Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Zika Virus

Episode Date: February 4, 2016

This week on Sawbones, a new disease is taking the world by storm and Sydnee and Justin are there to explain what everyone is so freaked out about. Well, Sydnee explains. Justin freaks out. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books! One, two, one, two, three, four! We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We pushed on through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

Some medicines, some medicines, the escalant macaque for the mouth. Hello everybody, welcome to Saw Bones, my little tour of Miss Cided medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McElroy and I'm Sydney McElroy Welcome to the shows Thank you Justin. Welcome to you too. Welcome to you at home. Welcome to all of you. This is weird This is a very special. It's a very special because of saw bones because we have a new setup For our microphones and we're looking at each other and that's new. Usually we kind of like give each other a side eye. This might be the first time Justin's ever looked at me.

And you know what, you're as beautiful as I imagine, if not more so. We usually face the world like same direction facing the threats. Not just staring at each other. Like lost in love and romance. So it's kind of like a different solvents this week's it. It is. For our new mic setup, we decided to try something a little, it's not really different.

We've done shows that are a little more, I don't wanna say serious, although it is serious. This show in particular doesn't delve quite as much into ancient history and the stupid stuff we did in the medieval times and that kind of stuff, like a traditional saw bones episode does, because a lot of people have asked us to talk about Zika virus.

Right, and usually, there's not the first ones he jumped onto for variety reasons, for one, there's not the first ones he jumped onto for variety reasons. For one, there's not usually a lot of like prior knowledge. We like the ones where it's all fixed because that makes it look smart. Exactly. We, like, ones, there's a long history of people like, I don't know what you have, but I should probably put a leech on you or, right, I made this thing out of toxic substances and leaves.

Why don't you paste your whole body in it and then run out and make it in a full moon? Those are much more entertaining. And the thing about viruses, specifically like Zika, is that they were discovered a little more recently. And I mean, not yet recently in the grand scheme of things, pretty recently. And there's not a whole lot of crazy stuff we ever did in the past for us to laugh about. Yeah. So it's a little harder to make funny.

But we are, so we're not going to try to make Zika virus funny because that doesn't make any sense. We're just going to try to tell you about it. Tell you about it. Do our best. And I want to, since Zika virus is a fairly narrow topic, we'll talk a little bit about mosquitoes first. Because they're the pits. Yeah, they are the pits. I saw in one article as I was reading about this, them described as flying hypodarmic needles. Sure. It's pretty fair. Yeah. They're terrible,

and I hate them. And so I thought we'd start by talking about mosquitoes and maybe some related viruses, and then I'll give you the scoop as far as I can tell from this doctor's perspective on Zika. So thank you to everybody who recommended this topic, specifically Tamra, Sean, Daniel, Marguerite, Persephone, Andrea, Carly, and her high school students who are here to learn about Zika and Gloria. Thank you guys so much and everybody else. I know a lot of other people tweeted and said, hey, what's up with Zika? All right, it would really bug me if we didn't talk about mosquitoes first. So let's do it. That was the one and only joke you will hear in this podcast.

It was a pun about insects. It is the only joke you'll hear. I plan on repeating it a multiple times. Oh, excellent. Good. So everybody at home just turn it off now. So mosquitoes have been around for at least four million years as far as we know and they've probably been causing disease for a good bit of that time, although

we didn't know it until much more recently. They have definitely been drinking blood for that long, so they've had the potential to cause disease for that long. We really have, like Justin you you're gonna get so excited. You know, we've really found mosquitoes in amber, like trapped in amber from the Jurassic period. It's. And like, they've had blood meals still inside their little mosquito bodies.

Like, that's true that we found that. So far away. It's torturous to know that there's Dino, D&I. Just like lying around out there and we can't do a thing with it. I'm not that we should. Life finds a way. I don't know that, I mean, maybe I don't know that we can't do. That is not my area of expertise.

You should be a little less concerned with whether or not you can and be a little more concerned with whether or not you should. You know how excited I get when you quote Jeff Goldblum at me. Okay. That's just gonna be my whole night now. Wait till I get switched to Earth Girls are easy. I got a lot of those. Especially when you're looking me right in the eye.

Yeah. Just don't start quoting the fly or else I'm done for. Yeah. Just make all those gooshy noises that he makes at the end. I haven't seen the fly, I don't think. What? Right now I know that he makes gooshy noises at the end so spoiler alert.

So it's ruined. Yeah, that really, you know what said that really bugs me They you ruined that movie for me to fly Number two number two for the for the drinking game that goes along with this episode. That was number two Throughout human history you may know this Justin. I don't know if you would I don't know if you would know this a nice Sentiment, well, I mean, you know, this is one of those fun facts that like, I guess that I would like bring out at a party and then everybody else at the party would look at me like, is that your idea of a conversation starter?

More people have died from mosquito-borne illnesses than from any other single cause in the history of humanity. That does not surprise me. They do a lot of really whack crap. That's true. That's true. But I'd bet that many more than like war or famine or any other single disease. That is wild, yeah.

Yeah. They still cause about a million deaths a year around half of those are still from malaria, although the stats get better and better every year from that, which is very promising. It's funny, because as you're looking for those kinds of numbers, it's really important that you see, you know, for a lot of things like if it's 2013 or 2014 or 2015, the numbers aren't that different for diseases, but it's nice to see something, and we've done a whole show on malaria, so I'm not going to talk about it again, but like it's nice to

see the numbers from malaria drop each year, the deaths from malaria. So like we're doing better. We are fighting back. There are about 3000 species of mosquitoes, not all carry disease of course. Most, this is important for a lot of the disease processes and why certain diseases exist in some places in the world and not in others.

The way that mosquitoes lay their eggs for the most part, not all but most, They lay them in wraps. Did you know that? Like on water? They have like a raft of eggs. Oh, cool. Like gross. That's what the movie without a paddle was about, right?

It was about that shepherd and those cats just like cruising out of like a mosquito egg raft. On a mosquito, yes, I think. Without a paddle. And like, there's a time limit because you know at some point They're gonna hatch and then you're just in the water and they were shrunk down I think by Wayne Zalinski's Ray from Honey Ash Young to kids That's another part of the movie and without a paddle too my sequel to without a paddle

And then it's also like the movie speed where like you have to go you have to keep it a certain coolness once it's warmer The eggs will hatch maybe I don't know this is hatch. Maybe, I don't know. This is a great movie. I don't know how mosquito eggs work, but I'm into it. No, I don't think they work that way, but it would be cool if they did. So there are about one to 400 eggs in these wraps, and it has to be on like still water. So it actually wouldn't work on like a river.

You need more like a pond or a lake, or like a bucket of water. The traditional is like we think of places where there are like pools of standing water, you know. I see one of these. Should I just ruin it? I should like ruin it, right? Okay, you know, I'm not going to say no. Yeah, I mean, they seem like there's lots of mosquitoes. I don't think you're going to endanger them. That's true. They're they're running around. That way it would gross me out, so I personally wouldn't. In the same place where the eggs are, the raft of eggs, they will hatch into larva and then pupa stages, and then eventually the adults will pop out, and they'll kind of hang out on the water

until they're strong enough to take off and start annoying all of us. Here's just one interesting mosquito fact for you that I stumbled across that is horrifying. Do you know that they used to execute people by mosquito in Alaska? What? So in places where there's cold weather, mosquitoes like warmer weather. So places where there's colder weather, they have, they've adapted their life cycles to be very short during the, the warmest, the warmest period in that climate. Really carpe in the DM.

Exactly. So, they're very short. The life cycle of the mosquito in Alaska in a lot of colder places is very short, but it's extremely intense. So, in that tiny period of time where there are lots of mosquitoes, there's lots of mosquitoes. And so one way that they would, that I read, that they could execute people is to put them in a canoe naked and then just send them down the Yukon. And you would die of one of two ways.

You would either, obviously, get bitten by so many mosquitoes that you bleed to death, you sanguanaate essentially, you're just you know any maker than you die or you would suffocate on mosquitoes Because they're so thick in the air. That's a rough run. That's awful. That's really bad That's a lot of mosquitoes. It's so laborious, too Like they uh So don't do something bad in Alaska. But like, can you, but like flip side, if you, if this is a podcast hosted by mosquitoes, they would be telling us we're like, I never believed it would happen to me. They put a human being in a rat and just floated him

and he was just there for everybody to enjoy. It was the best day of my life. And I was so glad I took, you know, I'm gonna stay home that day. I did. I almost stayed home. I was like, I'm just gonna watch Dr. Phil and chill out here. And I want to miss it. And that's still, I get shuttered to this day thinking about that. I could have missed it. And that was the first mosquito Thanksgiving. Mm-hmm.

It really puts it in perspective. Not really. Really? Really puts it in perspective. Doesn't it? Oh Are you turkey eaters? We are too. I'm not judging anybody. Really in turkey. Sorry. Anyway.

So how did we figure out that these little flying hypodermic needles cause disease? If you needed another reason to dislike them. So the first thing that we kind of figured out and then everything followed from there was malaria. The reason being, and again, we've done a whole episode on malaria, so I'm not going to talk about it a lot, but it was the biggest problem. So a lot of people were trying to figure out, you know, where does malaria come from, how do people get it?

You know, malaria, they think was from bad air, malair. You know, get it. Anyway, in the 1890s, a British scientist named Ronald Ross was able to prove his theory that mosquitoes carried malaria by finding the malaria parasite inside of a mosquito. They'd already seen some parasites in ticks, so that's where they got this idea, like, well, if ticks can carry things, maybe other blood sucking creatures can. And then that's when, once they figured out, oh, hey, mosquitoes can carry malaria, then they started trying to investigate everything else.

Like, what about all these other weird diseases that we don't know where people get them? And so... It was probably mosquitoes. Spoiler alert, history. So I want to talk about, before I talk about Zika, I want to talk about one, there are a lot of different viruses in this certain family that are similar to Zika. Denge is one of them. There's yellow fever, which I think we've talked about some before. Yeah, I think we did a yellow fever.

I don't... I think we did a whole yellow fever episode on Walter Reed. Right. Yeah, so we've talked about yellow fever before. This is part of the Flava virus, genus, the family Flava Veride. So they're all related. Do you need to make a Flava Flava joke? No sweetheart. I saw I saw you get excited. What I did what I

almost said was insert your own flavioke joke here, but that's something people say as Jesse Thorne or network boss point out that's something people say when they can't come up with a joke. So I'm not going to say that because I couldn't come up with it. I'm not gonna fake like I could. All right. Well here's the good news. Zika is also in the flame of flame of Irida family. So you've got some time. If you, you know, if you want to come up with a joke like that, we have a whole other virus to talk about. Well, no, it is, I'll be honest though, it's really bugging me that I can't

come up with one. But again, there's number three. These are slow drinkers tonight. So you're gonna have to speed it up. So, dengue, which is part of this family, is an important virus to talk about because about 390 million people each year get dengue fever, which is actually one of four different viruses that can cause the same kind of syndrome. They're related. So we're going to talk about the syndrome as opposed to each specific virus. Okay. And Dango has also in more recent years, we've seen some cases in the US. You may have...

I think I remember this. Yeah. It seems like every... I'm not lumping Zika in with this because I think it's probably different. And also I don't know enough about it to sort of these conclusions. Not yet. Not yet, but hopefully by the end. It seems like every year, there's something pops up in the US.

It's like all of a sudden it's popping off here and we should be specifically mosquito related, like West Nile, for example. Something pops up and it's like, hey, everybody freak out. Mosquito suck again. Mosquito suck. Well, yeah, and we'll talk about, at the end, I want to talk a little bit more

about mosquitoes in general, but that is one of the problems with mosquito-borne illnesses. And there are lots of reasons we're seeing them more in the U.S. and I know right now there are people yelling, like climate change, climate change, and that is part of why. You know, as it gets warmer, it's more amenable to mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are traveling further north, and so we're seeing mosquito-borne illnesses. But they're also, as we travel more, it's really easy to, you know, I mean, how does a mosquito-borne illness work?

Think about it. I can't pass it to you. I don't get dangae and give Justin dangae. I get dangae and then a mosquito would have to bite me and then bite Justin and pass dengue along to him. So it's not easy to do if you've just got like one person with it. Right.

But as you have more and more people traveling all over the world and getting exposed to this stuff, you're exposing mosquitoes to it too. So you're carrying it home as long as there is the right type of mosquito. But if you carry that home and then those mosquitoes bite you. It seems like for it, tell me if I'm wrong, for a disease vector, mosquitoes don't seem like, particularly effective when compared with things like airborne.

Is that not true? Is that not? Well, I mean, yeah, if you're comparing it to airborne for the potential to just like, you know, hit a whole population at once very quickly, but it's a very effective vector because mosquito is multiply quickly and there are tons of them, and you can't go out and as we have seen in history, we're not very good at eradicating them. Although I'll talk about that too, we might be getting better at it.

Nice. Watch your back. And I think for no other reason, I think the prevalence and the difficulty we've had getting malaria under control would speak to just how effective mosquitoes can be. But you're right, we are seeing more and more of these kinds of things. And you mentioned West Nile, that's in the same family actually. Some of the other in cephalolidides and cephalitis causing viruses, Japanese and cephalitis. There's a whole family that are very similar. Dangae is one we like to talk about.

Some of the names people find very, like kind of mysterious and spooky, like we call it break bone fever. That's a bad one. Yeah, yeah, that scares people. It was actually, you know, even called for a while, dandy fever? That's much better.

Yeah, that one sounds okay. I'd like to have a dandy fever. I could a while, dandy fever? That's much better. That one sounds okay. I'd like to have a dandy fever. I could do a little dandy fever. And it has probably been more clinically significant throughout human history than Zika has until very recently. You know, about half of patients who get dangle are actually asymptomatic, meaning they don't know they got it.

Some get like a mild febrile illness meaning like they just kind of get a fever and they feel kind of yucky and then they're fine and they probably never knew they had dengue because then they got better and they didn't go to the doctor. Others actually get true dengue fever or dengue hemorrhagic fever and this is one like the break bone fever comes into play where and the reason it's called that is because you feel like your bones are breaking. That was one of the ways the first time I went to Honduras they told me that I might see some cases of Dengue. I actually only saw one the whole time I was there but they said you

know it's important to know the difference between malaria and Dengue and one of the things that they can point out is that people with malaria clearly don't feel good. I mean you can tell like they look like they don't feel well. People with dangere and pain. And I saw that in the one patient that I saw dangere is that they definitely have that severe pain. Um, and then dangere hemorrhagic fever moves on to like bleeding and rashes and your liver can get enlarged and you get really sick. You can die from dangere hemorrhagic fever.

It's a big deal. Um, it was it probably is a lot older in the grand scheme of things. We see descriptions of what was probably Denge in like an ancient Chinese medical encyclopedia that dates back to like the gen dynastate. It's like 992 or something where they speak of what they call a water poison that is transmitted by flying insects. Okay. Yeah. So that's all right. And they described that kind of pain that we think they're probably talking about dengue.

So dengue has been around and recognized and even maybe associated with mosquitoes for a really long time. Well, but- It's pretty smart. Like I'm pretty impressed. Yes. It's a pretty good job Chinese medicine guys.

Yeah, and you find instances like this, right? We talk about this a lot on the show pretty impressed. Yes. It's a pretty good job Chinese medicine guys. Yeah. And you find instances like this, right? We talk about this a lot on the show where it seems like somebody in ancient times figured something out that was super important and then we collectively forgot it for. Thanks, the dark age is hundreds of years. Hundreds of years. And then we figured it out again like in the last century or whatever, you know, in the last two centuries.

If I'm going to be transported back to the dark ages, I'm just going to walk around and then we figured it out again, like in the last century or whatever, you know, in the last two centuries. If I'm gonna be transported back to the Dark Ages, I'm just gonna walk around shoving people into wells. Those people, those other, bring me your medicine men. I'm gonna shove them into what your wizard's probably though, it's probably what you call them. What about the butterfly effect? The butterfly, what have I,

my name is Ignatius McAurinius. Oh no, you're my great-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-, you're my great-great-great-great-grandfather. Oh no, I'm disappearing. Oh! And all I know is I'm sitting there and I'm holding a picture, a Polaroid, probably of you. Of me. And you're slowly disappearing from it. But if I killed him, how could I have gone back and killed him in the first place?

Uh-oh, Paradox, world splits open. Sorry, I guess you finally saw the mosquito problem because the time stopped. Okay, but much scarier than all that. Did you just run back to the future for me? No, sweet. All right. No, you were in the fly for me. So the word dangay, it's interesting where it comes from. It may come from a Swahili phrase that translates to cramp like seizure caused by an evil spirit. They have a phrase for that, do they? Yes, that's my what a robust language. Or it might, which it seems likely to be because that seems like a pretty good description in the Denge.

My favorite word is the Swahili phrase. That means that feeling when you feel like you might have left your checkbook at home, but you're not sure, but you don't really have time to drive back and get it, so you just gotta go ahead and go to the store anyway. That's Swahili, that classic Swahili word. Are you still using a checkbook often? No, Siddharj is the first thing you came up with in my mind, okay? Sheesh.

It may also come from the Spanish word Denge, which means careful, like, or fistidious, which it would be a reference to when people have Denge, they like, they walk very delicately, which it would be a reference to when people have Dengue, they like, they walk very delicately because they hurt so much. That's actually where the term Dandy fever also comes from because they said that people who, it used to be said that people who had Dengue would walk like a Dandy, like very delicately. Yeah.

So like a very, and I think by that they meant like at the time period, like a very finely dressed gentleman would walk, walk very properly and delicately so as not to disturb anything that he was wearing or any of your bones that were like hurting really badly Right, okay It didn't spread all over until the 1700s And that's when we see like all of these instances of descriptions of Denge and people trying to figure out like where did this come from and why did it spread all over? Cause we did. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, we built big giant boats

and we took people all over the world in them and what did we take with us? People. Mosquitoes. Yes. Yes. So we took mosquitoes all over the world and people carrying diseases that then infected mosquitoes

and mosquitoes infected people and on and on and on. And that's when Benjamin Rush actually dubbed it break bone fever. So some interesting old cures for Dange, there weren't a lot. People really didn't know what to do. They just hoped you got better. Which they're really supportive management is all we do now. In 1771, Dr. Sabateur in Puerto Rico was the first one to advise any kind of cure, then it was rum. Go for it.

Good as any, I guess. Benjamin Rush, who we've talked about before, who loved bloodletting for, and he was one of the signers of Declaration of Independence and one of our founding fathers and also father of psychiatry. He loved bloodletting for like everything, except for Denge, which was a good idea since a lot of people did get hemorrhaging with Denge. Instead, he proposed like laxatives and emetics, meaning things that make you puke, rest, a liquid diet, and also something called tartar emetic, which I only mentioned

because this has been used a lot throughout like bad medicine history. Tartar emetic is a really powerful puking substance. It's called antimony potassium tartarate is actually what it's made of. It's a chemical substance. It used to also be used for parasite infections until we found better stuff for that.

And you could make it, this is what's cool. You could get cups made of antimony, that compound antimony, and then you could pour wine into it and leave it for 24 hours, and it would create this substance. Weird. And so then you could sit there and sip the wine out of your antimony cup,

and when it was effective, you'd know because you'd start hurling, and then it was working. And then you didn't get got better? Yes. No, but anyway. Said, this is all very interesting, but I'm trying to freak out about Zika over here, so if you could help me with some of that information, I would greatly appreciate it.

Well, that is exactly what I'm going to tell you about next, but first, why don't we head to the Billing Department? Let's go! The medicines, the medicines, the escalate my cards for the mouth! Hi, I'm Sydney McElroy, and I'm Riley Smirl, and we co-host a podcast called Still Buffering, a Sisters Guide to Teams Through the Hays. On our show, we tackle all of the hot teen topics that kids have on their minds today. Hot teen topics? Well, you know that the questions that are that are plaguing teenagers through their tumultuous growing years questions like how do I party or what do I do with all this hair everywhere the same questions that people like Sydney had during their years as teenagers

many many many okay not that so so long ago Yeah, okay, I think they get the. So search for still buffering on iTunes or maximumfund.org for new episodes every Tuesday. Still buffering. I am a teenager and I was too. I'm ready to wait a long enough to tell me about the Zika virus. All right, so Zika virus. In 1947, not that long ago really, some researchers in Uganda took a recess monkey and put it in a cage and set it in a treetop in the Zika forest. On the

western edge of Lafictoria, now, why would they do this strange thing? They were working for the Rockefeller Institute and they were studying yellow fever and the goal was to, unfortunately, get this monkey infected with yellow fever. They knew that mosquitoes carried that and so they were basically, it was mosquito bait. And they knew monkeys hated it? Yes. And then they didn't like... When they say having yellow fever, oh, the piss. I think everybody does. The monkey did get sick. So they succeeded, except it didn't get sick with LVR. So they examined the monkey and figured out

they isolated a brand new virus as far as humans were concerned, probably not a brand new virus in terms of like evolutionary history, but as far as we knew about. And it was Dub Zika, after the Zika forest, where it was found, which is actually the word for overgrown, because it's a big overgrown forest. They figured out that it was, that they started looking like, well, this is probably also a mosquito born illness, because at this point we were pretty familiar that this was a thing that happened. And they found it in an 80s mosquito which is a common. It was like listening to the

bunch like Billy Idol and the bangles. That's exactly right. Go into the mall. Yeah, I have really big hair. Deep in the Tiffany. That's, that was good. I like that. Thanks. Yes. So no, it was AEDES, is this sort of, yeah, DNA, some mosquito, which is commonly carries different viruses. And they found the Zika virus inside the mosquitoes as well.

So now we know this mosquito carries that these monkeys can get it. Here we go. This is where it comes from. And really, up until 2007, we didn't really care much about Zika virus. We found it sometimes in people we would find evidence like that they would have antibodies against it. We would do studies and say like, oh, this person has had Zika virus at some point in their life,

but the person would have no recollection of any particular terrible illness. And then sometimes we would see cases but but they were usually sporadic and honestly people didn't get that sick. So, you don't worry about it. And it was in that same kind of band around the center of the earth where these types of mosquitoes mainly live is where we would see it. However, in 2007, we start to see some more cases that were a little bit like larger outbreaks

and a little bit more significant. When people did get sick, most of them, they just got like a mild fever and like some achy joints and some rashes, conjunctivitis, meaning your eyes get red is a big one, hallmark kind of of the disease that a lot of people get. But most people, still we're getting, I mean, but everybody was still getting better. I mean, not just most people, everybody was getting better. I mean, we get sick but they got better.

So in 2007, there was this outbreak on the island of Yap in the South Pacific. There were about a hundred cases. Sounds like Dr. Schoo's look out. It does. The island of Yap. I thought that, because Yap is what all the hues yell. Yeah, I think it's what I was thinking about.

But it's not, it's a real place I believe you think I'm Zika about I didn't think you'd brought in a doctor's use location to try to trip me up You win you found it the fake location. I made up to trick Justin They they had traveled to the jungle of you all to So so there were about a hundred cases at reported they actually checked people out later and found that most of the people on the island were probably exposed to it, but only a hundred people got sick. And then they saw slightly bigger outbreaks in 2013. French Polynesia saw a huge outbreak, like 28,000 people got sick.

Most of them again, with a pretty mild illness, but this is when we start to see some little scarier stuff. Some neurological consequences happen and a small percentage of people who got it, and about it's like 70 or so people had some neurological problems, and then some even developed Guillain Baray, who's kind of like temporary paralysis that can happen after certain illnesses. So some people got pretty sick, it was a little scarier, but most people who got it, again, got better on their own pretty quickly. Weren't that sick to begin with.

And then again, they found that a lot of people were exposed and never showed symptoms or anything. So this brings us up to 2015 last year. And this is when things start to get kind of scary. So we start to see an outbreak in Brazil in April, which was a new place for Zika, by the way. We had never seen Zika virus in Brazil until this past year. Now, how did it get there, by the way? Probably sports. Thanks, Ford. Probably the World Cup. That's our theory. We don't know. That's just one theory. Is it, you know, there was a reason for a lot of people to be

traveling for a lot of different places. If there is a theory that can assign large amounts of blame for a serious issue to sports, are the kids going to take the hour? Okay. Yeah. That's the one. Thank you very much. There are a lot of football fans all over the world right now who are very mad at you. I mean, like football, like actual football, like footy. Not a football day in North America now. Exactly. So they see outbreaks of it again in about April and Brazil. Same kind of thing where most people are getting

like a self-limited illness, mild symptoms, and getting better. So people aren't very excited about it at that point. The reason we're talking about it now is because of what we started seeing in this past October, so really recently. Dr. started noticing a drastic increase in cases of something called microcephaly. Microcephaly is actually a congenital problem, so babies are born with this condition, and it is when the microcephaly refers to the fact that the head appears smaller, and it's

associated with brain under development. So, these children are going to have some degree of delay. And up until then, in Brazil, up until this past year, you see this anyway. You see this occasionally. This is something that isn't only caused by a virus. But there were about 147, I think, in the year prior cases of microcephaly. Last year, there were over 4,000. That's a really significant jump. And so, obviously, doctors in Brazil started looking into what could have caused this. Something has happened. And that's when they start being able to isolate the Zika virus from amniotic fluid in some of these mothers. Now this link is not a hundred percent for sure known. We suspect it.

Even at this moment. Yes, even at this moment. We highly suspect it. We think that this is definitely a possible cause, but we're still studying the pregnancies and the children that were born with us everywhere that we're seeing this to try to a hundred percent prove that this is, in fact, the cause. But it's a high suspicion at this point, so it is something we're gonna take seriously. We started to see cases in other countries now, Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico.

The US has had a few cases you've probably heard about. They weren't actually, and this is important to know, this distinction, people aren't getting it in the US. They're bringing it back to the US from places where it is already in the endemic. Right. Okay. So that's a big distinction as far as how concerned should you be about it being passed around your community right now.

Right. There was a baby born in Hawaii with microcephaly, which has caused a lot of panic there. And I think a lot of island areas would be worried. Yeah. But microcephaly, which has caused a lot of panic there. And I think a lot of island areas would be worried. Yeah, but microcephaly is not only caused by this. No, it's not. It's not. So that's why we're still trying to investigate if all these cases are linked to Zika or not. Right.

So now, in reaction to the CDC, the CDC has issued travel warnings to basically all of us and then specifically pregnant women that's who we're really targeting with this about any kind of affected areas. So travel warnings to, there are a lot of different countries, Brazil of course, in Colombian, El Salvador, and there's a whole list, you can look it all up on the CDC if you're thinking of traveling, I would do that.

Yeah. Go to the CDC website and there's tons of information. It's always do actually before you travel. Actually, yeah, anytime you're gonna travel, go to the CDC and go to the CDC website and there's tons of information. It's always do actually before you travel. Actually, yeah. Anytime you're going to travel, go to the CDC and go to the National Institute of Medicine. Go see your doctor. Go to your doctor. Go see your doctor for a travel health visit.

And then there are also countries that are also issuing these travel warnings. And then there are some countries that are urging women to delay pregnancy as a result of the SL Salvador Jamaica, Colombia, Brazil. They're all basically saying, hey, try not to get pregnant for a while until we kind of figure this thing out. The thing is the virus is gonna go where the mosquitoes are. Right.

We have these mosquitoes here. Right? The only places that conceivably we probably won't see the virus in North and South America would be Canada and Chile Everywhere else is at risk. They just don't because of the climate. Okay. Um There's illnesses There was just I just saw this actually like two days ago

There was a cuz a suspected case before and now we have a confirmed case that it it actually can be passed from person to person But that's not quite as scary as if the mosquitoes flying around us are carrying that. But again, it's not pregnant, right? For most people know, in Zika virus, but yes, the majority of people who get it are gonna get sick and get better and be fine. Be aware of these travel warnings, be aware of this,

you know, go to the CDC if you're thinking of doing any travel anymore, because that's our best bet at this point, right? Do you know why mosquitoes bite humans? Aspects of our scent. There are actually 400 compounds that make up human sense, and so those actually make us less likely to be bitten by mosquitoes.

But there are about 10% of people who because of due to overcome that. Although you will read about like eat a bunch of garlic or avoid salt or don't eat anything. And this isn't like an ancient problem. In Egypt, they would put castor oil and lamps in ancient Rome. They would put vinegar all over their bodies. All throughout history, we've tried burning different things

to scare away mosquitoes, fish, snakeskin, feathers, burn a coconut to try to ward off mosquitoes. But what I would say is that if you really want to avoid mosquitoes, and this is not a popular position, use DEET. If you go to the CDC, that's what they're going to tell you to do. If you're going to an area, especially, and I've done it, in my travels, when I've gone to malaria areas, areas where malaria is endemic, I've used DEET, and I know that that is scary

for a lot of people, but that is still the recommendation. There are other choices. Pickerid and oil of lemon eucalyptus is effective. So if you don't want to use Deat, these are other options that repel mosquitoes. There's a compound called IR3535, so write that down. So it's a little bit creepier than Deat. These are all in over the counter mosquito repellents. So if any of these are in there, they're probably gonna work against mosquitoes. Cover yourself where light-colored clothes,

long sleeve clothes, long pants, be indoors if possible. Sure. Air conditioning can help. Window and door screens are a huge thing. Just having window screens and door screens, hugely, in areas where there was malaria, adding those greatly decreased

deaths from malaria, just window screens. Nets, of course, to sleep under if you're going to be somewhere, you know, I mean, not in the US, but if you're going outside the US. And then things that attract mosquitoes are movement and heat and sweat, especially old sweat, because then it has germs in it. And mosquitoes like old sweat with bacteria in it. Gritty. Now I read an argument that we should kill off all the mosquitoes. Yeah, I wrote it.

Did you write it? I wrote it. It was a really interesting argument that people... Like an argument from a science person or an argument from just like a dude. From a dude. For me dude. But he now to be fair,

he interviewed a lot of scientists before he made his argument, okay, and What he was saying is So we've tried to kind of do this before with DDT We tried to kill off a lot of mosquitoes the fact is mosquitoes were actually whatever you want to say about DDT Whether it was you know because there's a lot of contention about that was it really that harmful or not? One thing is that mosquitoes got resistant to it pretty quickly. So whether or not it was the most effective way

to kill mosquitoes would be a whole other question. I think it would work for brief periods of time. But we're finding better ways to kill mosquitoes with genetic engineering. Great. That's not creepy at all. No, it's pretty creepy. They found ways to introduce like genetically sterilized

mosquitoes into populations to try to basically like end their line, which is scary. They found ways to just create like male mosquito, like to program all the mosquitoes so that they can only give birth to males. That's cool And then they'll end mosquitoes not a fan. No, thank you. They tried x-raying them to sterilize them for a while, but mosquitoes are really fragile and so they just died. Yeah, that doesn't work. But there's this whole conversation does work It can't x-ray them all. No, but like you would have to discerralize them, Sydney. They even tried this way. It's crazy. You didn't think through this. They even tried this thing where they would like put jeans and mosquitoes that would just make

them really susceptible to something. And then what you would do is you would engineer all these mosquitoes and then like make them heartier than other mosquitoes and then introduce them into the population. So they would outlast and outlive all of the other mosquitoes. And then what you would do is you would engineer all these mosquitoes and then like make them heartier than other mosquitoes and then introduce them into the population. So they would outlast and outlive all of the other mosquitoes. And then it could be that like this one pesticide kills them all or they're all vulnerable to this temperature. So as soon as it hits, you know, you put a kill switch in there and you flip the kill switch and they're brain shafts down. Well, or as soon as it hits like 88 degrees Fahrenheit, mosquitoes, or a mouse per hour,

it goes back to back to back to the future. I've seen it. I know. But should we kill all the mosquitoes? You're up. Um, I don't know. It makes. I don't know. That makes me it makes me concerned. I guess that's also very easy for me to say, as somebody who does not live in an area where these things are so hugely prevalent and devastating.

Exactly, and right now we don't know that they hold this really super important place in the web of life, like with all ecosystems collapse, if mosquitoes disappeared, I don't know, but isn't that enough reason not to do it? I don't know. I don't know with it.

Like we're wiping out enough stuff just accidentally for rather not hey But this has been super long and I think it's been interesting But I want to like some of that I feel we didn't really like hit that I want to like kind of your opinion on it And I know that a lot of this will be Conjecture so I want to I want to say that first but like You when we did our episode about Ebola, it was very much about like,

here are the reasons why for a certain group of people, most of the people who would be listening to the show, probably not like a panic moment. Like, what should, what should like our freak out meter about Zika be? And what do we know that, like, what do we know or not know that would affect that sort of ruling. I think that if you're listening to the show and you don't live in one of the countries where Zika is in Dima right now, you shouldn't be freaking out about it. You really shouldn't. I mean, unless you just traveled there or you're about to travel there or something that I would be, I would never advise freaking out.

It doesn't really matter. But I would advise being cautious if you're in those situations. Otherwise, I mean, like for us living in West Virginia, there's no reason to be concerned about it. If Zika, we'll probably see some Zika transmission in the US eventually. If it follows the course of a lot of these other mosquito-borne illnesses, we may see that probably on sorry Southern states, and then the more Southern states, it's more likely first. But the fact is, if you're talking about this scary scenario that people like to paint

for you, that somebody has traveled to Brazil, and then they've come back to some area in the US, Northern US, wherever, somewhere where they probably wouldn't have gotten it quickly anyway. And then they get bitten by a mosquito, and then that mosquito infects a person, and then they infect another mosquito. And like, that would be so hard to do with just one person having Zika virus. I mean, it's pretty much impossible.

That kind of scenario just is, in that sense, you're right about mosquitoes. They're not a very efficient vector. If you have one person infected to try to infect an entire population of mosquitoes, that's crazy. That's not gonna happen. So even though we have the right mosquito

and it's conceivable we could have the virus here. It has to be a spray, it will radiate. It will not like insert itself. It would radiate from other areas. Exactly. You may see tiny little outbreaks here and there, but the other thing that's also very helpful in a lot of places in the US is sanitation.

Mm, sure. You don't have, I mean, that's been the biggest thing with malaria is that mosquitoes like big pools of standing water to lay their egraphs in. If you don't have, I mean, if you have pretty decent sanitation, you don't have a lot of big pools of standing water around your house. Yeah, and I bet think about, like, especially if you talk about what's happening in Brazil right now, there's construction everywhere I'm certain.

Exactly. That's going to lead to tons of, you know, standing water and, and, uh, concentration of human beings. Exactly. People working outdoors, like it's like a hot bed. It's perfect and those are the kinds of situations It would be more concerning. I would say certainly for the Olympics. Should we see the public? Cancer the Olympics You know, I've thought I've had that thought like what it what will be the plan about the Olympics? I mean I mean, maybe they control it like maybe we get our And a lot of these people are gonna be inside and they're gonna be wondering outside Again, like you said though if the concern is let's like like if the concern is these people all spread out back to

Their home country and bring it home. It's not like that. That's very unlikely to happen It's just not it's not an efficient way to do it. You can't, you can't infect enough mosquitoes who could then affect, infect enough people who could then infect enough mosquitoes and so on and so forth. Yeah. To do it that way. So, and also we're, we're working on a vaccine because that's the best way to control this, honestly. And, you know, we, we have made vaccines. I think a great corollary I read about this against other viruses that probably aren't that big a deal, but because of the congenital effects of it, it's a big deal. Rubella is a great example.

If you got Rubella, you'd probably be fine. If you get Rubella and you're pregnant, it's a huge deal. And so I think Zika would fall into that same category where a vaccine is going to be, I mean, we're going to make one because we're good at that, right? Sorry, we are. Humans are going to make a vaccine and then we'll be okay. But until we make the vaccine, I would be cautious. I wouldn't freak out though.

And honestly, if you don't live somewhere where it's already being transmitted, you should really be spending your worry on other people and hoping that they're okay. And not so worried about yourself right now. Because you're fine. There's a good news. I just said you're fine.

You're fine. I wanna give a big plug to Still Buffering. It's a new podcast from Sydney and her sister Riley where they talk about Teenage life comparing Sydney's life to teenager to Riley's current existence You are in for a treat with their second episode, which is all about technology and communication technology specifically Hearing Riley freak out about the idea of chat rooms is outstanding and I would recommend the entire episode. You can find that by searching iTunes for Stillbuffering or you can go to teengoogle.com to find all the Stillbuffering. Thank you, Justin.

Stillbuffering you need. There's a lot of other shows in the Max-Bum Fun Network, Schmanners is another great one that my brother Travis just launched, which is Wyfe Theresa, who's something of an etiquette expert, sort of like a, a, a, she's who I turn to. Yeah, she's, yeah, she's a person we ask about this kind of stuff. And she's hosting a sort of etiquette in the modern era

show called Schmanners, like manner Schmanners get it. But that's an iTunes as well. And it's also Maximum Fun Network. There's a ton of other shows. Oh, also, if you're new to the bachelor, check out Rosebuddies. It's on iTunes and my brother Griffin hosts it with his wife Rachel. It's really funny even if you don't listen to the show. I really, I really dig it. But those are just a few of the things that are happening right now. We got a lot more for you. If you got a Mackelroy shows.com,

you can find pretty much all the stuff we're doing right now. If you're curious about it, we're spinning up new things regularly for the people. But we have- For you, our people. For you, our people love. Hey, we don't ask this a lot, but if you've found Zika's kind of a hot topic right now, if you've found this interesting or educational or reassuring or anything, please share it with a friend. Please send somebody a link and say, hey, or put it on your Facebook or Twitter or whatever.

It would really help us out a lot, especially if you point people towards our iTunes page so they can leave us a review or a subscription that. Yeah, and I hope it was reassuring. I'm trying to be, I'm reassuring you now, if I wasn't before. You reassured. And that's going to do it for us folks until next Wednesday.

My name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a thing in your head. Music Music Music Alright! Yeah! Maximumfund.org Comedy and culture, artist owned. Alright!

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