Science Friday - Covid Court Cases, Sharing Viruses for Research, Hepatitis Spike. April 29, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

What’s Up With The Spike In Hepatitis Among Young Kids? This spring, there’s been a strange spike in hepatitis cases among young children. Hepatitis can leave kids with stomach pain, jaundice, and a generally icky feeling. 169 cases have been recorded globally, and one death. A majority of these cases have been found in the United Kingdom, with the others in Spain, Israel, and the U.S. The sudden rise in cases is unusual, and physicians are trying to unlock the mystery of where this is coming from. Joining guest host Umair Irfan to talk about this story and other science news of the week, including the holdup over COVID-19 vaccines for kids under five years old, is Science Friday producer Kathleen Davis.   COVID-19 Vaccines Are Some Divorced Parents’ Newest Divide Heather and Norm have had their share of disagreements. Their separation seven years ago and the ensuing custody battle were contentious. But over the years, the pair has found a way to weather disputes cordially. They’ve made big decisions together and checked in regularly about their two kids, now ages 9 and 11. But the rhythm of give and take they so carefully cultivated came to an abrupt end last fall, when it came time to decide whether to vaccinate their kids against COVID-19 — Heather was for it; Norm was against. (WHYY News has withheld their last names to protect the privacy of their children.) In Pennsylvania, decisions about children’s health must be made jointly by parents with shared legal custody, so the dispute went to court. And Heather and Norm weren’t the only ones who couldn’t come to an agreement on their own. In the months since the vaccine was approved for children, family court judges across the commonwealth have seen skyrocketing numbers of similar cases: Divorced parents who can’t agree on what to do. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   Why Sharing Viruses Is Good… For Science The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked an unprecedented era of global scientific collaboration. Just a few days after the SARS-CoV-2 virus was isolated, its genomic sequence was posted online and accessible to researchers around the world. Scientists quickly went to work trying to understand this brand new pathogen, and began to counter it with treatments and vaccines. But genetic sequences have their limits, and scientists also have to work with the real viruses. Sometimes there’s no substitute for a specimen. Sharing pathogens across borders is where things get a lot more complicated. A web of international laws govern some, but not all aspects of how pathogens are shared and stored. Science isn’t the only factor here—global politics shape responses to the tracking and detection of disease. What happens if countries are not on the friendliest terms with each other, or if they aren’t up to the same safety standards? Could viruses be misused or mishandled, potentially escaping containment? There are some historical examples that could be instructive. And while the COVID-19 pandemic spurred cooperation between scientists, some governments downplayed or misled the world about the state of the pandemic. Does misinformation remain a threat, and if so, how can we prevent it? Guest host Umair Irfan talks with Amber Hartman Scholz, head of science policy at Leibniz Institute DSMZ German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures based in Braunschweig, Germany, to unpack the complex system of scientific virus sharing, and the importance of developing a better process.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.   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 Omer Erfond. I'm a science reporter at Vox, and I'm sitting in today for Ira Flato. This spring, there's been a strange spike in hepatitis cases among young children. Hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver and can leave kids with stomach pain, jaundice, and just that icky feeling. This sudden rise in cases is unusual, and physicians are trying to unlock the mystery of where this is coming from. Joining me to talk about this and other science news this week is Kathleen Davis, a producer for Science Friday. We're glad to have you, Kathleen. be here. So, Kathleen, tell us a little bit about this outbreak. When did this start? So over the weekend, the WHO published a report about a cluster of cases of acute hepatitis. The first cases were reported at the

beginning of April. There have been 169 cases reported since then. That might not sound like a lot, but in a majority of these cases, the kids have been hospitalized. So these aren't just normal hepatitis cases. These are on the serious side of the spectrum. A friend of the show, Caitlin Jedalina, who has a newsletter called Your Local Epidemiologist, broke this down really well this week. She says there's a big question that needs to be figured out. Is this a true increase in cases? Or is it just that parents are more aware about hepatitis right now? So they're actually testing their kids for hepatitis at a greater rate. And kids are getting diagnosed more often. Another unanswered question is why these hepatitis cases are showing up in kids. It's not that uncommon for kids to get

hepatitis, but it's rare that the cases are this severe. Are we seeing this outbreak scattered all over the world or concentrated in a few areas? Where is it happening? A majority of these cases have been in the United Kingdom. That's 113 kids. There have been a handful of cases in other countries, including the United States. Of all of those U.S. cases, nine in total, they've all been in Alabama. The ages of the kids in this report range from one month old to 16 years old.

And you mentioned hospitalization. You know, how serious can this hepatitis get? So acute hepatitis, which is what the WHO looked at, is more serious. As I said, pretty much all of the kids in this report were hospitalized. 17 of those kids required liver transplants. And there has been one death reported. So certainly these are more serious cases. And you mentioned earlier, you know, we don't quite know where the spike is coming from, but do we have any inklings as to what might be at work here? So as Dr. Jodilina wrote in her breakdown of this, there's some disease detective work going on. One hypothesis is that this is related to adenovirus. Some of these hepatitis cases in the UK were co-tested for adenovirus, and three quarters of those were positive for both. There are over 50 strains of adenovirus that infect people in kids. These can cause diarrhea, tonsillitis, and ear infections. It is important to note that the strain of adenovirus, that has been identified in these kids that also had hepatitis is super common.

So it's very possible that these kids just happen to have adenovirus anyways. Correlation does not necessarily mean causation in this case. It's very possible that these kids just happen to have this adenovirus and hepatitis at the same time and they are not tied together. A tie to COVID-19 infection is also a possibility or another novel virus. there's just a lot of detective work that still needs to happen here. If you're worried about your kid getting sick with hepatitis, the WHO is recommending that kids and their parents do what hopefully they've been doing throughout this whole pandemic, following basic cleanliness and hygiene.

You know, things like washing your hands regularly, not standing in front of someone who's coughing, things like that. Well, speaking of COVID-19, you have another story for us about vaccines for young kids. What's going on there? Right. So the people that I know who are parents of kids under five have been waiting so patiently, in some cases not so patiently, for their kids to be able to be vaccinated. As you know, vaccines have been available for adults for almost a year and a half now. Kids older than five have been eligible to be vaccinated for a few months now. But for kids younger than five, it has just been a waiting game. The FDA has delayed action several times on approving vaccine. from the big manufacturers that we're very familiar with at this point, particularly Moderna and Pfizer. But it's a complex situation. The FDA says it wants as much data as possible from these manufacturers to prove that these vaccines are going to be safe and effective for our youngest kids. Have there been any more recent developments? And do we have a better sense of the timeline?

Yeah. So Moderna said yesterday that it had asked the FDA to authorize its COVID-19 vaccine for our youngest kids. This would make it the first manufacturer to do this. According to Sharon LaFranier at the New York Times, an official at Moderna said it would finish submitting its data by May 9th to regulators. It is interesting that Moderna wants to jump all the way down to six months since their current COVID vaccines are for 18 and up. So that would be a really big jump. Pfizer is the only manufacturer of vaccines that are available for under 18s at this point. So if these very very young kids do get approval to get vaccinated? I mean, how big of an impact would it have at this stage of the pandemic? I mean, there are about 18 million kids who aren't eligible to be vaccinated yet. So from,

you know, a public health, public immunity standpoint, it would be great to have more people, no matter how little they are immunized. But it's also a peace of mind thing, right, for a lot of parents. If you're a parent and you've been living through this pandemic, hoping your kid doesn't get sick, this would make a lot of people more comfortable, right? You would feel safer, sending your kids to school or sending them to the playground. Going back to normal life would seem like more of a possibility for a lot of parents. We are, though, in an interesting place in the pandemic where it does feel like things have calmed down a little bit. The demand for vaccination just isn't as strong as it was in 2020. People aren't knocking down the door to get vaccinated right now. So some

pediatricians think that because disease burden is less massive in the community right now, this might actually be a harder sell for some parents. So we're just going to have to wait to see how this plays out. So switching gears then, there's been this massive heat wave going on in India and Pakistan. Just how bad has it been? It has just been brutal. So temperatures have reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit in some regions. And experts predict it could get as hot as 120 degrees in the coming days. The average temperature for last month reached the highest that it's been in 122 years. You know, these are countries where heat happens, but to give a little bit more historical context, India's average temperature has risen more than a degree Fahrenheit since

2001. And what's driving this? Like, what are some of the factors here? Well, to probably nobody's surprise, there is a climate change component. A UN report found that India will be one, of the most affected countries by climate change. For example, scientists project that heat waves in India will be longer and more intense as a result of climate change in the future. And of course, India and Pakistan are some of the most populated countries in the world. How many people here are at risk? Yeah.

So CNN reported that this heat wave is affecting more than one billion people. That is billion, not million. And as you can imagine, it's putting people in life-threatening situations. especially the elderly, those without AC or easy access to drinking water. I mean, all of these people are at increased risk. Well, staying on this note of grim news, unfortunately, there's also been some bad news for reptiles. A whole bunch of them are at risk for extinction. Just how many reptiles are at risk. Yes, I wish I had some happier stories for you this week, Um, mare. But things are really bad

for reptiles right now. Researchers looked at more than 10,000 species, and they found that one in five of them are headed towards extinction. That's according to this new paper in nature. That means those lizards, turtles, snakes that we all know and love are in a bad spot. How do you feel about reptiles, Umair? I know there are, you know, some people like them, some people don't really like them, but what about you? Are you a herp enthusiast? I like to keep a respectful distance. Okay. That's very fair. But, you know, losing any species is bad, but do reptiles play, you know, a particular role in the ecosystem that we should be concerned about? Yeah, reptiles hold an important place in our ecosystems.

They eat insects and rodents, which we people commonly see as pests. They hold this intermediate role in the food chain. They are in between insects and the big predators of reptiles. And I'm guessing this extinction is somehow our fault or partly? Yeah, that's a very appropriate guess. The biggest causes are habitat destruction from farming, urban development, and logging, so, you know, the usual suspects. And though this research is upsetting, it's important for scientists to know where reptiles are most at risk so that, you know, we can go about protecting

them. Let's end today on this story you brought us about mushrooms. You know, I like mushrooms. They taste great. But I don't think about mushrooms as being male or female. And it turns out that not only do mushrooms have a sex, they actually have lots of them. Tell me about that. Yes. So mushrooms are just so cool. They're also very tasty. And this is a number. example of why they are so interesting. So researchers reported in the journal PLOS genetics that some species of fungi have thousands or even tens of thousands of biological sexes. This is really hard for me to wrap my head around. I am sure I'm not the only one. The way that these researchers found this out was with some really cutting edge genetic tools. They used these

tools on a group of mushrooms called tracheptum. These are pretty common mushrooms. You've probably seen them if you like to go on hikes or walks in the woods. They look like plates or flat shells, and they love to decompose dead wood, so you often find them on trees. So from 180 specimens of trachapum mushrooms, they sequence their genomes. And they found that there could be 17,550 different sexes possible for these mushrooms. So what can we read into that, or what are the implications of that? I mean, it just shows that reproduction is really complex for mushrooms. It's not like people. They have their own thing going on. Having so many different possible variants of sexes means that it's more likely that if you are a mushroom,

a neighboring mushroom will be reproductively compatible. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about this, but, you know, this might be a clue into why some fungi are just so resilient. Mushroom tinder must be wild. Yes, I'm sure it is just a wild place. That's all the time we have right now. I'd like to thank my guest, Kathleen Davis, producer for Science Friday. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. One more thing before the break. Last week, on Earth Day, we shared many facts about this planet we call home. Among them, we said that the Earth is estimated to be 5.54 billion years old, give or take a few million years. Well, we were off by a whole billion. Our planet is actually 4.54 billion years old. Sorry, Earth. We think you don't look a day over

2 billion. We have to take a quick break. And when we come back, COVID-19 disagreements between divorced parents has led to an influx of family court cases about vaccines and masking for kids. We'll talk about one family that went through this in Pennsylvania. Judges don't really feel equipped to make the scientific decisions. What they want is experts who can make those decisions to be offering recommendations. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Omer Irfan. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO, St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News.

Local science stories of national significance. When divorced parents have to make joint decisions about health care for their kids, it requires a careful dance with some negotiation. Even the most collaborative co-parents who share custody won't always agree about everything. That has proven especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic. In family courts across the country, battles have broken out between divorce parents. parents about health decisions for their kids. That's because in many states, decisions about

children's health must be made by both parents if custody is shared. If parents don't agree about vaccines or masking, a judge gets involved. Our next guest has been following how this has played out for one Pennsylvania family. She joins us now. Nina Feldman is a journalist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She reported this story for a radio station W-H-Y-Y in Philadelphia. Welcome to Science Friday, Nina. Hey, thanks for having me. You wrote a story about these kinds of conflicts following one family in particular in Pennsylvania. Can you tell me a little bit about it?

That's right. So I spoke with two parents, Heather and Norm. And they've been co-parenting their two kids who are ages 9 and 11 ever since they split up six or seven years ago. Their separation has gone through a range of levels of cordiality. They've had plenty of fights in being separated. I think up until the pandemic, you know, they had kind of reached an equilibrium where they didn't always agree with each other, but they really wanted to make sure that they didn't disparage one another. And they made sure, above all, their kids knew that each parent loved

them. And sometimes we're going to do what mom thinks is best. Sometimes we're going to do what dad thinks is best. So when it came time for their kids age group to be eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, Heather, the mom, for her it was a no-brainer. And here's how she kind of described why this was going to be an easy choice for her. I felt like it was the only thing that is available to give us some layer of protection and a sense of control about all of the things that have been uncontrollable for the past two years. And Norm, her ex-husband, had kind of a different approach or different philosophy on the vaccines, which actually really surprised Heather. I think she did not see this coming as a huge conflict. I didn't really see any risk of not being vaccinated. Now, it is worth noting that

we also don't have long-term data on getting COVID and how that's going to impact people's health and children's health in the long term. So just worth noting that as well. So that was his argument and that was Heather's argument. And they just could not come. to an agreement. So has the number of cases like this in family court gone up during COVID? Yes. It's hard to quantify exactly in part because family court cases are harder to get public records on than other cases since kids are involved. But all the lawyers I've talked to have said, you know, it was very rare before COVID to get vaccine-related custody disputes. I talked to one lawyer in Bucks County who said she maybe saw one or two of these cases

ever in her multi-decade career. And now her office probably sees one of these cases a week. So it's exponential growth in the wake of the COVID vaccines. And in the courtroom, what does a judge have to consider? What factors are at play here? So the standard that a judge is looking out for in these cases is, you know, which parent is looking out for the best interest of the child? And so what attorneys told me, you know, a judge might be keeping an ear out for is evidence that a parent is, in fact, motivated by something other than that, right? So maybe there's evidence presented that that parent was particularly vocal at a school board meeting speaking out against mask wearing policies at school. That feels like it's coming from a more politically motivated place than deciding what is best

for an individual child. So things like that are what a judge is keeping an eye out for. The other end of the spectrum, something that sort of demonstrates a parent would be looking out for the best interest of their child is presenting a note from a pediatrician, which recommends that the child get the vaccine and the parent saying, listen, that I'm just trying to follow the sound medical advice of my doctor. Are the judges in these cases equipped to tackle the scientific aspects of these decisions? I don't want to put words in the judge's mouths, but I would think they would be the first to say no. They are not trying to be in the business of diagnostics or, you know, reviewing necessarily the scientific evidence. What they want is they want that recommendation

coming from the professionals, from the doctors. I think, you know, in most cases where you have a pediatrician recommending that the particular kids involved in the case get the vaccine, in most of those cases, you're going to see the decisions falling in favor of the parent who wants to vaccinate just because exactly what you said, judges don't really feel equipped to make the scientific decisions. What they want is experts who can make those decisions to be offering recommendations. Then what did end up happening to the kids that you looked at? Ultimately, the judge did rule in favor of Heather. And Heather took the kids and got them vaccinated. That's a fascinating story. Thank you for telling us about it, Nina. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Nina Feldman, journalist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She reported this story for public radio station W. HYY in Philly. The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked an unprecedented era of global scientific collaboration. Just a few days after the SARS-CoV-2 virus was isolated, its genomic sequence was posted online and accessible to researchers around the world, and scientists quickly went to work trying to understand this brand-new pathogen and began to counter it with treatments and vaccines. Since then, scientists have continued.

to upload new sequences of the virus, identifying new variants and zeroing in on some of its most concerning traits. But genetic sequences have their limits, and scientists also have to work with real viruses. Sometimes there's just no substitute for a specimen. And that's precisely where things get a lot more complicated. Joining me now to help us better understand this complex system of scientific virus sharing and why we need a better process is my guest. Dr. Amber Hartman-Schultz is the head of science policy at the Leibniz Institute, DSMZ German collection of microorganisms and cell cultures based in Braunschweig, Germany. Dr. Schultz, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Mayor. You did a great job with the word brown shwag that usually trips up American tongues.

Well, I've lived in Germany briefly, so I had to pick that up a little bit. You're pro, yeah. Well, to begin with, I mean, why do we need whole viruses when we have genetic sequences and they're so easy to share around the world? It's funny, you ask it that way. I think if you ask that question 10 or, you ask you, even less years ago, you would have asked it the other way around. You would have said, why do we need sequences when we have viruses? Because of course, for, you know, the last, you know, centuries, when scientists do work, they work with the biological material. You work with the living stuff.

So if we actually turn back to your question, why do we need to have these viruses? There's at least a couple of examples why you'd want to have the real material. Number one is for a reference point, right? Because you want to know this is the thing that caused the beginning of, in the case, of the COVID pandemic, this is what caused the disaster, right? This is sort of the starting point of this kind of living material. And it can very well be in science that there are things about that biological specimen that you don't uncover or realize until much later. Maybe it's something to do with the proteins or something to do with the physical specimen. Maybe it's something to do with the metabolites or proteins that are around there that actually give you information that you

wouldn't otherwise have. The second place, of course, is that when it comes to building things like diagnostics in the very beginning, right? If you want to do a rapid test or a PCR test, you want to make sure that you have enough real biological material that you can prove that the thing that you're trying to test hypothetically is actually the same thing that you have from the nature. So you need to have that real stuff, the real biological material around to make sure that the sequence-based stuff is what you think it is. And of course, when it comes to vaccines and to any other types of development, of course, there are many stages along the way where you're going to do a great job having just that sequence data, which,

so sequence data I should probably back up for those of you out there that aren't familiar with it. It basically tells us what are the instructions for making an organism. Then when I want to actually go to doing experimental manipulations, it's very sort of quickly in the development chain that I actually need to have that physical. material to test out my hypothesis and make sure that I am doing what I think I can do based upon the inferences that I've made from the sequence data. You alluded to the fact that scientists have been sharing viruses longer than they've shared sequences. So how does that actually happen now? Is there sort of a standard international process? Oh, I wish there were the standard

international process. Probably the biggest impulse for standardization comes from something that's a bit archaic, just something called the taxonomic codes of nomenclatures. If you're in the field of taxonomy, you're in the business of describing new species. You want to tell the scientific community and the world, stand at the top of the hill and say, I found a new being, then what you have to do to prove that is show your scientific community, show them the money. You have to take that organism that you've described, you had a plant, an animal or microbe, and you have to deposit into a collection.

So, for example, for animals, you might frequently do that within a museum for plants, maybe in a botanical garden. And if you were doing it for microbes, you would often deposit it in a microbial culture collection of what we call them, because the culture is the word, not culture like things that we enjoy, but cultures is actually that term of art for bacterial cultures or a viral culture, being able to grow it up in the laboratory. It turns out that as with many different types of fields of science, the individual sub-disciplines also have their own, culture, and in this time I mean it actually in the how we interact with each other type of sense, they actually have different ways of doing these things. And in particular, in the field of medicine and public health and urgent response, because of the need to distribute rapidly in the cases of a public health emergency, actually they don't even usually have time to do formal descriptions. So they basically just put it in a box and ship it to the people that they think might know

something about this thing, right? And so you end up having highly specialized, let's call them closed or private collections because you look into the microscope and you say, ah, this might be, you know, a flavo virus or whatever. And I think that my friend, you know, at the University X in City Y is the most likely person to be able to know about it. And so that person is the first person to get that. And then she receives that sample and then she boards it on to another colleague to have to confirm hers. And so unfortunately in the field of sort of rapid public health response, the transfer of items is often done rather informally and rather in transparently. And this is okay if you're trying to react quickly, but then if you want to try to go back and

figure out who has what, where, when, and why, it can be really hard to figure that out. In fact, I can remember conversations here on campus when we were trying to figure out, you know, who has the SARS Code 2. And it was like, oh, yeah, let me go check. I think we had it a week ago, but now I'm not really sure. And it's not to say that these things are not tightly regulated in a biosecurity sense. It's just that the process and the procedures are unfortunately not well standardized. Now, there are groups, for example, I work with a group called the European Virus Archive that does really try to thread the needle, if you will, to do both rapid response and also to deposit in a standardized predictable way and to quickly get things up online.

So there are sort of middle and interim solutions and there are other culture collections that really work on this. But I should say, I guess, it's kind of a mixed bag. What are some of the international regulations or policies right now that we have that governed virus sharing? And what are some of the hurdles that they currently pose? So there's at least kind of three different buckets of international rules that come to mind, if you will. So I don't want to get too wonky, but let me just kind of speak, kind of. of high level. So if you're talking about the World Health Organization, which is, you know, the international body that should certainly regulate health-related things, including pathogens.

There's kind of two things that you have to look at. One is very broad and has a relatively long history. That's the international health regulations, the IHR. And these regulate how scientists and in particular WHO reference laboratories and countries around the world should notify the World Health Organization when something's amiss, right? When there's, they suspect, you know, a new outbreak. They sort of regulate the notification process, but not necessarily the transfer of the organisms, which, as we talked about in the very beginning, is a necessary precondition for a lot of the further response work that needs to be done. The other thing that's in the WHO neighborhood is something called the PIP. Sounds so spunky and fun. It stands for the

pandemic influenza preparedness. framework. So we realize pretty quickly it's not quite as fun as you might hope. And this is a very specialized agreement that regulates the exchange and then the benefit sharing the way in this case vaccines are distributed for pandemic influenza. However, this covers very, very specific types of viruses, only a few strains of pandemic influenza and does not extend to other things like novel viruses, for example, SARS-Cove 2. The really big gorilla in the room, if you will, is actually has its home within the United Nations Environment Program. That's something called the Convention on Biological Diversity. And this large agreement covers all of the biological

diversity found within a country's borders. Oh, wow. So you sort of have an environmental agreement that is meant to encourage conservation, sustainable use of biodiversity that actually has reached into pathogens, which of course we don't want to conserve at all. We actually would hope that they would die out in many cases probably. But those can be regulated under national legislation. And then the second, oh, wow, moment is that there is no predictability about how countries at the national level regulate pathogens. For example, whether or not they do, if they do when and how, and which kind of viruses under which conditions or which kind of bacteria under which conditions. And so then there just becomes a lot of legal uncertainty in this space

once you actually have to get into implementing it. So this patchwork system seems like it leaves a lot of holes for or room for things to go wrong. Has that happened before? Are there any case studies or examples that stand out to you? Yeah, you know, there's a couple of sort of famous, if you will, examples. One has to do with Indonesia and the sharing of flu samples in I think 2007. And basically the story there is Indonesia said, we have a right to receive benefits from sharing our resources. And in this case, they were specifically talking about the right for access to vaccines, that the vaccines were unapprovalable. They provide material, but they don't get something back in return.

And that specific year, the vaccine development for the flu vaccine didn't include quite the right amount of biological diversity of the flu samples that you're in. And in part because of the withholding of the Indonesian samples, which meant that the efficacy of the flu vaccine that came out of that particular batch or lot that year was not as good as one might have hoped it could have been. On the other hand, it actually leads, if you kind of look at the domino effect of discussions, then after that, it leads to the PIP framework, which actually standardizes it and has the very positive effect that then the distribution of vaccines around the world, including for Indonesia, become much more. more transparent when it comes to flu. We have to take a quick break, and when we come back, I'll continue my conversation about the complexities of sharing virus specimens around the world and how politics are shaping how research is done. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Umair Irfan. If you're just joining us, we're continuing our conversation about the complexities of sharing viruses across international boundaries for scientific research. I'm speaking with Amber Hartman-Schultz, head of science policy at the Leibniz Institute, DSMZ, German collection of microorganisms and cell cultures based in Braschweig, Germany.

And another example of this patchwork international virus sharing system that comes to mind is what happened with the diagnostic test for the Zika virus outbreak that was happening in Brazil a few years ago. What happened there? In South America, particularly in Brazil, there were also both logistical but also legal challenges to getting the viral samples out of Brazil. But like with most infectious diseases, it quickly left Brazil and patients wound up in many different countries where the logistics and the legal situation was not as challenging as it was in Brazil. And so a very early diagnostic kit was made using Zika samples that did not come from Brazil. And what we actually learned after the fact with

that was that the diagnostic kits had an unfortunately high false positive rate, which means people were told you have Zika when they actually didn't. Now, you might think, okay, well, better that a diagnostic kid turns out that way, right? Better to be told you of a virus when you actually don't than the other way that it doesn't detect enough. But actually, that's not true. It's really important to have reliable positives and negatives, because remember what Zika does, Zika causes microencephaly and fetuses. So there were pregnant women that took this diagnostic kid and then thought their babies would have

microincephaly and not survive or be severely handicapped. and chose to have an abortion because of their Zika virus results. And so these can have very real human outcomes, even though we're talking about relatively techy, scientific kinds of things. Then given those stakes, say you have the ear of every health minister in the world, what's on your wish list then? How can we be sharing viruses and pathogens better? Or what are some of the things that we could get started on right away?

Oh, man. If I had a nickel for every time somebody asked me that, no, nobody's asking me that. These are, you know, questions that get solved a lot of of my pay grade, but we do what we can. And academia had to sort of put new ideas forth. I mean, the number one thing that you'd want to do is you would want to standardize things. I mean, standardization is super boring, but yet this is what you need to do in this space so that you can react quickly. because it is only when you have the system set up ready to go that you can easily react. I mean, think about it.

What do I tell my kids in the morning? Lay your clothes out the night before so that you can get dressed quickly in the morning because we're always late. And it's the same thing when you're responding to a global pandemic. Like have the forms, the documents, the procedures standardized, formalized, ready to go before the next one hits. Number two has to sort of be, agree that pathogens are not like rhinoceroses or pandas. does or orchids. It needs to have a special way of handling things. And then number three, we have to establish solid and strong infrastructures that allow for the proper, predictable, transparent handling of the viral material as well as the molecular and metadata associated

with those things. And it really should be not centralized in a single place in the the world, it has to be distributed, fair, and equitable. And then belonging to that package of things, we have to be just fair and equitable. We have to really think about if we standardize, if we are getting access to the viruses from the world and we are working in the collaborative way, then when it comes time to save lives, protect public health, we cannot then be nationalistic, then we must, we are, I think, morally compelled to then equitably share diagnostics and perhaps most importantly, we're talking about viruses, vaccines. The public health measures that we need to protect everybody. And if we look back at this last pandemic,

you know, it was a bit of a free-for-all when it came to sharing the resources and it was certainly a free-for-all when it came to distributing the vaccines. And I think all of that ties together and thinking about what are the right ways to be prepared, standardized and then ready to share fairly and equitably with the whole world. That's all the time we have. I'd like to thank my guest. Amber Hartman-Schultz is the head of science policy at the Leibniz Institute, DSMZ German collection of microorganisms and cell cultures based in Braunschweig, Germany.

Hey, thank you, Amir. I appreciate your interest in your time. Take care. We've just been talking about the need to develop a better system to share viruses to improve our grasp of the science and to contain pandemics. But science isn't the only factor here. Global politics are also shaping our responses to diseases. What happens if countries are not on the friendliest terms with each other,

or if they aren't up to the same safety standards? Could viruses be misused or mishandled, potentially escaping containment? There are some historical examples that could be instructive. And while the COVID-19 pandemic spurred cooperation between scientists, we've seen some governments downplay or mislead the world about the state of the pandemic. Does misinformation pose a threat? And can we prevent it? Joining me now is my guest, Gigi Gronevall.

She is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security based in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Gronvall, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. So just kind of to begin with, how important is it to get everyone on the same page when it comes to these best practices and security around these kinds of pathogens? It's important, but it's a task that never ends. So just like education, you know, there's always new people to educate and train. You have to have programs in place where you're training people,

where you're continuing to provide information and equipment so that people who work in laboratories can protect themselves and can do work safely and work on the international level to make sure that, you know, WHO can give the best guidance that it can. So then what are the threats or the risks that we have? have to be concerned about, you know, potentially for bad actors or for people who are maybe mishandling some of these dangerous pathogens. What are some of the risks to actually be concerned about and how likely are some of these prospects? Well, there's all kinds of things to worry about. I mean, we continually worry about the emergence of new threats from the natural environment.

We need, you know, people continue to have not just COVID, but other diseases. We don't investigate every single infection that might land somebody in the hospital. If people are working in the laboratory and there's a mistake or some sort of accident, they could harm themselves and potentially have a loss of containment and potentially infect somebody else. There are, of course, challenges where we worry about misuse of biological pathogens. A lot of what's going on in Ukraine right now and some of the signaling that Russia has falsely claimed that Ukraine has a biological weapons program, that raises a lot of alarm bells because we know that Russia has a biological weapons program. And so we definitely worry that, you know, they will try to pass off a biological

weapon as originating from Ukraine, but it's actually from them. Yeah, I've heard that theory, too, and I was hoping you could just elaborate on that. Like, was the U.S. actually involved in any biological research in Ukraine and in what context? The work that the U.S. funded in Ukraine and has funded in other parts of the world is really public health-oriented. So we want to provide support so that laboratories can appropriately diagnose diseases and report them to the World Health Organization. And it has nothing to do with biological weapons. So that's the program that Russia has attacked as being somehow nefarious and it's just not the case and it's disinformation. And the risks you described earlier about

you know, pathogens escaping containment, are there any case studies or precedents that stand out and what should we learn from them? There have definitely been incidents where there's been a mistake in the lab. If you work with a pathogen that, you know, has the potential to, uh, to cause an infection and be contagious, there are lots of different things that you're supposed to be doing so that even if there's one step where you have a loss of containment. There are many other ways that it's not going to affect the person working in the lab who really does not want to catch their experiment and potentially infect other people. In the movies, you see people wearing the space suit sort of protection. That's all there to try to prevent any infections from in the person who's doing the

work so that they can work safely. So do you think that our ability to prevent lab leaks and these other kinds of hazards has improved. Do you think this is research that can be done safely? Oh, absolutely. You know, I mean, there's, there's been a lot of progress in biosafety over the decades. And, you know, there are some really sad examples of, you know, back decades ago with people working with the bacteria that causes anthrax at their laboratory bench and then they reach over and have another puff of their cigarette. And then they end up giving them. themselves in relational anthrax. Like, that's how bad things were, you know, decades ago. Obviously, you don't smoke or eat or drink in the laboratory anymore. It used to be back in the

not that long ago, people would measure liquids by inhaling liquids into a tube and measuring it that way, which, you know, is not safe. So yes, there's been a lot of improvement. There's a lot of work to be done. I mean, when it comes to safety, when it comes to training, promoting biosafety standards and norms around the world, I mean, you know, it's not the, it's, it doesn't get the same sort of dollars that more glamorous aspects of research do. A lot of times people will bring up some cases that were egregious and terrible from the 70s. And it just, it just doesn't, it doesn't have the same resonance today when so much has changed and how we do laboratory work. And you mentioned earlier about Russian disinformation about virus research in Ukraine.

I'm also thinking about how early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization said that China was not fully forthright about the extent of the pandemic. And then more recently, though, we saw South Africa, which discovered the Omicron variant and declared it to the world. They were greeted with international travel restrictions that hurt their economy. economy. And it seems like there are some pretty perverse incentives here to cover up or mislead. And I'm wondering, how do you get that right? How important is it to get countries all to be forthright about their work on this? Absolutely. So what happened in South Africa was really

counterproductive for future events. So why would a country say, oh, well, we discovered this terrible virus. We should all take precautions if that by announcing that, that means that everything shuts down and it's extremely punitive. That's why we, we, we know, we have. We should have, we, have the international health regulations. That's why there are agreements in place before so that we can concentrate on actually limiting the transmission of disease and not signaling out one country, a political goal versus an actual public health or scientific goal. So yeah, that was definitely the wrong way to go. And I hope that next time we do better because that in that specific instance, they announced that they found Amacron. And the U.S. had not found

Amicron. So for a little while, people were thinking, oh, well, maybe this traveled ban was a good idea. But it turns out we just hadn't analyzed those samples. There was a backlog. So, yeah, I mean, by the time the U.S. imposed these measures on South Africa, Ammachron was already spreading here. So it's important that we get it much important. much more right next time. I'm Omerer-Refan, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And part of the equation here is not just how governments talk to each other, but how scientists talk to the public. I'm wondering, how do you have any best practices for how to communicate with the general public about how scientists are doing this kind of high-risk research and

how can they reassure people that everything is under control? Yeah, I think there's a lot of problems when it comes to communication. I think, first of all, people need to understand why the scientists are doing this. This is not something that people are doing just for the heck of it. I mean, it's really important. We would not have the vaccines that we have for SARS-CoV-2 if we hadn't had the research on other pathogens like MERS and SARS back in 2003. We would just not be in the same position where a year after discovery, we're vaccinating and protecting and saving so many lives. So I think we can do better than what we did this time and we can do it safely,

but the importance is clear. And I think scientists, very often a lot of the boring stuff kind of gets sloughed off of the communication, like all the oversight that goes into working with these kinds of pathogens, all the training, all the equipment, all the standards and all the hoops that people have to jump through so that they do it correctly. Then is there ever a point where you would not want to work with a pathogen or is there a scenario in which we would be better off just simply trying to eradicate a disease rather than trying to work with it? Eradication is tricky. There's so far only been one human pathogen that we've successfully eradicated, that's smallpox. I actually do think we should

stop all research with that particular virus and we should, you know, throw it in some bleach and be done with it. There's a long controversy over whether or not we should hold on to the samples of smallpox that left over from the eradication campaign. So I would say for that pathogen, sure. But other things that are out there in the world, we do not know when they're going to come out and bite us. And the circumstances that led to COVID, which now it's, I mean, almost certainly it was a natural emergence that came through wildlife markets in Lujan, those circumstances where you have illegal and legal wildlife trade, inappropriate land use, encroaching on animal habitats, much more mixing of stressed out bat populations in contact with

humans. All those conditions are still kind of going to be with us for some time and we're not really addressing. So it's going to be very important that we do what we can to learn about these diseases to do what we can to make vaccines and drugs so that we're not here in a few more years. That's all the time we have. I want to thank my guest, Gigi Gronval. She is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security based in Baltimore, Maryland. Thank you so much for having me. To end this hour, sci-fi's trivia host, Diana Montano joins us for a quick science fact for your everyday life.

Hey, thanks, Umair. I've got a trivia question for everyone today. I'll read the question and give you a few moments before you get the answer. Here we go. Cephalopods use ink for a lot of different purposes. What is the scientific term for when a squid creates a decoy to distract predators by creating a mucusy ink cloud that holds its shape underwater for longer? Time's up. This mucusy inkblot is called a pseudomorph from the Greek words for false shape.

If you share our octopus obsession, get ready for cephalopod week coming up this summer. And if you'd like a first chance at tickets to our events in, you guessed it, eight major cities, find out more at Science Friday.com slash squid. Thanks, Diana. Here's Kyle Marion Viturbo with some folks who helped make this show happen. Annie Niro is our individual giving manager. John Dan Koski is our director of news and audio. Daniel Peter Schmidt is our digital producer,

and I'm community manager, Kyle Marion Viterbo. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Kyle. BJ Leaderman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of this program, would we like to hear it again. subscribe to our podcasts or ask your speaker to play Science Friday. You can email us too. The address is SciFri at ScienceFri.com. I'm Omerer Erfond. Have a great weekend.