Science Vs - Presenting Coronavirus: Fact Vs. Fiction

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

This week, we’re sharing an episode of Coronavirus: Fact Vs. Fiction, a podcast from CNN. This episode is The Hunt for Disease X: As human activity ventures further into the wilderness, scientists believe more diseases will emerge. CNN Senior International Correspondent Sam Kiley takes Dr. Sanjay Gupta on a journey deep into the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the hunt for the next pandemic pathogen continues. Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction is a production of CNN Audio. Megan Marcus is the executive producer. Felicia Patinkin is the senior producer. Raj Makhija is the senior manager of production operations. This episode was produced by Anna Lagamayo, Rachel Cohn, Emily Liu, Eryn Mathewson, Madeleine Thompson, Zach St. Louis and Zoe Saunders. The medical writer is Andrea Kane. Nathan Miller is the engineer, and David Toledo is the team’s production assistant. Special thanks to Ben Tinker and Amanda Sealy of CNN Health, as well as Ashley Lusk, Courtney Coupe and Daniel Kantor from CNN Audio. Mixed for Science Vs by Bumi Hidaka. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, hey, hey, it's Wendy here from Science Versus. We're plugging away on new episodes for our brand new season and we're going to be back in March. I'm super excited about what's coming up. Just like last season, we're mostly moving away from the coronavirus and diving into some other topics that I think you're going to love. But if you want to follow what's happening with the Rona a little more regularly, we wanted to share another great podcast with you about this very thing. It's called Coronavirus Fact Versus Fiction, and it's all about COVID and pandemics more generally. It's hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. He's the chief medical correspondent for CNN. And recently, Sanjay and the team were looking at the hunt for new diseases that could cause our next pandemic.

It's a story that takes us deep into the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And that's the episode we're sharing today. It's coming up just after the break. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe

wherever you tune in. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan Eleven? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves.

Get ready to learn. I'm Jan Eleven. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. You're listening to virus hunters in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They are checking on their local bat population, testing the animals for potential pathogens.

As you may know, bats are well-known vectors or hosts for viruses and bacteria that could jump from animals to humans. They include coronaviruses, like SARS and MERS, and viruses that cause hemorrhagic fevers, like Ebola and Marburg. When they spill over into humans and cause illness, we call these zoonotic diseases. Although we still don't know the exact origin of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the prevailing theory is that it circulated in bats and then most likely jumped to an unknown animal before then spilling over into humans, possibly at a wet market in China where live animals were sold and then butchered for meat. Now we are going to put it in the capture bag.

When you've got him out of the net, we have capture bags just over there. You have to be really careful all they bite. The researchers know that a single bat bite could become the start of the next pandemic. There are eight bats just in this net alone. Now a local man who just passed us as we were arriving told us that they did locally eat bats but bigger fatter ones than these that they catch in the trees. Now these ecologists have said that they haven't yet discovered traces of the Ebola virus as such but they have found the antibody. A similar situation that has been seen in China where the bats are seen as part

of the process of the spread of Covid, but perhaps not the original source. But in a sense, these are a sentinel species, a species which if you monitor them, you can somehow monitor the movement of these viruses. In his new documentary, The Coming Contagion, CNN senior international correspondent Sam Kiley traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to document the

hunt for the next deadly virus, the so-called Disease X. Sam has been covering the Congo for 30 years. In fact, he broke the story of the notorious Ebola outbreak in Kikwit in 1995. This time around, his journey took him to a remote village at the edge of the rainforest deep in the Congo, one of the front lines of our global war against the next pandemic-causing pathogen. Today, Sam's going to join us on the podcast to talk about his reporting and why protecting the rainforests is our best bet. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, and this is Coronavirus, fact versus fiction.

Sam, thanks so much for being here. I was curious, like, how did this all come about for you? What drew you to DRC, to the Democratic Republic of Congo? What drew you to the edge of the rainforest? And why now in the middle of a global pandemic? Well, the truth of the matter is that if one reads around the science, there's nothing new about this story. It is a red flag that epidemiologists and environmentalists have been running up for a very long time. Indeed, zoonotic diseases, the diseases, as you know, that can leap from the animal kingdom to the human kingdom, MERS, SARS, HIV, AIDS, these things have been coming up more and more frequently. And it's blindingly obvious that that is happening because we are soiling our own nest and chopping down our own heart around our ears.

And so, in a sense, we wanted to be able to explore that idea and that reality at a time when people were struggling with the hideous effects of COVID-19 itself, a zoonotic disease. There was a disease X, right? I mean, you called it disease X in the film and in your digital piece. What is disease X? Is it a real thing? No, it's the boogeyman. It's the epidemiologists horror story. It's the term they use for what's coming next. And it's not the if, it's the when and the what. Epidemiologists variously estimate that there are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of unknown viruses locked up in the rainforest, some of which could be pathogens to humanity. And then we got COVID-19

kind of proved the argument. Disease X is the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. Many of our listeners have never traveled to Africa, certainly never traveled to DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo. You're sitting with some friends, having a beer. They're asking you, what is DRC like? How do you describe this place? So the DRC that was called Zaire is the size of Western Europe. It is truly vast. It takes five or six hours to fly across in a jet. So it's a bit like

kind of North America in that sense. It is grossly over endowed with natural resources. Its greatest resource, though, are the people there who, for all of the traumas that they've endured, which includes genocide at the hands of the Belgian King Leopold, who murdered an estimated 10 million people. It has also endured the infection of the Rwandan genocide back in 1994, which I covered, and then the subsequent Nine Nation War that went on for nearly a decade and continues to this day. And yet amidst all of this, the people manage to remain dignified and resourceful and just wonderful. It is also the most shockingly beautiful place. One thing about DRC as well is that they are considered also a leader in battling infectious diseases. I mean, at the end of 2020, they successfully ended the 11th Ebola outbreak, right? Absolutely extraordinary achievement for a country that has been so riven by so many problems. Ebola was discovered by Professor Jejem Miembe.

He took the first blood samples of a mystery disease close to the Ebola river in what was then Zaire as a very young epidemiologist, a very young doctor. And then he jointly with scientists in Europe was able to identify this new pathogen, which was given the name Ebola, and was an extremely unpleasant, highly dangerous, frequently fatal hemorrhagic fever. Fast forward 40 years, the Congolese have now got a pretty good grip on, so they have a treatment system for it, and they even have a vaccination and a very rigorous ability to break the chain of infection. They move very, very fast. Certainly in the Anglo-Saxon world has been pathetic by comparison. If you want to get Britain and the United States sorted out, get some Congolese doctors in there now.

Sam, when you cover a story like this, so you go into DRC, you're along the banks of this river. It's actually on a tributary of the Congo River and beautifully jet black, pristine, mirror-like water that we were lucky enough to travel through. And we begin our journey in Ngende, which is about 700 kilometres upriver from the capital, Kinshasa, sort of coming to the end of an Ebola outbreak,

but we had been tipped off by people in the US Centers for Disease Control that there were unknown diseases emerging all the time and that there was possibly one was emerging in in Ghandi we get there and very quickly we are told by the local doctor they have two patients who are displaying Ebola like symptoms but are not showing up as Ebola victims. Are you afraid of unknown diseases that may come from the forest? Yes, that's what we have got now. With the recent situation, we have cases that look very similar to Ebola. But when we do the tests, they are negative.

So we have to do more examinations to figure out what's going on. So the doctors just told me that one of their immediate concerns is that they are getting cases now that present symptoms that are similar to Ebola, but when they test them in the laboratory here, they're coming up negative. What you're describing, Sam, sounds like diagnosis of exclusion. They got somebody who has a illness. They start checking, you know, what could be causing this illness and start ticking things off. And at some point they say it doesn't appear like anything we've actually seen before. Now, the point about the Democratic Republic of the Congo is that it now has the capacity to be the forward intelligence reconnaissance for the planet

in terms of alerting to some new potential pathogens. So when a doctor in a remote environment sees something that looks bad and they can't identify it, they take samples and they rush them as quickly as they can under the logistical pressures that they have, all the way to Kinshasa, where they've got a state-of-the-art laboratory under Professor JJ Miembe, one of the world's great epidemiologists. And he and his team then set about trying to identify these potential pathogens for the human race. I'm pleased to say that both of the patients of this disease are recovered, but the disease itself remains unknown. That may be because it's not a massive priority, because it's not killing people who didn't

kill those people. It's one of the many viruses that scientists don't have time to fiddle around identifying. But it just goes to show how quickly and how potentially these diseases can get out. I have to tell you, just sort of as a side note, I got to meet Professor Mayembe many years ago. It was actually at an infectious disease conference, so I didn't get to see him in the field like you did. What was it like? And what is he like?

He's very warm, very cool, very relaxed. He's got that easy confidence that great men sometimes have. The warnings he's got are really profound, and essentially he's saying, get ready. I think we are now in a world where new pathogens will come out and that will constitute a threat for humanity. As you know, most of these diseases emerge from Africa, except COVID. And so the contact with the forest, with the wild animals, this is the risk factor to acquire these diseases. And that will be a very big problem in the future.

When we talk about this idea of zoonosis, this jumping of pathogens that is happening between animals and humans, how does that happen? There are numbers of viruses that exist that have never had any kind of contact with human beings. That contact is now becoming more and more frequent because wilderness areas are getting smaller and smaller and the wilderness is disappearing. The more you come into contact with species of animals that have never seen or been near human beings, the chances are that the viruses that are in their bodies can get into our bodies or into domesticated animals and then into our bodies. The point of infection very often seems to be

described at the point of killing and butchering. It's less problematic if you've cooked meat and eat it, for example, but if you cut yourself when you're butchering a bat or you're coming into contact with body fluids saliva the more farming that goes on the more industrial exploitation the more that we chop down the forest the more that human beings invade the wilderness the absolute certainty is more pathogens will be released upon us you also went out into the forest then to do this tracking you Essentially, the Congolese are the world's surveillance system. But if you get even more granular than that, you go out into the forest to check on local bat populations, for example, to see what you can find. What was that

process like, these virus hunters traveling with them? These are ecologists, very highly skilled ecologists that go out. And they go out about once a month, literally hacking your way through the jungle. And they capture 80 to 100 bats and they put up nets, sort of like giant tennis nets, but above head height. And they catch a variety of bats. And then there is an analysis of their saliva, of their rectal swabs and of their blood, and then they'll go off to another area and do the same. And it's along those paces where the rainforest has been fragmented, that's where a lot of the research goes on,

because of course that's the point of contact between the wilderness and humanity. In the last 10 years, just in the west of the DRC, just in that one area, they found over 100 new coronaviruses in bats. They are constantly monitoring for all of these different viruses. This idea, not if, but when, as you say. So what do we do about it? At the local level, the Congolese are acting as the forward reconnaissance for the world, going out and literally hunting for viruses. And then you've got the Centers for Disease Control and similar organizations around the world who are constantly monitoring for the existence, the extant threats of these emerging

diseases. And then you've got the other side of it, which is how do you keep these diseases locked up in their reservoirs? And the simple answer is by leaving the wilderness alone. Now, that is a much wider debate about how we construct our high levels of consumer culture, how we go about our world, how we influence our own governments. If we soil our own nest, it'll be uncomfortable and unhealthy to sleep in. If we bring the house down around our ears, we won't have any cover against the weather. And if we destroy the environment that gives us sustenance, we may unleash the environment that might fight back.

You know, that will happen. I'm completely confident that the world will carry on, that life on Earth will continue a vigorous and robust trajectory. Whether or not human beings are part of that life is going to be up to the way that we behave over the next few decades, starting today. That was from the podcast Coronavirus Fact Versus Fiction from CNN. You can check out more episodes on Spotify or wherever you listen. We're going to pop a fun thing down the feed in about a week and then we'll be back with proper episodes in March. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you soon.