology of the 19 forties, which is what the current flu vaccine is, didn't get out any sooner than the egg based cultures.
We got problems.
We went back and looked at 68 57 the two previous pandemics each time the vaccine arrived too little, too late.
Well, we then did this quite exhaustive study starting in 2009 called the CID Wrapped Comprehensive Influenza Vaccine Initiative.
Study the compelling need for game changing influenza vaccines, and you may not be able to see all this.
But each of these chapters reflects a very different part of the flu vaccine world.
We went through over 15,000 papers.
We even had the old Department of War studies brought out of the archives to look at the original flu vaccines license for studies of the 19 forties, and to understand what they did.
We interviewed over 120 world experts in all aspects of vaccine, some of many times finance business If you look in chapters down here 12 10 11 12 we looked at the entire business model and guess what we've been telling people for so long.
This vaccine is so good that to vaccine industry said, Well, why are we gonna invest any money in a new vaccine?
You been telling me it's really good.
We were shooting ourselves in the foot.
Paper after paper has come out recently showing new potential vaccines that are very different to the ones we have today very different, but could work very differently and much more protective idea.
The universal flu vaccine is I'm not sure can ever be universal, but we can sure get one that could work a lot longer.
Lot better.
What's the problem?
This is a figure from our report.
This thing called the Valley of Death.
What happens when you start working and discovery and phase one Phase two, Phase three.
We invest all this money in this.
I say all it's, you know, 20,000,050 million here, but not big money relative to what vaccines are gonna take.
And then we suddenly get it and it stalls out when against a phase three, which is actually putting into people and doing a big study.
We estimate today.
It'll probably cost us a $1,000,000,000 to bring one flu vaccine through, and nobody the private sector has an appetite for that.
They have to charge $120 a dose for flu vaccine to even think about recouping any other investment. 00:50:23.82