Science Friday - California Fires, Fire Engineering, Flu Near You. Nov 16, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: November 16, 2018

When wildfires strike, the conversation typically centers around natural factors: forest management, climate change, or hot dry winds that fan the flames. But there’s another important factor in wildfire risk: what humans build. Not just where we build, adjacent to flammable landscapes, but how we build it. Fire historian Stephen Pyne joins us to talk about what we might learn from the way we build in big city centers, where we’ve been largely successful at stamping out big blazes, and Sascha von Meier of UC Berkeley tells us a few ways power companies might fortify the grid to avoid sparking fires. And could California use more planned burns to prevent forest fires? Molly Peterson of KQED tells us more. Plus: Flu season has already begun, and Science Friday is teaming up with Flu Near You to recruit a national team of everyday citizens to build a real-time map of the rise and fall of influenza-like-illness in the United States. It’s as simple as reporting how you feel each week. Science Friday education director Ariel Zych and Flu Near You co-founder John Brownstein of Boston Children’s Hospital kick off the project with information and some of the trends they’ll be tracking throughout the season, and biologist Matt Smith tells about the dangers of flu season for people living with cystic fibrosis. Plus, Annalee Newitz joins Ira to tell us the latest science news in the News Round-up. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, broadcasting today from the studios of WUSF at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Okay, you've seen the horror movie, right? The bad guy is over there. The protagonists are hiding and waiting, and they whisper, be quiet. He'll hear you. Okay, the bad guy leaves, and when they hear, oh, so, then they make their quick getaway. It's called displaced reference, being able to talk about something that is not actually, right where you are. And it turns out it is not just a human thing. Researchers report this week in the journal Science Advances that orangutans can do a very similar thing. Here to tell us more about that and other selected short subjects in sciences. Annalie Newitz, science journalist and author based in San Francisco. Welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me. So what did the researchers

actually see the orangs do? So the best part about this study is, how they did their research because they wanted to see if orangutans would talk about danger, not talk about, but communicate about danger that wasn't there. So the researchers found some sheets that were patterned like tigers and other cat fur that was associated with predators in the orangutan's habitat in Sumatra. and they walked on all fours underneath the trees where the orangutans were, put the sheet over them, and basically pretended to be tigers. And what they found was that the orangutans, which most of them were mothers with babies, would completely become silent during that time. But then about 20 minutes later, after the scientist wrapped in a sheet was gone, then they would issue distress calls and warning calls.

So it was a very clear example of an animal other than a human talking about something that wasn't within their immediate frame of reference. And researchers say this is very significant. It's significant because we've never seen this in another primate. One of the only other animals we've seen do this are bees, actually, when bees do their waggle dance and communicate with each other about where to find honey when they're back in the hive. So this is an incredible breakthrough, and we may find this happening in more animals. but we're certainly learning more about what scientists will do to get answers when they put on sheets and crawl through the forest. Must have been a graduate student. Okay, in other anthropology news, there's news out about just how dangerous the lives of Neanderthal were.

That's right. So, you know, there's a lot of misinformation out there about Neanderthals, you know, that they were dumb or that they, you know, led incredibly dangerous lives. And so we already know that Neanderthals were basically the same intelligence level. level as Homo sapiens. And now we have evidence that they weren't actually leading more dangerous lives either. A couple of researchers in Europe looked at a collection of fossils, about 800 examples of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens skulls to see how many of them had died violent or dangerous deaths. And the way they do that is basically looking at skull trauma. You know, did you die by being hit on the head? And they found no difference between

the adult homo sapiens and the adult Neanderthals. They were basically experiencing violent deaths at the same rate. A slightly elevated number of Neanderthal juveniles and children had died from head injuries, and there's other reasons that that could be true. But what this means is that we're not seeing Neanderthals engaging in a more dangerous lifestyle that might have led to their demise. So again, we're left with questions about what actually led to their end. Very interesting. And I want to get to another really interesting discovery, a new discovery about a huge crater that's under the Greenland ice sheet. I know. This is a fantastic story. So scientists using a relatively new form of ground penetrating radar that works really well for penetrating ice, have discovered a 31 kilometer wide meteor impact under the ice sheet known as Hiawatha in Greenland. And the thing that's super interesting is this is one of the 25 biggest impact craters on the planet.

And we can tell that it came and hit when the ice sheet was still in place, which means it had to have been during the Pleistocene. So it was 2.5 million years ago or younger. So this is relatively recent. And it would have been such an enormous impact that it would have melted a huge part of the glaciers, probably resulting in sea level rise. and probably perturbing climates around the planet, certainly in the northern hemisphere. So this was a huge hit really recently in Earth's history. So, you know, this gives us a lot of insight into how often giant rocks from space hit the planet. Wow. But it wasn't big enough to wipe out Earth.

It certainly wasn't. To give you a comparison, you know, the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs, that impact crater is about 150 kilometers across. So it's significantly larger. Yeah. Let's go to some other spacey kind of news. There's another Martian landing coming up, right? I know. This is so exciting. So Insight, which is going to be exploring Mars, is landing on November 26th in the afternoon, East Coast time around 3 p.m. And this is going to be a relatively easy landing. There's no sky crane like when Curiosity landed. It's just a parachute landing. And it's going to be sitting in place. So it's not going to be driving around. and it's learning about the interior of Mars, which means it has a giant drill,

and it's going to drill five meters into the Martian crust. And that's going to tell us about the planet's composition. It's going to tell us about heat levels inside the planet and give us just more information about how rocky worlds are formed. Second data point that we have on that. You know, Earth is a rocky body. We've studied that. Now we're going to study it on Mars.

And it's also going to learn more about seismic activity on Mars. So we might actually learn about Marsquakes. So what date should we circle on our calendar for this one? So November 26. And if you go to NASA's website, there's going to be watching parties all across the United States. So you can get together with friends and watch the landing. And like I said, it's happening in the afternoon. So it's actually a reasonable time.

So get out and watch our space program go. I love it. I love it. Thank you very much, Annalie. Yeah, thanks for having me. Have a happy holiday. Annalie Newitz is science journalist and author based in San Diego. Francisco. Now it's time to check in on the state of science.

This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. You know, the fires in California now are the deadliest and most destructive to hit that state with more than 10,000 structures destroyed, scores of deaths even more missing. And, you know, we've often heard that burning before these big fires can help prevent these out-of-controlled wildfires. It clear out all that flammable brush. And back in May,

California Governor Jerry Brown put out an executive order that doubled the amount of land that could be managed by these prescribed fires and other forest management strategies. So is it getting done? Molly Peterson is here to fill us in. She's a reporter for KQED science based out of Los Angeles. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. So Governor Brown put out that executive order in May. did it do to address the fire prevention? Well, when you talk about doubling the amount of land managed against fire, burning is just one part of it. Vegetation management and reforestation were really the bulk of it. And the idea was to double the amount of land to about half a million acres that would be managed this way. That executive order also was kind of the governor laying

the foundation for adding $100 million to the state's budget for this kind of activity. According to a state watchdog commission, though, we need an area the size of Maryland, about 6 million acres to burn in prescribed burns to sort of improve conditions to where we'd like to see them better. So you need a lot more going on is what you're saying. And that's expensive and takes manpower and you have to plant for all of that. Yeah, that's, I mean, there's the environmental review problem making sure that once you do that, you've got the temperature, the wind speed, the direction of the wind, the soil moisture, the speed by which the brush will burn. And in a lot of cases, you need to mechanically thin these lands that haven't been managed as we've suppressed fires and kind of kept off of these lands. So there are a lot of factors that need to be considered when setting one of these controlled burns.

And I didn't even mention the air quality, right? Yeah. What do you mean the air quality? Well, I mean, in the Bay Area right now, there's measurements for particulate matter. And that's south of where the fires are burning in northern California. There's measurements for particulate matter five times what we have in Los Angeles on a bad day here because there's an inversion layer over the greater Bay Area kind of holding that smoke in. Uncontrolled fires are responsible for something like 50 million metric tons of pollution at least a year in California. That's, you know, up to a sixth of our state's overall emissions.

You talk to Cal Fire, the department that's in charge of fire prevention. How do they plan on expanding these prescribed fires? What do they need for this to happen? Yeah, when I talked to Ken Pimlet back in the spring, he was saying, by the way, at the time he was saying that they needed to stay out of trouble on megafires in order to really transition to this world where they can do these prescribed burns. The idea is to sort of establish teams that are ready at all times for the purpose of prescribed burning.

But that's hard to do when you've got to deploy all these guys to various fires that are burning around the state. And at the time, he was saying, look, we have a problem. The grass, you call it, if you're a firefighter, you call it flashy. It looks flashy because of drought. And so this isn't a forest fire problem entirely. It's also this dry grasslands that burns quickly as well. And sure, these fires are happening on a mix of land. You have private, you have state, you have federal areas.

How do you coordinate all of that? I mean, I think these guys go to lots of meetings together. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of meetings. But, I mean, you're right. Right. The federal government controls something like 46% of California's land. There's also a lot of interest in private land, particularly in the northern part of the state, not just in more burning days, but also in logging for thinning purposes is something some conservative lawmakers have been pushing as well. And how does climate change fit in here? How does that fit into this picture? I mean, this is one of those ones where sometimes people want to make it sound like it's all one thing or all one another thing.

And it's not. Climate change is a part of what's happening here. But it's a fallacy that, frankly, the president played into with his tweet that it's all one thing or another. There's also huge amounts of planning that needs to be done to get areas around the wildland urban interface into some sort of a code that's responsible about how people develop on those lands. The management and the vegetation stuff, that's just how we've budgeted for decades in California. that has nothing to do with climate change. So there's a lot of causes for the problem we're in and no easy way out. Molly Peters, a reporter for a KQED science.

We're going to take a break and talk more about our wildfires. It's going to continue our coverage, at least, and as we talk about how to protect housing developments in high fire risk areas, and how we can strengthen the electrical grid to prevent sparking future fires, there's some speculation that there might be a spark that have set off some of these fires. We're right back after this break, so stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from WUSF in Tampa,

and we have started talking this hour about the wildfires in California. And when wildfires strike, a lot of the conversation typically centers around natural factors, like how the forests or scrub have been managed to let alone, climate change, drying out the landscape, or hot winds fanning the flames. But there's another important, the factor here, and that is what humans build, not just where we build adjacent to flammable

landscapes, but how we build. And my next guest says we might learn a thing or two from the way we build in big city centers to stamp out fire risk. Our questions for listeners today, if you live in an area with high fire risk, have you retrofitted your house to make it fire safe? And if you were affected by the recent wildfires, we want to hear from you, too. 8447, 7,000. 248258-5-844 SciTalk. You can tweet us at SciFri. Let me introduce my first guest. Stephen Pine is a fire historian and professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.

He is author of the book Between Two Fires and as well as many others. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you. You've said that we need to think of our wildfires like an urban fire problem. What do you mean by that? Well, the wildland urban interface is a kind of geeky term, but it was invented by the wildland side of the community, which saw their problem being complicated by encroaching houses, urban sprawl, and so forth. But, you know, we could just as easily define that problem from the other side of the border. And consider these are really urban fires with funny landscaping.

And if you think about in those terms, I mean, these are really fragments of. cities, their excerpts, they are little bits of built environment. And in the past, our cities used to burn as frequently as the countryside. They were made of the same materials, responded to the same droughts and winds, and we finally fixed that. We were able to disentangle those two. And then on the urban side, we began getting serious about codes, materials, zoning, putting in an appropriate infrastructure, and so forth. And, you know, these five, went away and now they're coming back. It's like watching an old plague return.

We thought we had fixed that. But my comment was actually that maybe we were still defining it as strictly a problem on the wildland side. If we think about the analogies as to the urban side and we think about the history, how did we squeeze fire out of our cities, which were so combustible, that maybe that's the model we should be looking at. Are you saying that our houses are just too vulnerable now like they used to be, and we should do something to make them less fire risky?

Sure. Well, there are lots of things, and part of it is that the fire equation has changed as well. So you sort of think you've got houses that are appropriate or adequate enough for the conditions. The conditions change. Now we're seeing fires that are more savage, a little faster, more problematic. we need to re-examine the codes. But there's quite a lot of evidence, though, that the home ignition zone, as it's called,

the structure in its immediate surroundings, I mean immediate within matters of feet or yards, is really where you want to put most of your effort. Fires are going to happen in many places they need to happen. The real payoff comes from hardening the houses in explicit weight, certainly getting rid of combustible roofs. I mean, that should have been solved many, many years. ago. But just the kind of vegetation you have right adjacent to your house, the materials of the house. Most of these houses are taken out by embers, and the embers may take a while to burn,

so the houses actually combusts very frequently after the main firefront has passed. So you've got thousands, tens of thousands of sparks, this blizzard of sparks blowing through. If there's a point of vulnerability, one of them's going to find it. And you speak from experience. You had a house in the wilderness that nearly got incinerated by a fire? No, we avoided it. We avoided it. Why was your house spared? Well, I spent 20 years imagining what kind of fire hazard we would face.

And I said it's going to be a spring fire. It's going to come very fast. It's going to be wind-driven. It's going to come over those hills to the southwest of us. It's going to drop a million sparks down, and those sparks are going to ignite. The wind's going to be a little calmer at that level. how does this landscape look to fire? And what do we need to do?

We're not going to nuke this place. We're not going to pave it. We're not going to take out every piece of vegetation. But how do we have a place that looks attractive? It's bio-friendly, but it is also relatively fire-safe. We did that. I have to say, the vegetation around, a lot of the stuff we were cultivating to grow up well away from the house,

was all incinerated, our massive wood pile, laboriously assembled. was all fried down to ash, but the house came through without a scorch mark. So part of that is luck, but part of that was preparation. It is possible. That's interesting. Let's say you're the governor now. You're Governor Brown.

You're Governor Pine of California, and your top priority is solving this problem. Tell me what your top priority is to do. Wow, great question and a tough one. I'm glad I'm not governor. Because this must be a huge political problem, right? Right. Well, there are a bunches of things. I think one of the first things is to make sure that the fire problem does not get hijacked by other agendas.

Fire is so graphic, fires like what we're seeing are so horrific that they galvanize lots of sentiment. And people will try to rally that sentiment towards some other cause. Let's make sure we open it up to logging. Let's make sure climate change is the only thing that matters. Whatever. First of all, make sure that you're focusing on stuff that actually address the fire problem. And then I would begin, I would give Cal Fire a more explicit charter to do what they're doing. Everybody admires what Cal Fire does, but everybody, including Cal Fire, admits this isn't the solution.

More air tankers, more engines is not going to solve it. They sort of know a lot of things that we can do, even a lot of small things. Give them an explicit political charter. Cover their back on this and tell them, okay, do it. And the third thing, okay, cost, it's going to cost a lot, but it's not just money. I think what is really stymied a lot of it is the social costs, having to get consensus, getting people to agree on things, getting people to admit there's a problem, getting them to admit that fire is a contagion phenomenon.

If you treat your house and your neighbor doesn't, your house is going to go, may very well go. And we've seen some examples recently in Australia where people at, great expense, retrofitted their houses, their neighbors didn't, and all the houses went when the fire came. This is a social problem. I want to get a caller in who has that experience, Kit from a Cool California, which is 100 miles from Paradise. Welcome to Science Friday.

Well, thank you. We enjoy your show immensely. Thank you. Tell us about your experience. So we live in an oak woodland in the foothills, Sierra foothills, and we have a through, we've been here over 40 years. And so as we've recited and re-roofed, we changed from wood shingle roofing to asphaltic shingles. And then when we recited the house, it used to be redwood siding.

We went to a cementaceous siding that looks like wood, but it is absolutely fireproof. And in addition, we cleared about 200 feet. down the hill out of oak trees and other brush that is highly flammable. Well, good for you. Thanks for calling. Yeah. You did it. Yeah, she did what you were talking about, basically.

Yeah, it's not that difficult. I mean, it can be costly and time-consuming. Again, you've got to get, in many ways, it's like vaccinating. You've got to make sure that almost everyone does it. And at that point, it also was a political issue, legitimately political. I mean, we're talking about public safety and often public lands and assets. The political system has got to function to bring together the rest of it. I'd like to turn now to one of the causes, possible causes of these fires.

Southern California, Edison admitted that its electrical equipment may have been at least partly to blame for sparking last year's deadly Thomas fire in Southern California. And Pacific Gas and Electric stock just took a beating when news spread that one of their high-voltage power lines had an issue. right around the time the campfire began to burn, and the cause of that fire is still under review. Can we fortify the grid to avoid sparking fires? Sasha Van Meyer is Director of Electric Grid Research at DeKal Institute for Energy and Environment at UC Berkeley. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks, Ira. Well, apart from the usual things, clearing trees, vegetation, we've heard about this. There's been talk about burying cables. Is that a feasible thing we could do? That's more expensive than you might think. I mean, you can start with insulating conductors, but keep in mind that we rely on cooling conductors with the wind in the air.

So wrapping them in an insulating jacket means that we can put less current through them, or we have to make them fatter, which also makes them heavier. Burying them underground, typically is something we do for distribution systems. where you might go a few miles, not so much for transmission lines where you go tens or even hundreds of miles. Yeah. Yeah. What other techie solutions might power companies have to avoid sparking fires? Censors on the line, you know, letting us know when there's a problem, something like that?

Exactly. That's one approach that we've been working on at Berkeley is to get better information and sensing of the electrical conditions. and we can do this with high-resolution synchronized measurements. That means that, you know, we're not just getting data once every few seconds or minutes, but actually many times per second that we can observe very small disturbances and small faults like the kinds of arc faults that actually are very common, but go unobserved, whether it's a, you know, a palpond, a, tree branch touching a line in distribution systems.

We, you know, often have animals that make contact. There are little arcs all the time and being able to see those events and then go in with, you know, advanced machine learning algorithms, for example, if we have a fast database that can look for these events and we can begin to anticipate what might be precursors to larger faults that could spark a fire.

And let's talk, Stephen, about renewable energy. It's growing in California and other places. Is that going to help? Maybe you have more energy stored locally, right, for solar or microgrids? We don't have as many power lines in rural areas. Yeah, all that would be. I mean, I'm not a power line guy, a grid guy, but there may be some places where you want to bury lines,

where winds are going to potentially carry fires right through communities. If you distribute it, have a better distributed system, you could shut it off in one place and take it in another and local. Local storage, you can afford to turn off those big lines or redirect them in some way and then still have power. Right now, the option is either you turn it off or you risk of fire. Sasha, you're a great person. Tell us about that.

No, I do think that that strategically in the long run is an important piece of the solution. And it's also something we're working on at Berkeley, for example, in our eco-block project, to make communities more resilient in a way that makes it easier for the utility also to make that tough call, whether to shut power off preemptively or to ride through other kinds of extreme events. And it's getting to be more common for commercial and industrial and industrial, customers to have uninterruptible power supplies, to have some backup. I think it's important also to look toward the residential sector, including the most vulnerable customers, and perhaps by aggregating customers at the scale of, say, a city block,

and combine local solar generation, storage, and you can combine that with efficiency, electric vehicle charging, and so forth, we can really bring communities to a point where they can write through these kinds of disturbances. Amira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about fire prevention, the California wildfires with Stephen Pine and Sasha von Meyer. Sasha, are you optimistic about any of these things happening, fire prevention or any of these techniques you're talking about?

I'm optimistic in the sense that I know these solutions can work. What's tough is that they will take time and money. And I think ultimately, as Stephen has also said, you know, this is a decision-making problem because we really have to spend money today that those are very certain costs to reduce a very uncertain risk in the future. we expect that there will be more fires, but we don't know exactly where, right? And so if we're successful, we'll never know exactly what catastrophe we've averted,

which in a sense mirrors this larger problem of climate mitigation. Stephen, you know, we always look toward the insurance companies or money incentives to get people to do anything or head in the direction we want them to go. Is that a case here with the fire prevention, especially where your homes are concerned? Well, we'd like, I'd like to think so, but my experience is no, and I would say, again, we could look to the urban example. Insurance companies didn't cause the reforms.

It was a political decision that established a base level, and then the market could operate on that. And in fact, on a personal example, we, after our house survived, the 2011 wallow fire, successfully for having done everything, the insurance company doubled our rates. So we just went to another. They doubled your rates because why? That's right. Well, because there were losses elsewhere. And so we were going to be penalized personally for having done it. So we just went to another company.

So that experience on a small scale suggests to me that the market is not going to fix this problem. It has to be given very strict parameters and then it can operate. So what kind of political bravery? What would be the first step if you're a brave politician to do? Any suggestion? Oh, I don't know. I would say, you know, sort of what I suggested before is to make sure that you focus on the fire problem. And in the past, I mean, California has had these big fires for at least a century, and they always have commissions afterwards, and they always make reports.

And the reports look at all the different things. But the only thing that ever gets funded is the immediate protective capabilities, more engines, more air, tankers, more crews, better alarms. Because that's a clear political payoff. You're seen to be doing something. The optics are good, but the longer, tougher questions that really involve how we live on the land, how people relate to one another, all of those kinds of things, which fire is integrating, get dismissed. And for this time, we need to really dig in our heels and say, it's going to be a long process, but we're starting to turn the crank in the right direction. And I think the same is true for the electric grid, where the brave decision is to make the investments today that are long-term investments.

And to then talk about how do we share those costs, but to admit that you get what you pay for. And we have to spend the money today. All right. That's a good place then. Sasha Von Meyer is Director of Electric Grid Research at the California Institute for Energy and Environment at UC Berkeley. Stephen Pine, fire historian, professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. author of Between Two Fires. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. We're going to take a break when we come back. We want you to get involved in a flu project. We're tracking the state of your health this flu season. Stay with this. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Thanksgiving is just around the corner. Time to hug and kiss all the relatives right when the flu season is getting underway. For most of us, flu season might mean making that inconvenient trip to the pharmacy you've been putting. off, getting that little jab in your arm, the flu shot.

But for my next guest who's living with cystic fibrosis, flu season is altogether another thing, and he has agreed to share his story with us today. Matt Smith is a biologist and volunteer with attain health, a patient care program specializing in cystic fibrosis. Welcome to Science Friday, Matt. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me. What is the flu season like for you?

Yeah, so as you mentioned, I have cystic fibrosis, which is life-thartening lung disease. And so for me, the flu can be really dangerous. You know, I would get much, much thicker than a normal person. So whereas you may end up staying at home for a few days from work, for me, I could end up in the hospital for a few weeks. I could lose a good chunk of my lung function, and really it could even possibly be fatal. So for me, flu season is a super stressful time of year. Can you get a flu shot? Yes.

So people with CF are strongly encouraged to get a flu shot. But there are certain circumstances under which you wouldn't be able to get one. I actually haven't gotten the flu shot yet this year. And the reason is because I'm on some medications that they don't want me to have the shot yet. So it'll be probably two weeks before I'm able to get it. And then another two weeks before, you know, the immunity will kick in. So I'm a little bit of a sitting duck for the next month. So you need to take special precautions to avoid getting the flu, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, I'm constantly thinking about infection control, anything that comes into the house, whether it's packages or people. You know, I spray it down with Lysol. When I go out in the public, I wear a mask, and I'm always sort of vigilant for people who might be sniffling or coughing, and I do my best to run away from them as fast as I can if I hear that. So you have to avoid meeting people? Yeah, absolutely. I try to avoid going to crowds, restaurants, concerts, that sort of thing.

And it does sort of limit the amount of time that I'm able to be around my friends, which is kind of a bummer. Actually, my 25th high school reunion is the next week, and I'm not going to be able to make it. Sorry to hear that. anything else you'd like people to know. Yeah, I think that I just like, I know some people are kind of apprehensive about getting the vaccine, but I'd like people to think of it as an opportunity to help out other people. And it's not just, you know, people with a rare lung disease like me.

It's anybody with asthma or COPD or kidney disease or heart disease or the elderly or young kids. You know, there's millions and millions of vulnerable people. So I hope that people will make an effort to go out and get the shot. All right, Matt, thank you for sharing that with us. And those are good words and good advice. Matt Smith is a biologist and volunteer with attain health, a patient care program specializing in cystic fibrosis. And as Matt says, get your flu shot.

It is one way you can help out this flu season by protecting the more vulnerable among us. but we've got another way you can help out. We're collaborating with the group Flu Near You on a citizen science project to track the flu spread across the nation in real time, this flu season, but we need your help to do it. Now, here with the details are John Brownstein,

co-creator of Flu Near You, chief innovation officer at Boston's Children's Hospital. Welcome to Science Friday. Great to be here. Thanks so much. You're welcome. And her own, very own education director, Ariel Zich. Good to have you back, Ariel. Hey, Ira, how's it going?

All right, let's talk about what people can do. John, what's the idea behind flu near you? Yeah, well, the idea is pretty simple, and it's to get a better picture of influenza and how it spreads across the country. Generally, it's very hard for us to know when a flu season is beginning, how severe it is in real time.

We generally look at counting cases of people coming into a hospital visit, or through laboratory confirmation, but that can take time, and not everybody that gets sick actually goes to the doctor. So it really gives us an incomplete picture of the flu and a very delayed one.

So our idea was super simple. You know, there's a lot of work going on in crowdsourcing, but not that much happening in the public health domain. But in that sense, you know, from somebody wanting to contribute to the public health infrastructure and what we say is putting the public back in public health, we say just spend a few seconds and tell us how you're feeling on a weekly basis, and if you get symptoms, report them.

Because what we can do then is identify influenza-type illness and actually track flu as it spreads through communities, through states, and through the country to really get a jump start on what is actually happening with the flu. This is essentially what we've been doing for years with flu near you and what we think we can really ramp up with the listeners. Is this a replacement for the flu data that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out,

or is this a different kind of project? It's absolutely not a replacement. In fact, we work with the Centers for Disease Control very closely. This gives them another perspective on illness happening at the community level rather than in health care systems. And so this gives us a really interesting picture about what's taking place. The CDC can use this data to understand when flu is starting, how bad the flu season is, how well the vaccine is working. But even more importantly, it's an engagement tool. It explains to people what's happening in the community and really gives a sense of why it's so important to get the flu shot.

All right, Ariel, you have wedded our appetites, our listeners' appetites. How can our listeners get involved? What are we asking all our citizen scientists out there to do? Sure. Well, it's surprisingly easy. If you're one of those people who likes to complain about how you're feeling, or even if you're one of those people who likes to brag about how you're feeling, I'm feeling great today.

That's about as complicated as this gets. So if you go to ScienceFriiday.com slash flu, we've got a sign up link for you, And you sign up with your zip code and your email address. And in just a few short moments, you get to contribute to the nation's largest self-reported flu-like symptom map. And like you press a button. It says, yeah, I'm feeling great today. And every week, you know, you have an opportunity to report how you're feeling. And you can even report for other people in your household.

So if you want to be your local captain of influenza monitoring, you can report for the folks in your home and say, yeah, I'm feeling great. my son's feeling great, maybe my partner's feeling kind of coffee today. And those symptoms, there are pretty little buttons to press, so you can press like a coughing button or a rash button or whatever you want to press to kind of indicate the symptoms you're feeling, and you've contributed to that map. And all you have to do is do it once a week. Yeah, yeah. And if you're a space cadet and you need a little reminding,

we also have set up a texting reminder system. So you can get, you can sign up to get a weekly reminder text, complete with a fun flu fact or prevention tip, just to add a little carrot for you. So if you want to get a weekly text from us, you'll also be able to sign up for that at ScienceFriday.com slash flu. So no one's asking you to take a cotton swab of your cheeks or your nose or any to send the sample back to anybody. No, but we are experimenting with some of those projects as well.

We actually have an ongoing collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control in a couple states right now where we're doing just that. But the reality here for what we're looking for the listeners is just to, report symptoms because that subset of symptoms that relate to flu can really help us understand what is going on with this virus and really can provide important information to local communities as well as the country. Will people be able to go on a website and actually watch the spread and see how their data is contributing?

Absolutely. So at Fluor Near You, we actually provide all the data in real time. This isn't like general tools that are out there where you're a data source, but you don't actually get to see the data. In fact, you get to see the data live real time. of what's happening. Of course, we keep all the data private. We're not giving up any individual information, but in aggregate, we're seeing how this virus spreads across the country. And in seeing this, can you tell how well the vaccine is working? So we actually collect data

from people about whether they've gone the flu shot. So from that perspective, very quickly, we can see how well the flu shot is doing because we can compare the people that have gotten the flu shot versus those in the system that haven't. So we can see, very clearly how well the match is going and how well it's doing across different demographic groups. Can you also tell whether, you know, by age group, how well it's doing? Exactly. The level of detail we get is really unique and very different from more traditional surveillance systems because we get exact age. So we know how flu is affecting different age groups, the young, the old, but also across gender. And also we get it across a very high resolution

geographic data at the zip code level. So that makes it a really rich source for influenza research and surveillance. So what you really need are people of all ages, all places to contribute to this so you can get a wealth of data. Yeah, we want this to be highly representative of the country. So everyone is included. We want everyone to participate. Ariel, one thing that's always confusing people is the stomach flu. Is that the flu?

No, that's a don't be confused, everyone. They're different. And we like to say the stomach bug because it has a totally, you know, there's a whole different. set of symptoms. When you get a stomach bug, it's like everything weighs down. It's stomach intestines, all the yucky stuff. With the flu, it's everything weighs up. It's your lungs. It's your throat. It's your head. It's your nose. And those symptoms are different. And that's because they're caused by something different. And the course of, you know, all the symptoms are something different. So please don't confuse the stomach flu with the influenza that we're

talking about today. And this being, you know, especially interesting and maybe it will make people remember or try to participate. This is 2018. We are a hundred-year anniversary of that really deadly 1918 flu, aren't we? That wiped out tens of millions of people around the world. Yes. We can't forget that

we do have the annual flu season, but there are those rare moments where we have major pandemics that can really have massive impact across the globe, really. And so that adds a whole level of importance to flu surveillance as sooner that we can get a jumpstart and

what's happening, the more that we can intervene. Yeah, and I would add, too, the exciting thing about flu near you for me is this baseline idea. So, you know, having people who are healthy reporting, how healthy they are, as well as people who have minor symptoms, gives you this nice kind of low-grade picture of how people are feeling. And so when things like that, when crazy things do happen, whether it's an emerging pandemic or an emerging disease, this citizen-led initiative to monitor the flu has this

kind of baseline background data already, which is pretty rad. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with the Flu Near You Project. You know, and that's interesting. I'm glad you brought that up again because I think people, when they hear this, are going to say, well, if I don't have the flu, I don't need to press that button. But you're saying, yes, you know, we want you to report back, even if you're healthy. Exactly. We need a denominator in order to really understand what's happening. So, yes, we will take the data from people reporting just purely on illness, but getting a sense of the people that are not sick helps us just as much because then we can understand the impact it's having different groups in different ways.

So exactly, we want people reporting consistently throughout the season. Ariel, is this sort of a new trend where people, everyday citizens are generating the health data and citizen scientists? They're not PhDs. They're not epidemiologists. They're totally normal people. It's wonderful. big deal. Citizen science is this thing that is like truly my favorite most empowering part of science is how we do it right now. And like, you know, the stuff like what we're talking about here where with the tap of a button you're reporting into a national mapping tool of influenza

is the type of, that's the type of science that's truly been unlocked by recent technology, the fact that like we all have these super smart devices in our pockets. And those of us who don't who have flip phones, they can go home and use the internet to do this. I mean, that's insane. and it's really cool. I mean, and what John mentioned about representativeness, right? So this idea that you don't necessarily, you don't have to have health care to participate in flu near you. You don't have to be in a certain part of the country in a major city

or be near to a health care facility to participate in flu near you. That's the type of coverage and the type of completeness that something like citizen science can provide. And it's why I think this is such a fun thing to do together as a listenership. So listeners, I think you're going to be really good at this. And again, all schools can get. together on this, right? Get the students and their parents involved and teach you how to do this.

I mean, we would love for organizations to really commit their membership, whether it's a school or an office, absolutely. Tell us, okay, let's wrap it up by talking about ABCs. How do you get involved in this? What should you do? Right. So absolute first thing to do is go to ScienceFriiday.com slash flu. You'll learn all about the project.

And if you're feeling lazy and just want to sign up immediately, there's a bunch of bright red links, you just click on those, and you will get to our registration page. Super easy. Like, I think it takes a minute to register. And then you'll be in the system. You'll be ready to go and you'll be reporting your flu symptoms. And that's it. It's like really that easy. And then if you're a nerd and or are very interested. We don't have any nerds. We don't have, I know. I feel like that's a strange thing to say to Science Friday. So if you happen to be really into health data or you want to see your local flu forecast, then you can all. go to flu near you and see where your data fits in this larger picture of

influenza like illness and you know it's kind of fun because they've also got the CDC data there too so you can do a little back and forth thing between your state data from the CDC and your state data from flu near you and if you've got anybody you know in certain parts of the country that seem underrepresented you can call your cousin North Dakota and be like cousin report your influenza symptoms and kind of make it a party I think that's I think that's what we're going we'd have a competition about how many people what state can sign up the most people. Oh, boy, I know. I'm really excited for that. Alaska, I'm looking at you. I think you can do it.

And how many, and, John, how many people would you like? What kind of hell of signs would you like that? You know, the more the merrier, we've had in past seasons in the tens of thousands, right, 30, 40, 50,000. If we could push it to 100,000 this year through this partnership, that would be amazing and really just be incredibly transformational for how we think about looking at diseases and communities, really the idea of engaging individuals directly. It can really be democratizing in terms of how we think about public health. All right. Let me thank both of you, John Brownstein, co-creator of Flu Near You and Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children's Hospital and Science Friday's Education Director, Ariel Zich. Thank you both for taking time to be with us to you. And it's great topic.

Thank you so much. And our listeners can find more information and they can sign up, sign up at Science Friday.com slash flu. I've already done it. Science Friday. dot com slash flu. I've signed up, so join me. It's going to be fun, and we'll be tracking our progress all winter long. Charles Berkwist is our director, a senior producer, Christopher and Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Haller. We had technical and engineering help from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, Kevin Wolfe, and a very special thanks to all the great folks here at WUSF in Tampa who made us feel so welcome in their studios today. And of course, Every day is Science Friday now because we're active on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.

And if you have a smart speaker, you can say, hey, please play Science Friday whenever you want to. You can also email us SciFri at ScienceFri.com. I'm Ira Flato in Tampa.