Science Friday - Racism And Mental Health, How To Milk Ticks. March 26, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

The Mental Health Costs Of ‘Everyday’ Racism On March 16, a 21-year-old white man killed six Asian women and two other people in multiple shootings in Atlanta. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Asians and Asian-Americans in the U.S. have experienced a rise in racist attacks, which psychologists say are tied to anti-Chinese rhetoric from the former White House administration, as well as others who have scapegoated Asian Americans. The Stop AAPI Hate reporting center was created in March of 2020 to track these events. The project is a collaboration between the Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies Department. The center reports that more than 3,700 acts of hate were brought to their attention between their founding and February 28 of this year, including verbal harassment or shunning, physical assault, and civil rights violations. At the same time, people who identify as Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) have increasingly reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, or requested screenings for mental health diagnoses. Charissa Cheah, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County has found that even witnessing acts of hate or discrimination can affect someone’s mental health—and spill over to their children. And Kevin Nadal, a psychology researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has documented how microaggressions, considered a more covert form of racism than physical violence, can cause trauma. Cheah and Nadal discuss the connection between chronic exposure to racist behavior and mental health, along with resources for people who may be experiencing the effects of trauma, as well as the long history of anti-Asian racism in the United States.   To Milk A Tick Ticks are masters of breaking down the defenses of their host organism to get a blood meal. They use anesthetics to numb the skin, anticoagulants to keep the blood flowing, and keep the host’s immune system from recognizing them as invaders and kicking them out. And the key to understanding this is in the tick’s saliva. Biochemist and microbiologist Seemay Chou discusses how she milks the saliva from ticks to study what compounds play key parts in these chemical tricks. She also talks about how ticks are able to control the microbes in their saliva.   A Year Of Staying Home Has Led To A Global Chip Crisis The global pandemic has led to a different kind of worldwide crisis: a global chip shortage. Demand for semiconductor chips—the brains behind “smart” devices like TV’s, refrigerators, cars, dishwashers and gaming systems—has spiked after a year of staying and working from home. And the pressure on global supply chains has never been greater. Sarah Zhang, staff writer at The Atlantic, joins Science Friday to explain what happened. Plus, why AstraZeneca came under fire from U.S. regulators this week and how one scientist has finally solved a 20-years-long mystery about the bald eagle. 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 Iraflato. Car companies around the world are being forced to freeze production. They can't get the computer chips they need for their brainy vehicles. The global pandemic has sparked a global chip shortage. Computer chips, they're inside lots of things, right? Phones, tablets, computers, refrigerators, dishwashers, and that's part of the problem. Here to tell us more is Sarah Zang, staff writer for the Atlantic. Hi, Sarah.

Hi, thanks for having me. So why have we run out of chips? What's happened? It's kind of a perfect storm created by the pandemic. So remember about a year ago, everything kind of frozen place and factories were closed and a lot of shipstop running. So there was first a dip in production. And I think carmakers that you were talking about, they saw this and we're thinking, oh, well, we don't need to make as many cars. So they decided to put in fewer orders for chips.

But what actually happened is that we've all been stuck at home. And a lot of us maybe have needed to buy laptops or webcams to be on Zoom all the time and just bought a lot of appliances, you know, whether it's like fridges or TVs and all of these things require semiconductors. So what you now have is also a huge demand for all these electronics that require chips. So the car companies were kind of locked out, they've suddenly found themselves, oops, we don't have any cars. So now they're idling their factories. While you have all the electronics companies still going, you know, kind of full board, like making all the things. making all these things that we're ordering. And you have phones and, you know, game consoles, like, they're also getting delayed because we're all kind of caught up in this chip crunch.

Yeah. Yeah. Is there any estimated time for things getting back to normal? Yeah, it's a great question. It kind of depends on a little bit about what we do, right? So, first of all, it depends on, do we keep ordering a lot of electronics? It's possible that the demand might slow down a little bit. But with car companies, I think we will be looking into disruption until later this year. Speaking of a disruption, let's talk about this global shipping problem.

How is that boat in the Suez Canal doing? It had something to do with the weather, did it not? Yeah, it's still stuck. So what happened was earlier this week, a giant container ship, which is as big as the Empire State Building turned on its side, got stuck in the Suez Canal in Egypt. And what happened is, you know, it seems to be like the weather is kind of bad or the sandstorm, so it was a little bit hard to see. And the winds were really strong.

And you can imagine these container ships, you know, they have containers stacked up really high. So they're kind of acting like a giant sail. And if you have this wind and maybe if you maneuver incorrectly, the ship got stuck. It stuck sideways. And it seems like the sides of the canal are actually quite shallow. So it seems like quite a bit of it is kind of like in the sand right now.

Yeah. As a sailor, I can relate to this running aground in all that sand. and the Suez Canal is a major shipping lane, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. All of the traffic between Europe and Asia is going to the Suez Canal. You can imagine without the canal, ships would actually have the sail all the way down, Africa, and back up. So this would be cutting their journeys a lot shorter. But the delay, which is going on for almost a week now, and it's possible it might go on for weeks more.

This is what officials are saying now. I think because of that, some ships are actually saying, well, rather than waiting this out, maybe we do just sail around, you know, down South Africa and back up again. You know, these ships are such high-tech objects. They're the biggest things in the world. And you have to use the most basic way to get them out. Just dig them out or something, right? Yeah, so if there are pictures, you might have seen,

there's like the tiny little excavator that is digging out the sand that the ship is stuck in on one end. They also have tugboats that are kind of trying to straighten the ship out and pull it out of the sand. The problem is that the ship is so big and in, heavy that if you kind of pull really hard on one end, you might end up damaging the ship rather than dislodging it from the sand. It could come to needing to take some containers off of the ship to lighten it. And that will take a lot of time just because you need a lot of specialized equipment to kind of pull those containers off of the ship. Okay, moving on,

there's some drama. Is there not with AstraZeneca and its vaccine data? Can you help us tease out what happened there? Yeah. So I think at the end of the day, what happened this Atrozenica has done a terrible job talking about the results, even though their vaccine actually looks very good. So what happened is in the fall, AstraZeneca released results from its trials in the UK in South America. And the results are kind of muddled. They kind of had a dosing error in one arm, and there are a lot of different arms. It's just kind of really hard to say exactly what the efficacy number for this vaccine is. So the U.S. basically said, you know, we're not going to mess with that. we have our own trial of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the U.S.

That is very well designed, and we're just going to wait for that data. So that's what we got earlier this week, and it looked really good. It looked like the vaccine was 79% effective. And then a little bit more drama, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Lisa's statement, like a day later saying that an independent data safety and monitoring board had some concerns about the data that it was slightly outdated. What happened is that Astrosanica. kind of decides to analyze its data after a certain number of COVID cases in its trials in both

the placebo and the vaccine arm. And that happened somewhere around the middle of February. But since then, obviously, we've had a little bit more data, which this independent board had seen. Came out later that with this new data, the efficacy looks a little bit closer to 74%. So really not a huge difference. A lot of back and forth over very little. And I think that maybe does obfuscate a little bit the underlying fact, which is that this vaccine does look quite effective. So as we enter the late stages of this pandemic, we're starting to talk more about recovery from COVID.

And there are some people who are working on relearning to smell after COVID. Tell us about that. Yeah, it's called smell training. It's a little bit like physical therapy for your nose. So I talked to one woman who was going through smell training. And basically what you do is every day, you take four bottles of essential oils. The typical sense are rose, clove, eucalyptus, and lemon. And you just sniff them for 20 seconds.

And the idea is you're kind of just training your nose, right? You know, sometimes people say you should be thinking of memories while you're smelling these smells. So why are smelling lemon? Think of, for example, eating lemon pie. And it's really just kind of attuning your brain a little bit more to the smells. So we're not really sure exactly what it happens. But what's maybe happening with COVID is that the virus is not necessarily infecting the smell neurons in your nose, but kind of damaging the support cells around it. So these neurons end up not to be able to regenerate over time.

And this smell training may just help that regeneration and make sure those rewiring goes back correctly. Yeah, because smell is so much tied to memory and emotions. You know, you smell something. It's very evocative of some period. in your life. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And one of the really strange things of re-learning how to smell is a lot of times people go through this period of smelling phantom smells or distorted smells where like their coffee can smell like sewage or think about to smell burning all the time. And we don't really know why these smells are usually really, really bad and obviously like really distressing if you're

eating food and it tastes like sewage. But it could be that your brain is just getting these scrambled signals. And because anything that you've never encountered before, it might be danger is just interpreting the scrimmel signals as danger. All right, let's move on to a new theory about two unusual spots in the Earth's core. I love Earth science. Tell us about what's going on here. Yeah, so there are two huge blobs inside the Earth. So this is... Is that a technical term, blob? Well, let me tell you the technical term. You'll do know why I'm saying blobs instead. The technical term is large, low-share velocity provinces. I stick with blobs, yeah. Okay. Yeah, so these blobs, they're huge, basically the size of continents, and they're inside the Earth's mantle, which is a layer that's

right under the crust. And they're kind of at opposite ends of the earth. So one is right under the surface of West Africa. The other is under the Pacific Ocean. And we know they exist because when seismic waves pass through them, they seem to slow down. And it could be because they're hotter than the rest of the mantle, or it could be that they're a little denser than the west of mantle. And there's a new theory that says that these blobs, these dense blobs might actually be the fragments of these ancient proto planet that hit Earth, and that collision created the moon. Whoa.

Whoa. That's one heck of an idea. Right. It's like our mantel is like a graveyard for ancient planets. So what happened is we don't really know exactly how the moon formed, but the prevailing hypothesis is that this big planet collided with the Earth, as you can imagine, was pretty catastrophic, created this huge debris cloud that coalescent to the moon. But then what happened to the rest of the planet, it's still stuck inside the earth.

And that's what these blobs are. So what happened that people suddenly started talking about these blobs? Yeah, this idea has been out there for a while, but there's a few different lines of evidence. So first of all, magma kind of flows around these blobs and they kind of feed volcanoes that erupt in Iceland and Samoa. And if you look at the lava on those islands, they seem to have records of radioactive elements. that would have only been there when Earth was very, very young about when the moon had formed. So these blobs seem somehow really old. Another is just you do some modeling and do some math on what the moon is made of.

It seems to be just a little bit denser than the Earth. And it seems to be that when that planet merged with the Earth, it would just have kind of created these slightly denser blobs that is now where we see in our seismic imaging. I love this kind of stuff. Let's move on to a decade-old mystery about the bald eagle. It's been solved. Is that right? Yes, it took 25 years.

But what happened is that they suddenly started dying at a lake in Arkansas called the Great Lake. These eagles, they seemed like they were going blind. They were like flying straight into cliffs. They were flying into trees. Even when they were on the ground, they were kind of walking around. One scientist told me like they were kind of drunk. And it turns out they had these little lesions in their brain. But for a long time, nobody knew why.

You know, it didn't seem to be bacteria. It didn't seem to be any known pathogen, any heavy metals or pollutants. It wasn't any known toxin. And so we're 25 years. And now they finally have to answer. And it's really complicated. So it explains why it took them so long. But the answer is that the bald eagles were eating water birds that were eating an invasive plant that lived in these lakes.

The plant itself was not poisonous, but it had cyanobacteria that lived on them. And these cyanobacteria only make this toxin in the presence of an element called bromine. So you had all of these things kind of like having to, like a perfect storm, but they created this toxin that ended up killing all these wild eagles all the way back 25 years ago. And so the bromine came from the cyanobacteria or was just present with the cyanobacteria? It's present in the water. And it's actually kind of a mystery exactly where it came from. So it seems like the plant that the cyanobacteria living on seemed to sequester the bromine, but where's it coming from the first place?

One hypothesis is that it actually might be herbicides that were used to try to get rid of the invasive water plant, ironically. Or maybe it was part of the wastewater from power plants because bromine is used to remove mercury from coal. But we don't know exactly where the origin is, but it's definitely in there. And that's the condition in which these toxins appear. All right, Sarah, terrific, terrific reporting. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Yeah, thanks. Great to be here. Sarah Zang, staff writer for the Atlantic. We're going to take a break and when we come back, what's the best way to milk a tick? You heard me right, a tick. We revisit a conversation with a

researcher that studies the saliva of ticks to find out how they will tick. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Ticks. are full of tricks, chemical tricks. They use anesthetics to numb your skin, inject anticoagulins to keep the blood flowing. They've also figured out a way to get around not only your immune system, but different types of host organisms. And did you know that they harbor microbes and somehow control these bacteria so that they don't get infected by the microbes?

That's all kind of interesting stuff. and the key to understanding how these tiny creatures accomplish this is in their saliva. And this could be used for treatments for tick-related illnesses. My next guest is what you might call a tick wrangler. And she studies ticks in the lab by milting them. Yeah, and you can see photos of her tick-filled lab at ScienceFriety.com slash ticks. CMA Chow, assistant professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California in San Francisco. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks for having me. I'm trying to figure out what a tick lab looks like. Describe your laboratory for it. It actually looks a lot like any other lab. The only difference is that we have a room that has what looks basically like a refrigerator of ticks inside, and we wear white coats in there to make sure we can see them if they're on us. You know, I'd be afraid of them getting out. If they ever get out and, you know, feel something biting you.

No, we've never had any get out. and I think the UCSF Safety Administration would also share that concern with you. But I have had a tick on me from elsewhere. Have you ever had one on you? Yes, I have. You know, I live in Connecticut, so we're, you know, the capital of Lyme disease. We're always careful about these. And the Lyme tick's really tiny, right?

And I like the bigger tick. Well, there's a couple of different life stages, so you probably saw one of the more juvenile stages on you. And how did you? get interested in studying ticks? Yeah, I came about it through kind of a roundabout path. We were actually studying how bacteria compete with each other, completely independent of ticks. And we found that some of the toxins that they used to kill each other were basically stolen over the course of evolution by ticks and are now found in the genome of ticks. So we started probing how the ticks were using these antibacterials to try and kill off some of their own microbes. And then I got hooked.

Wow. So you're milking them, yeah. Yes, we're milking them as well. One of the things we found is that the antibacterial we are studying is really enriched in the saliva of ticks. And so we think that they're using this agent basically to kill off bacteria that they might encounter naturally when they're feeding. And so we just got deeper and deeper into the world of spit. I love it. So if you figure out how they use, they can fight the bacteria off, then the logical extension is how we might be able to use our knowledge about that. Yeah, and I really think that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we can learn from saliva.

As you alluded to at the beginning, they do a lot of different things with their saliva because they're feeding on us for days to sometimes over a week. So they really have to figure out how to make a home and go undetected. I once interviewed a biologist who studied spiders. And her job was to milk spiders, the venom. And she had a little YouTube video. You're familiar what I'm talking about? Yes, I do. I think it was Binford was her name.

I can remember so long ago. And she applied a small voltage to the spider and got it to eject its, you know. That's pretty awesome. And how do you do it? How do you milk the tick? So it actually wasn't figured out by us. It was figured out by some researchers long ago. we found this old paper, and you basically take the ticks and you feed them partially on an animal,

a mouse in our case. And then you can pull them off the mouse. And then we use very glamorous scotch tape to tape them down and then put a chemical called pylocarpine, which is used to enable both us and ticks to salivate. And then you put what looks like a little glass straw on the feeding organ of the tick, and eventually you pull out quite a bit of saliva through capillary. action. Wow.

Okay. Let's talk about ticks in general. Is there a mythology that people have? They think ticks do this, but they don't actually. Oh, I mean, I think the number one thing I run into is that people think ticks jump and fly, and they don't. They don't. No, no, they don't.

They don't have the muscles in their legs to do that. So how do they get on you? Yeah. So they do something called questing, where when they're in feeding season, they basically climb to the tops of shrubs or grass, places where they may be. run into animals walking by. And then they are really adept at sensing our carbon dioxide, our body heat, other things that would indicate that in animals nearby, and they raise their little legs up and latch on when you walk by. And it kind of looks like in the lab like they're

reaching out, looking for a hug. Do they live in your grass, if you have a lawn? Are they living in the grass? Are they living in the shrubbery next to it? Yeah, I think it's context dependent. And in some parts of the U.S., they really like the grass, and in some parts of the U.S. they are more in the shrubs. I think it really is an indicator of whatever ecology they're surrounded by. Let's talk about you're interested in the saliva. Tell me what is so fascinating about the saliva. Yeah, I mean, I think studying the saliva actually gets at one of the kind of creepiest things about ticks,

because the fact that you can have a tick on you and not even know, know it. I mean, I think that's why a lot of people are kind of both fascinated and creeped out by ticks. But that is an indication that they've used their saliva to completely block your ability to sense it, block a lot of the alarm systems that are normally in place to help you detect them. So, as you mentioned, your immune system, normally if you have some sort of mechanical wound, you would expect that there would be a raised bump or something or itch and pain. These are all really annoying but useful things we have to help us know that something's there. And so we're really interested in mining what's in the saliva to try and understand these processes because

TICS have basically hacked our system. And if we can kind of use them as a muse to kind of follow what they figured out, we can have these clues to understand our own bodies more too. And then the second reason is that the microbes have really exploited this as well. We're sort of late to the game. the microbes use the ticks as vectors, meaning that they reside in the ticks and are able to be transmitted to their next host through the tick bite. And in fact, there's a phenomenon known as saliva activated transmission, which means that the microbe is enabled by the saliva and without it, it would not actually be able to survive or spread in our body as effectively. So they've done these old experiments where they injected the Lyme pathogen Borreliaberg-Dorferi and without tick saliva co-injected with it. your body's quite effective at clearing it. So somewhere along the line in evolutionary history of the tick, it picked up this method

of disguise, so to speak? Yeah, presumably long ago. I think these are mechanisms that ticks didn't evolve on their own, but they've been, yeah, acquired and expanded upon. Wow. So mosquito bites are not the same thing. Oh, ticks are way superior to mosquitoes, for sure. Do they know that?

Yeah, mosquitoes, you know, they don't make a home in us the way ticks do. As you know, they just need to be there long enough to bite and then fly off, whereas ticks have to make this blood meal happen. Without it, they can't transition to the next life stage. Okay, so when I was a Boy Scout many, many years ago, there was always a chapter on, you know, hiking and whatever. And what to do to prevent a tick getting bitten by a tick? And once you get bitten, how to remove the teeth.

tick. What I, you know, we were taught either take a match, blow it out, the heat. If you put it on the head of the tick, it will back itself out. There was somebody who said, you use vaseline or oil to cope, tick, it'll come back out. Any of that stuff, legitimate? I mean, honestly, the easiest way to do it is just take a pair of forceups and pull vertically, got to pull perpendicular to your skin. Straight up.

Pull hard enough that you kind of feel. this like pop of it really releasing from your skin. Because its feeding organ is kind of has these spikes on it that dig into your skin. So you really got to break past that. So if you do it the wrong way, you can make things worse. You could squeeze it and you get more saliva injected in there? You know, I think mostly you just don't want the leftover residue of the tick debris in your skin. You want to make sure that hold that we were told got to get the.

head out. Exactly. You're going to get the whole head out there or else you just really. Yeah. And as far as the small ticks, like the, the ticks that are tiny to see that we were trying to get out, you know, how do you, how do you look for them? Because they look like tiny little freckles on you. Yeah. Those are really, really hard. The Lyme disease ticks. Yeah. Well, so there's actually three life stages. The ones that look like freckles are the youngest ones. They're the larvae. And those cannot transmit the Lyme pathogen to you because they're. They're really. Yeah. Well, so there's actually three life stages. The ones that look like freckles are the lung pathogens to you because they. And they. And those. have to acquire it from their first blood meal. And if they are feeding on you, you are their first blood meal. And so the ones you need to worry about are the next level up, which are more the size of like a large crack pepper or the adults, which you can clearly see. But those, you know, really just paying attention after you go hiking or even for a few days after because sometimes pets can track them in. A hot shower after you go hiking can help. Having some some lab mates look you up and down, fiddle through your hair. This, you know, how did you decide?

I asked you before you, I just said, but you just wake up one day and say, you know, I'm going to study ticks. Or did you come from a different insect? No, I had never worked with, and by the way, they're not insects. Okay. They're arachnans. But no, I had never worked with an arthropod in my life. I had never even seen a tick when we first found these genes and bacteria. So it was meant to be a very short fray into this area that I was just going to figure out what they were doing in ticks and move on.

In my mind, it was like a six-month fray. Right. Turned into a couple years of really learning about the biology of ticks and just the deeper you go, the more you want to learn. So that's basically how I started. And what thing mostly would you like to learn? What don't you know that you would like to know about ticks, how they spread disease, maybe there's saliva? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that my lab is really interested in that extends beyond just the people that are working on ticks is we're interested in understanding why bacteria have such specific associations with different hosts.

And so ticks are a great system to study that because the pathogens that they carry are restricted to only a few species per pathogen. And so there's this phenomenon called vector competence where we have these really unique and limited relationships between one pathogen and one or two. or a few different tick species, even though there's a lot of other tick species that can encounter it. And this is true. Beyond ticks, it's also true for mosquitoes and fly vectors. But, I mean, even beyond that, just animals. Animals. How they associate with microbes. So this is one way that we can study this problem by looking at why it is this bacterium is really, you know, preferring this tick host and is able to thrive in this environment.

I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking ticks with C.M.A. Chow, assistant professor, biochemistry, and biophysics at UC San Francisco. For the ticks that have the bacteria that cause a, let's say, Lyme disease, why doesn't the tick itself get infected with Lyme disease? Yeah, so this is hitting on an important aspect of the biology, which is that these microbes are pathogens to us as humans, but they're not pathogens necessarily. to the ticks. In fact, the reason they can coexist so well is because they're living in harmony. So they're more of what we would refer to as a symbion or commensal, which has a more neutral or potentially beneficial relationship with the host. And conversely could be true.

Some microbes that are commensal to your skin could end up being pathogenic to the ticks. So is it that the lime doesn't recognize the tick as something to attack, or is there something about the tick that defends against? Or is it sort of a symbiotic thing going on? That's a million dollar question. I mean, we think it's probably a combination of the two. That's certainly what, you know, studies and other systems would suggest. So we're really just at the beginning of figuring all of this out. I think it's probably a combination. Yeah. And there is a bit of a West Coast, East Coast split that happens with ticks, right? Ticks in California prefer to bite lizards. Is that right? And eastern ticks like, like, like,

Correct. Correct. So on the West Coast, there's a tick called the Exodus Pacificus tick, which can intrinsically carry and transmit the pathogen for a lime. But the reason we're kept safer on the West Coast from this is that these ticks prefer to feed on lizards, which do not carry Borrelia burgdorferi. So because their blood meal host partner doesn't have it, most of the time they don't have it. There are situations if a lizard's not available. that they can feed on other animals like squirrels that may be carriers of it. And then that's where we run into some problems. So I was going to follow up on that. So if a East Coast tick makes it to the West Coast and, you know, well, you'll travel on airplanes or whatever, right? Yeah. Does that mean it's not going to survive out here? Like whether it could proliferate in the population.

Yeah. Unless it came along a female and a male and they magically found an animal to feed mate on together, it's pretty unlikely that it would proliferate. I know there are ticks that may have a meat allergy, right? How does that happen? Yeah. So that is a, I'm from Texas, so I get a lot of questions about this for my friends from Texas. So this, we don't know what's causing this in terms of whether there's a microbe responsible. hole. This actually ends up being an allergy against this sugar modification that somehow is now associated with red meat. And so there are a lot of different groups trying to look into this, whether there could be something we just don't know of a microbe maybe in there that's causing this allergic reaction or if it could be something related to the tick. But it's restricted to a different type of tick from the genus amblyoma. So it's the lone star tick. Are you going to make a career route of studying?

I mean, do you go on to a different arachnoid? You know, who knows? I mean, that's the beauty of science research is that you never know where you're headed. Thank you very much for taking time to be able to this. C. Mae Chow is assistant professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California in San Francisco. And you can see a photo of Dr. Chow's lab and all the ticks up there on our website at science friday.com slash ticks. And just a reminder that we want to hear from you on our voxielles. pop app. That's where you can record your questions and tell us what stories you're interested in.

This week on our Voxpop app, we want to hear from COVID-19 long haulers. These are people who have had COVID-19 symptoms over a long period of time. What questions do you have about your experience? So if you've had long-term COVID-19 symptoms, we want to hear from you. That's on the Science Friday Voxpop app, wherever you get your apps. Coming up after the break, we'll talk to two mental health researchers about the harms of anti-Asian racism, how physical and psychological traumas can affect the whole family. Parents' experiences of discrimination were associated with youth's mental health outcomes, so there was also the spillover effect within the family. Back after the short break, stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Before a 21-year-old white man killed eight people,

six of them Asian women, in horrifying shootings near Atlanta last week. Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. had already been experiencing a rise in racist attacks. Since the early days of the pandemic, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center has logged more than 3,700 incidents of racist violence, ranging from verbal attacks to physical violence. And the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University has reported a 150% rise in documented hate crimes. Psychologists attribute much of this to those in power last year, who blamed China for the COVID-19 pandemic.

But anti-Asian racism in the U.S. has a longer history. And the research says trauma inflicted by racism happens well before people are injured or murdered. Even microaggressions, we'll talk about them, which are considered less overt, less harmful, are increasingly being linked to symptoms of trauma. My next guests are actively studying the links between racist discrimination and mental health,

as well as where people who have been exposed to racism can find strength and healing. Let me introduce them. Dr. Carissa Chia, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Dr. Kevin Nidal, a professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Welcome both of you. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much for having us. You're quite welcome. Dr. Chia, let me begin with you. Let's start with the research you've been doing this last year. I understand you've been studying discrimination

and violence against Chinese American family since last March. Why did you think it would be important to go looking for this data even a year ago? We know that the racialization of disease is not a new phenomenon, and this is seen particularly when the first case of a virus or a disease is reported in either a non-Western geographical region or a minoritized group. So we saw this more recently with SARS and Ebola, for example. And with regard to Asian populations in North America being targeted for such racialization, SARS would be the closest example. where Asian American communities and businesses were targeted, although to a much lesser extent than what we're seeing now.

And so we know that these racial tropes that are being evoked so easily for COVID-19 racial discrimination go as far back as the first wave of Chinese-Asian immigrants to the United States. And so while we design new items for racial discrimination and racism, including xenophobia, to capture these experiences around the COVID-19 outbreak and pandemic, because no such measures existed at that time, it was not particularly difficult to do so as these stereotypes are woven very much

into the very fabrics of the formation of our society. And so you found that the data that you found showed some really high numbers about adults and children who experienced acts of discrimination. We found that during just a period of January to May of 2020, Over 76% of Chinese American parents and children separately reported witnessing at least one incident of COVID-19 racism online. And over 88% of parents and youth reported experiencing one incident of COVID-19 racial discrimination in person. The other number that's, I think, important to also keep in mind is that approximately one-fourth of parents and youth experience online or in-person racial discrimination nearly every day.

It's not just the frequency in terms of the numbers overall, but the chronicity of these experiences was quite shocking to us. I know you're a developmental psychologist, so you're also asking children about their experiences and mental health. And what did you find there? For both parents and children, every type of discrimination experience and collective racism perceptions, were associated with poorer mental health, specifically higher rates of depressive symptoms, higher rates of anxiety. We also found that for children, their parents' own experiences of discrimination were also associated with children's report of internalizing problems.

We talk about this as a spillover effect from parents to children, so parents direct victimized, was associated with children's anxiety and internalizing problems in the way that parents might be indirectly or directly transmitting some of the stress that they're experiencing. It might create more tension and hostility within the family environment. So we should really pay attention to the needs of these children, both as individuals, but also within the family system. And Kevin Nidal, it's not an exaggeration. to say that an event like the shootings in Atlanta was traumatic.

Right. And so this is another form of trauma in psychological research. We might refer to this as either collective trauma or historical trauma or even racial trauma. And what the research has found is that people who belong to historically marginalized groups may start to develop trauma symptoms in reaction to seeing, hearing, witnessing any of these violent acts that may have. happen to people of their group. And so last week with the shootings in Atlanta, many Asian-American people, particularly Asian-American women or Korean people or immigrant Asian-Americans, may have felt a deep connection to that. There's the fear that this could have been me or this could have been someone very close to me. And it's not just, you know, that they feel sad, but they actually

develop symptoms such as inability to concentrate, inability to function, the inability to just even get out of bed and continue with their days. But your work is on microaggressions that seems small, but have a larger impact. Tell us more about that, please. Sure. Microaggressions are the subtle forms of discrimination that people may experience in their everyday life, particularly when they belong to marginalized groups. And so what we're thinking about with Asian Americans are some of the experiences like being asked where they're from. And then the Asian American says, You know, I'm from New York, and then the person says, where are you really from? And then the Asian person says, I'm not going to give you my address.

It's a very common experience for Asian Americans to hear comments like these that aren't necessarily intended to be malicious, but the accumulation of these subtler forms of bias actually add up and actually can lead into a lot of different negative health outcomes, including depression, anxiety, and even trauma symptoms. So when we talk about microaggressions, we're actually also talking about trauma because of the accumulation of those things. What research has found is that the more microaggressions that people experience, the more likely they are to report some of these negative symptoms. Research has found this even to affect things like sleep, substance use, eating disorders, body image issues, and even physical health. And this, you know, to me, sounds something like we've heard about PTSD.

I mean, are people, is this that kind of a form of PTSD over so many years? It just adds up? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think one thing that we have to recognize is that trauma can exist on a spectrum, that there are people who may experience a very severe trauma. This is typically what we think about when we talk about PCSD or post-traumatic stress disorder, that survivors of war, sexual assault survivors and so forth, they may be unable to function because of these intrusive memories, anything that may trigger them to think.

about whatever that traumatic event is. And so people with PTSD, they might experience some of those very severe symptoms. The people who experience racial trauma that is more vicarious, more secondary, meaning that they didn't witness it directly, they can also experience symptoms of PTSD, but maybe they won't be as strong or vivid as those who were the direct survivors of the PTSD. You know, just one last thing that I always want to advocate for is that when there are trauma survivors who seek treatment, one of the things that they're told is that they are experiencing what is considered normal and expected reactions to trauma. They're told this by their therapist.

They're validated in this way. But when people experience racial trauma, oftentimes they're met with messages like, are you sure it's really that bad or you weren't even there? Why are you making such a big deal out of it? This is why it's so important for us to label racial trauma as trauma just so that even the patients who experience these things won't be in that. validated by their therapist or their practitioners because that person will have been trained and knowing that racial trauma is actually real and actually scientifically proven to be a legitimate experience for people. Is this kind of trauma worse and longer lasting, Carissa, in kids than in adults?

We did find that some of these experiences were more strongly related to children's mental health outcomes for several reasons. First, their identity formation is being developed, so they might not have a clear sense of their belonging or affirmation and the positive benefits that they could be deriving from their racial ethnic identity, which we know to be a protective factor. They are also more likely to be questioning their place in the American society or the American, how do they belong, where do they fit. And also, they also are less likely to have coping skills and strategies than adults. The other issue is that for many of these youth, particularly in our sample, they might have been

born in the United States in the sense that their parents, if their first generation immigrants, might have clearer senses of why they came to the United States, where second generation or third generation, children might not have that same sense. And so their identity and sense of belonging is being questioned in a different way that could have additional negative impacts on their mental health. Let's talk about then some of the help that our Asian and Asian American listeners or anyone who is dealing with microaggressions or more overt discrimination or traumatized in the wake of last week's killings. Curisa, what other advice do you have for them? I'll start off by focusing on what parents can do to support their children.

The most important thing is for parents to really provide a safe and secure emotional context during this and any other stressful event. This includes making children feel hurt and supported and that their experiences, feelings and thoughts are valid. No matter what they might be thinking or feeling at that particular moment, listen, validate and then try to guide them if they need additional support. advise and to remember that this will go on for a while. In doing that, parents then also need to engage in self-care, right? So to be able to take care of others, parents also need to remember that they are also going through this very stressful period and to obtain the kinds of help and support that they themselves need. I would also advise parents to engage proactively in racial ethnic socialization strategies, which include passing on messages and cultural strengths

and identity to their children, the advocates for the children if they feel that they're experiencing instances of bullying or hate in the school environment. These days, there are lots of wonderful resources available on the internet from different organizations, including mental health organizations such as the Asian American Psychological Association. Developmental scientific organizations have put out different webinars and resources, including the Society for Research in child development. And also there are advocacy or social justice-based organizations such as Embracerace.org, which has a ton of wonderful resources for parents how to talk about race and how to take care of yourself and your children during this period. You can also find information on how to access mental health

practitioners via helplines or local providers in your community and information to talk to your children more proactively to prepare them or reactively in terms of processing some of the tragic events that we're witnessing and that they might be experiencing or reading about. Just a quick note, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Kevin, one last question for you because we just heard Carissa talk about a whole bunch of resources, but I would think that asking people who are dealing with the after effects of trauma to seek help and be resilient, especially when they're hurting, is a lot of work for victims. In a system that not always is easy to navigate,

is there any other kind of systemic change or solution that your research leads you to advocate for? That's a great question, Ira. I definitely agree that people do need resources, but we know that there are so many different systemic issues that may prevent them from seeking those resources to find a therapist in most parts of the United States to navigate these systems is sometimes even a challenge for me.

So if you think about people who are English as a second language speakers, immigrants, people who are searching for providers who may match their cultural identities in some ways. And so systems really need to do a better job of making it easier for people to seek treatment and therapy, whether it be providing more resources in different communities of color, whether it mean having language accessible resources available to people of different groups, or even just making things free and less of a hassle for folks who might not have the financial means. The systems also need to do whatever they can to assist people of Asian American descent and really all marginalized groups during this time.

That might mean in workplace settings, recognizing that this anti-Asian hate may occur and to check in with your Asian American employees on ways that you could better support them. That might mean in school systems, creating curriculum, that focuses around Asian American history so that people are aware of the ways that Asian Americans have been treated and oppressed throughout the history of the United States. It can also mean that parents and family members can talk to their kids and to others and their family about the issues that are going on so that they can be allies and accomplices. Many times people are witnessing these Asian American hate crimes and aren't doing anything

in response, aren't intervening, aren't calling for help. And that's something that can easily be changed, that people to try. are aware of how serious this problem is. Part of the racial trauma for Asian Americans is this invisibility of Asian Americans throughout history. And so this idea that Kevin brought up of nobody seeing it as traumatic or people don't share our experiences or that these experiences are not validated is very much part of the racial trauma.

And so something families have been doing that have been helpful is just really storytelling for victims to share their experiences to really speak out and for non-victims to stand up and to validate these experiences. And I completely agree with Kevin about Asian American studies and ethnic studies also more generally being included in a curriculum. That's an important part of addressing the marginalization and invisibility of Asian Americans, but also other marginalized groups. Some very good information. Thank you both for taking time to be with us this hour. Karissa Chia, Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Kevin Nadal, Professor of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Thank you again for taking time to be with us today. Thank you, Iris. Thanks so much for having us. And for more resources on mental health, healing, trauma, or just being a better bystander for your neighbors, visit our website, ScienceFriday.com slash mental health. One last thing before we go. Did you know Science Friday is hosting weekly virtual trivia nights every Wednesday evening? Our nerdy competitions are for anyone looking to bring together a team or bravely play solo.

Go to ScienceFriiday.com slash trivia to RSVP on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash trivia. Charles Burkost is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, Kathleen Davis, senior producer is Alexa Lim. contributing producer John Dan Koski, B.J. Liederman composed our theme music. Have a great weekend. I'm I Refledo.