If you saw contagion, if you remember me mentioning Typhoid Mary in class, if you are curious as to the origin of HIV, if you are interested in more epidemiology, or if you wonder how an idea might spread....take a listen to this week's Radiolab. Add Radiolab to your podcasts on your smart phone, it's always interesting, really!
http://www.radiolab.org/2011/nov/14/
Maybe there will be extra credit on the final......
Both of these podcasts were amazing in their information and detail. One thing that was interesting and stood out to me, was the connections between the "Patient Zero". Typoid Mary clearly and easily is identified and Dugas was sort of labeled early on for HIV. BUT both of them felt they had the RIGHT to do whatever they wanted and that no one should stop them. Today you would never be able to publish a name as they did to Dugas and define them as any type of infected person etc. Then it wasn't an issue to do so and seemingly some didn't care and obviously didn't understand HIV.
ReplyDeleteHIV won't probably ever have a "Patient Zero" as the belief is that it was a one in a million chance blending of viruses...that kept happening one in a million times. When HIV first was discovered I was in my teens and no one could understand what and how this spread and what the impact would be. Its crazy to think that a zoonotic jumping of viruses and that I understand that now caused all of this. This article again was amazing.
First, this was a really great listen. "Patient Zero," is the orgin of a disease. In the first instance, Mary Mallon is labeled as patient zero for typhoid fever. She knowingly infected serveral people, including young children, and was eventually imprisoned on North Brother Island to spend the rest of her days. Mallon was unfairly treated because at the time of her arrest she wasn't the only asystematic carrier, but she was the only one who was arrested and made to sign an agreement to never cook.
ReplyDeleteAnother injustice was preformed when Gaetan Dugas was deemed to be patient zero in the case of HIV. His unjustice was to willingly infect thousands of young men with the HIV (gay cancer). In both cases the patient zero and in both cases the patient zero knowingly infected others with the disease.
In the case of new research in Africa trying to prevent the spread of other spillover diseases, it is a great effort to stop Patient 1 and Patient 2. The cell phone tower monitoring was a brilliant idea to track outbreaks. The biggest concern becomes what to do with patient zero? Is it ethical or moral to treat them like Typhoid Mary? Should they be allowed to carry on normal lives risking knowingly spreading the disease like Gaetan Dugas? Society is often cruel to those infected (think lepers), and only time will tell if we are able to humanely accomodate to the new Patient Zeros that arise.
Listening to the podcast “Patient One,” made me realize how difficult is it for a disease that can harm humans to be made, but on the other hand it also illustrated how easily it can spread throughout the world once it is made. According to the podcast and everything we have learned from biology classes, we know that mutations are random and the chance for a certain sequence of nucleotides to be made is one in a billion. Its crazy to think that the HIV virus started as two different primate viruses, then merged in to one virus inside a Chimpanzee, and finally found a niche to live inside humans by transferring to a hunter in Africa. The probability for each of the steps mentioned above is so slim that they seem near impossible. Still nature finds a way to evolve and survive in new environments. But it is this struggle for survival that has given each and every one of us the right to live on this planet. With better science we can make survival higher and diseases less deadly. For example we are using Digital surveillance by checking cellular phone chatter about diseases globally to predict an emerging disease and stop it from becoming a pandemic.
ReplyDeleteNo matter how hard we try there will always be Healthy carriers who don’t show any symptoms of disease and will spread it to others. These cases are hard to predict and take extensive research to uncover. We need to educate the public so that they would be careful with how they prepare food and or how they interact with others as to limit the spread of disease to others. In both cases of Marry Malon and Dugas Gaetan the spread of disease could have had been prevented if they had educated the public; also if they hadn’t treated them like human beings and not as dangerous monsters. It is very important to tread these cases carefully and with outmost compassion because these people are patients and need love as well, if we cast them out we will just make them angry and resentful causing them to cause more harm to take revenge for what has happened to them.
What I found facinating about the Typhoid Mary story was how a person can carry a disease, but not be sick with the disease and then sometimes test positive and then negative for the disease. Where does the pathogen go when she tests negative for it? Is the test not sensitive enough or does the disease really go into such a dormant stage that it is not detectable? Is this particular to Typhoid or does this happen with other diseases?
ReplyDeleteWe know from lecture that Lyme disease and Syphilis have latent stages. If you test someone during that latent stage will the bacteria still show up in the blood? If not, really, where is it? Now that I think about it, it is sort of the same with Chicken Pox and how a person can get Shingles later without warning.
During the second part of the show it was amazing how far back they could trace the HIV virus. It is exciting to think that they could take the knowlede acquired and track emerging disease. What a boon it would be to humanity to stop a deadly disease before it became an epidemic or pandemic.
This was very interesting to listen to. I think it is interesting that a person (Typhoid Mary) would go around and specifically try to get others infected. This was able to show me just how easy it is for diseases to spread, especially if the infected person does not know he or she is infected (by not knowing or testing a false negative). I know that some diseases have latent periods, such as lyme disease, so when a person is tested while in the latent period, the disease might not show up, therefore giving a false negative. I think that it is interesting the idea of a patient zero. We know that it is hard to find the very first case in some diseases, such as HIV. I think that Mary was patient zero for Typhoid, however, I think that it would be extremely hard for us to be able to find the patient zero for HIV. I honestly thought it was really cool how far back they were able to trace back the HIV virus. Viruses and diseases are dangerous because we do not always know who is infected and where the infection lies. I think that one day we will probably have better technology to trace back even farther into the past to see where diseases in HIV came from.
ReplyDeleteR.Davis
T/Th
What I found the most interesting of this was that those that are infected,are asymptomatic and sometimes test negative. I fell that even though it is latent in your body, that it is still there and should be positive,but its not! that is crazy.
ReplyDeleteIts amazing that with all of todays technology and studies they were able to show how far back HIV has been around. That shows great advances and how far we are coming along.
Thyhoid mary and Dugas going around and spreading there disease to others was sickening. Why do they think its okay to give others their disease, they know how horrible it can be and still infect others. This makes my stomach turn!
K.Hamilton