SciShow Tangents - Diseases

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

From toenails to T-cells, human bodies have a whole lot of moving parts, which means there’s ample opportunity for things to go not-quite-according-to-plan!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out SciShowTangents.org![Truth or Fail]Salmonellahttps://www.technologyreview.com/2007/09/25/223729/deadly-bacteria-from-outer-space/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/in-space-infectious-diseases-reveal-their-true-nature-19761956/)https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5515522/UTIhttps://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/germs-in-space-tougher-and-deadlier/article694273/#:~:text=In%201970%2C%20Fred%20Haise%2C%20part,2006%20mission%2C%20including%20Pseudomonas%20aeruginosa.https://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-13-5.htmlhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23658630/Green Musclehttps://extension.umd.edu/sites/extension.umd.edu/files/_docs/programs/poultry/IS1976%20Deep%20Pectoral%20Myopathy.pdfSupplemental https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/547736/what-happens-when-astronaut-gets-sick-space#:~:text=Astronauts%20floating%20around%20in%20zero,can%20sometimes%20cause%20an%20injury.&text=That%20happened%20with%20spaceflight%2Dassociated,their%20eyes%20during%20space%20missions.[Fact Off]Fake Typhus epidemichttps://archive.org/stream/NavyMedicine198004/Navy%20Medicine%201980-04#page/n27/mode/2uphttps://www.cdc.gov/typhus/epidemic/index.htmlhttps://www.dshs.texas.gov/lab/serology_agg.shtmhttps://amednews.com/article/20040705/profession/307059953/6/https://academic.oup.com/trstmh/article-abstract/37/5/321/1898852?redirectedFrom=fulltextGlaucoma T-cellshttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180810091530.htmhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05681-9

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I'm joined by Stefan Chen. Hello. I'm ready to wrestle. Do you have a favorite TikTok meme, Stefan? No. Or do you, like everyone else, forget everything that happened during the period of time you spent on TikTok?

I'm trying to go to sleep, but I'm going to open TikTok, and I know it's a bad idea and then it's like two o'clock and i'm like damn it here i still am and then that video comes up where they're like you've been scrolling for a while i know it's fun but maybe take a break stuff and what's your tagline uh gelatinous cube man sam schultz is also here. Sam, what's your tagline? Barney, my pebbles. Is that copyright infringement? I think it's less than 14 seconds, so it's fine. Is that how it works?

That was definitely fair use. Sari Riley is also with us today. Hello, Sari. Hello. And what's your tagline, Sari? A large group of ropes. And I'm agreeing that my tagline is, this group is too many my best work veto that one every week here on scishow tangents we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight

each other with science facts we're playing for glory but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week we do everything we can to stay on topic but judging by previous conversations with this group we'll be bad at that So if the rest of the team deems your tangent unworthy, they will force you to give one of your sandbox. So tangent with care. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from me. A virus wants nothing. It cares not at all. It's not trying or wanting or moving. It's a fluke, nothing more, a devastating bore. It ends up in your cells without choosing. Then your body's own parts grab a hold and they start to copy it over and over. It's just what

they do. They can't tell it's not you. Then it plows through you like a bulldozer. Our bodies are hacked by these particles that are no more alive than a bell. So when you cough or sneeze, just remember this, please. Your body does this to itself. That poem was about viruses, but this episode is about disease. Virus is just one kind of the many, many kinds of disease. This is just one kind of the many, many kinds of disease. And Sari, can you tell us what a disease is besides just dis-ease? Well, spoiler alert, that's all the etymology. We took dis and ease and we were like, ah, I'm not in ease right now. And then at some point in the 16th century people were like ah let's let's call

that sick also it is a very vague definition it is any sort of condition in a living animal or plant or one of the parts of that living animal or plant or organism that impairs its normal functions and usually has some sort of signs or symptoms or other characteristics that we would consider bad but are just annoying in some way like extra mucus what what if like i got if i just like stubbed my toe is that a disease i don't think so i think that's an injury what about a hangnail though i don't think that's a disease either so diseases can be i found four categories you can be you can have deficiency diseases hereditary diseases infectious diseases which are the ones caused by microorganisms like

viruses and bacteria and physiological diseases so i guess that would be stubbed toe hangnail territory yeah i think a hangnail is a physiological disease. I feel like diseases to me link to more systemic function. Like those are one-off events. Like a mosquito bite is like one-off, but malaria is a disease or like something that is transmitted by that. Or like food poisoning is a one-off event that we have a name for. Isn't a mosquito bite like a small infection caused by the saliva of the mosquito? I learned in Animal Crossing. It is a allergic reaction to the saliva of the mosquito, not an infection. Oh, so our allergy is a disease?

Definitely. Because ulcerative colitis is basically an allergy to my own body. And that's definitely a disease. I was also looking up words like disorder and syndrome and condition and how those relate to disease. It all seems very wibbly to me. I'm sure there's a doctor out there who has very clear lines in their own head, but there's like a Venn diagram of all these terms. I have a suggestion, and this is really neither here nor there, because I don't think that we're going to get to a definitive definition of disease. But I'd like to remove the D part of the word and have it just be called Zs.

Okay. Why? Sounds way cooler. It's like I got a chronic Zs. Is catch some Zs? Oh. Like out of the public discourse enough? That's probably bad, yes.

I don't want to catch some Zs anymore. Yeah, that would be not ideal. That really was neither here nor there. anymore. Yeah, that would be not ideal. That really was neither here nor there. The good news is that I right now am winning this episode because I have one point and no one else has

any. But that is about to end because it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real and we have to decide which is the true fact. You can play along at home at twitter.com slash SciShow Tangents. Please don't fill out the poll before the episode comes out, because we, in that situation, will be aware that

you are cheating. Yeah. All right, so play along with us at twitter.com slash SciShow Tangents, and Sam, I believe you are the one who's going to supply us with these facts. That's true, I am. According to an article that I found in the MIT Technology Review, there's only been one example of an American astronaut suffering from a severe illness or infection while on a mission. Which of these was it? Number one, an astronaut on the ISS had to be evacuated back to Earth in 1986

after eating a salmonella-contaminated package of beef tips and gravy. Number two. One of the astronauts on Apollo 13 suffered from a urinary tract infection due to a combination of dehydration and holding in his pee too long as they were on their perilous journey

back to Earth. Number three. An astronaut on Apollo 15 upon returning to earth complained of chest soreness and was found to be suffering from deep pectoral myopathy or green muscle disease which is where a lack of exercise in the pectoral muscle causes them to turn green and swollen wow okay so we have three potential serious diseases of astronauts in space. Number one, an astronaut had to be evacuated back to Earth after eating salmonella contaminated package of beef tips and gravy. Two, an astronaut on Apollo 13 had a urinary tract infection because of dehydration and holding the pee. Or three, Apollo 15 astronaut got deep pectoral myopathy or green muscle disease, which sounds like absolutely the worst.

So let's start at the top here. This seems like it would be hard to not prevent salmonella from being a thing. They just have a bunch of pouch meals and pouch meals are 100% safe. Yeah. Everybody knows that. It's common knowledge. You just boil them. You boil them and all the salmonella dies. Salmonella's more of a chicken thing though, isn't it? Well, we sound like

experts. Everyone should definitely listen to us. I know that I know nothing about food science and so I'm keeping my mouth shut. I don't know. I used to eat frozen dinners all the time. That's the only experience. Beef tips and gravy is like on the upper side of frozen dinner meals.

Yeah. I haven't had a TV dinner in so long, and I want one. I want the ones with the mashed potatoes that have the very thick film on the top. You got to puncture it with a fork a bunch of times before you put it in the microwave. Yeah. Oh, man. Those are the good old days. have the very thick film on the top you gotta puncture it with a fork a bunch of times before you put it in the microwave yeah oh man those are the good old days but also holding the p

sounds like a reasonable thing that would happen to an astronaut i agree this sounds very reasonable to me and apollo 13 was the one that was bad so they they probably had to do a number of things that they wouldn't have done if it wasn't Apollo 13 I would also believe it though because to some extent you're in a very small room with two other guys and it's just like I'd just rather not it's too embarrassing

you just got like so much that you get a UTI what was the third one? green muscle disease, deep pectoral myopathy I've never heard of weak pecs turning green What was the third one? Green muscle disease, deep pectoral myopathy. I've never heard of weak pecs turning green. Yeah, if it could happen, it should have happened to me by now. Yeah, I look at Hank and I'm like, he's never turned green.

So this doesn't make sense. It's just like the Apollo missions are so short. 15 was one of the longer ones. And they did not have a way to work out, whereas on the ISS, they do. I agree. I feel like they're too short to have your pecs turn green, unless it was a very physically unfit astronaut

to begin with, which I think they still are. They were none of those back then. All of them are muscle men. They were all ripped. You know what, you fuckers? I'm going to go with the fucking green muscles.

Ooh. I'm going to go with the UTI. It seems like a safe choice, which probably means it's wrong. I don't know. I don't know either,

but the UTI seems the most reasonable to me, I guess, so I'll go with that. The right answer was the UTI. Ah! Ah! God damn it, I i'm never gonna get my during apollo 13 as most people probably know an oxygen tank exploded and the astronauts had to

cram onto the lunar module that was still attached because they hadn't made it to the moon yet when the thing exploded for their emergency trip back home. And they got as much water as they could while they were evacuating, but they only had enough that they could ration out 6.8 fluid ounces of water every day for the three days they were heading back, which is like, I looked it up, it's like a little perfume bottle worth of water. So due to not drinking enough water, astronaut Fred Hayes got a urinary tract infection and it eventually, I think, became a kidney infection. There was a few different stories a urinary tract infection and that eventually I think became a kidney infection. There was a few different stories of what kind of infection he had,

but he had like a fever while he was lost in space or like on his way back to earth. So the thing that gave him the UTI is pseudonymous aerogenosa, which like something else I'm going to talk about in a second, is a disease that's been shown to be more virulent in space. But another contributing factor, this is a little conjecture on my part, is that they ran out of pee bags on the lunar module. So when they got back, they had filled up all their pee bags and they didn't have any left. And they probably were all holding it in pretty good.

I imagine that would mess them up. And so he was sick for a couple weeks, but he made a full recovery. This is why you have to stop when you're on a road trip. Eventually you fill all the bottles and you got to stop to empty everything out. Okay. Well, anyway, the beef tip one is fake. But in 2007, a study found that both salmonella and the disease that the dude on Apollo 13 had potentially can become two to three times more infectious and virulent.

Virulent? I don't know how to say that word. Sure, you're doing it. So non-space-bound salmonella spends most of its life sloshing around in different fluids, like digestive fluid, but it has the ability to tell when it's in a flowing liquid or when it's not and it's nestled into the lining of your intestines. And that's when it blooms and starts to spread. So it just happens to detect zero gravity as the same as being nestled into a part of your intestines where it can spread. So it's like always blooming when it's floating around in space.

And that's the same with a bunch of different diseases. So people are kind of worried that diseases will be worse and easier to catch in space and then the last one the deep muscle thing deep pectoral myopathy that is a disease that commercial poultry gets when they are in their cages and they can't flap their wings

and all the blood pools on their chest and then it turns green and rotten and then their meat's green when they cut it out of them. Oh, God. That's the worst thing I've ever heard. And also, I should have known that wasn't a thing. Why was I so reckless?

If it had been true, everybody would have been so impressed. Yeah, that's like 12 shots of water or less than that. This is not a lot of water, man. Yeah, for like almost four days. That would be rough. Like, I always have to pee, so I would have been a disaster on that trip, too. Yeah, no. In general, I think none of us here are super cut out for space.

Yeah. Who do you think is the best space candidate on the podcast? Because I've got a vote. I do, too. I also got a vote i do too i also have a vote should we say it on three okay yeah one two three stephan sam me no i have too many diseases that was my logic for not picking you stephan yeah i would not be good in any kind of, like, in combat, in space, as a pilot. Like, don't put me in any situation where I'm responsible for other people's lives.

It's not good. I think you would keep your head, though. You'd be calm. I could stay calm, yeah. But, I mean, like, we would all be dying and you'd be calm. Yeah. And it wouldn't really do that.

I would stay calm too much. See, I feel like you could train for it and you'd be good at it. You could also keep your cool under pressure and you don't have as bad eyesight as Stefan. I have great vision. I have great vision. I have 2016.

And you could chew someone out if you had to. Oh, God. I'd kick him out the airlock. Yeah. Well, now we know that Sam is best for every job from Santa Claus to garfield to astronaut next up we're going to take a short break and then it'll be time for the fact off welcome back everybody it's a tie ball game everybody's got one point but sam and i don't have any more chances to get points because it's time for the fact off so the win is going to go

to sari or stefan or both because they have brought science facts for us in an attempt to blow our minds and sam and i each have a sandbuck that we can award the fact that we like the most in order to decide who's going to go first here's a trivia question for the two of you the world health organization certified that smallpox had officially been globally eradicated in 1980 which is pretty recent but it's a very old disease what year did the first clear reference to inoculating against smallpox first appear in writing? I hate history questions because all of time before now is just mushed into one ball for

me. Yeah. I'm going to say 1870. Just throwing it out there so stephan can pick higher or lower i'm i'm gonna i'm just gonna say 1918 because that was the spanish flu which is not related to smallpox but that was the year that came up in my head so here we go uh yeah no it was the it was the year 1549 those geniuses so sari uh sari won but like not in a way she should be proud of never asked me the date and time of anything so sari you do get to choose who goes first i'm gonna go first because i'm really excited about my fact. What a treat. During World War II, two Polish doctors figured out a way

to save people in Roswadow, Poland from being deported to German labor, prisoner of war or concentration camps by making a bunch of patients test positive for typhus, which is a highly contagious infectious disease. Typhus, which is also known as typhus fever, has symptoms like a purple rash, headaches, fever, and historically has led to pretty high death rates. So Nazi authorities in Poland made doctors report any suspected cases and send blood samples to German-controlled labs so they could conduct tests and find infected people before carting them away to labor camps, if not executing them doing evil Nazi things.

And the test they used is called a Well-Felix test, which is a kind of agglutination test invented in 1916. So the Well-Felix test is called an agglutination test because it's positive if the sample gets all clumpy in a test tube or on a slide because antibodies, which your body makes in defense, are reacting with antigens, which your body makes in defense, are reacting with antigens, which is anything that causes an immune response. So if you're sick with typhus, for

example, your blood has typhus-related antibodies floating around. And in the labs, they would add some of an antigen called Proteus OX19, which is known to look like a typhus-like antigen and is close enough to activate those antibodies. So the typhus-like antigen and is close enough to activate those antibodies. So the typhus-related antibodies would react with the Proteus-OX19, the sample would get clumpy, and they'd be like, please keep your typhus-infected person out of our labor camps, and then ignore them. So, Sari, is it called a Well-Felix test because one of the doctors is named Felix, and at the end of the test, the other doctor goes, well, Felix, looks like this guy's got typhus. No. It's a man named Edmund Wells and Arthur Felix.

They were just two scientists. So how do they use that to save people from the labor camps? Two doctors, Dr. Eugene Lazowski and Dr. Stanislaw Matulowicz. I'm glad they didn't develop the test, because then it would be a Lazowski-Matulowicz test. Much more complicated. They discovered that injecting a patient with a suspension of the Proteus-OX19, sort of like a vaccine,

would cause patients' immune systems to make antibodies and therefore clump up the Well-Felix test, which resulted in a false positive. So they injected lots of people with any vague typist-like symptoms under the guise of protein stimulation therapy, which was this generalized thing. Sure, just a fake thing.

And the Nazis had no reason to believe their tests were being tricked because they were all being sent off to German labs. So they eventually declared an epidemic area and an estimated 8,000 people were saved over three years from being imprisoned or killed. It was like a vaccine against labor camps. Yeah, because they knew that the Nazis were afraid of getting sick.

And they just like tricked a bunch of people and protected these small villages, which isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things, but was like very clever at the time. Did they ever get found out? Like, I mean, just doing this, I assume like very clever at the time. Did they ever get found out? Like, I mean, just doing this, I assume put them in substantial danger. Did this all sort of come out after the fact? Yeah. So in an April 1980 issue of U.S. Navy Medicine, they published about it, like they wrote about it and was like, back in the day, this is how we tricked the Nazis. And it seems like towards the end of those three years they were receiving threats like some nazis were suspicious of like the epidemic area and and the tests and so i think either one or both of the doctors fled because they didn't want to be found out but yeah they just like wrote a detailed

article about it that now i can read in U.S. Navy Medicine, volume 71, number four. I love this fact, Sari. Stephan, what do you got for us? So today we're talking about diseases. And as I mentioned earlier, I have some diseases and one of the diseases that I have is glaucoma. And my fact today is about glaucoma. So I guess it's actually a group of diseases. And the common factor is that they cause vision loss over a long period of time by damaging different parts of the eye. And usually people with glaucoma have a higher than normal pressure of the fluid in the eyeball. But there are people who end up suffering vision loss while still having normal pressures. But in general, we don't know a lot about what causes it. And so these researchers at MIT and Massachusetts Eye and

Ear were studying glaucoma in mice and found that the mice's own T cells, so that's part of their immune systems, were actually the thing that was responsible for the damage to the retina and causing the vision loss. And that's very strange because up till now, I think the general idea is that it's the high pressure itself that's directly causing damage by squeezing the different parts of your eye. I guess eyes don't like that. But it gets kind of weirder because they think that these T cells are causing that damage because they had previously encountered bacteria that you find in your body normally. So sort of like the bacteria would be making your T cells kind of angry and then your T cells, which aren't normally able to get into the retina,

are able to get in because of the high pressure, although they don't know how that works exactly. Then the angry cells can start punching your eyeball parts and causing damage. And so they tried to do a few different things. They tried inducing glaucoma in mice with no T cells and found that the high pressure on its own was causing some damage. But once pressures returned to normal, the disease didn't progress any further.

And they tested it in germ-free mice, so mice that don't have any bacteria, and they were not able to induce glaucoma in those mice. And so then they looked at humans with glaucoma and found that they had five times the normal level of that kind of T cell. So all of this together suggests that glaucoma might actually be an autoimmune disease, which is very, very weird. And it was the headline that made me go, huh? And so this opens the door. Maybe there's some new treatments where we could treat glaucoma by blocking the immune response. So is the pressure in the eye a separate thing that just happens to help you get

glaucoma? I think the most common form of glaucoma happens partially because your eye has drainage ducts in it. And so it's draining little bits of fluids that maintains the pressure. But in my version of glaucoma, they're still draining, but they're maybe not draining enough. And so the pressure builds up.

So the stuff inside the eyeball is draining out of your eyeball all the time? Yeah. I mean, just to like the outside. You can't have old stinky water in your eye forever, I guess. Yeah, yeah. There's just a swamp in there. Got ogres living in it.

So you can see them if you look up at the sky sometimes. All right, well, I'm very in favor of finding new ways to treat glaucoma especially because one of my friends has glaucoma definitely had that personal touch didn't it all right sam are you ready yeah three two one sari wow uh yeah sari i like that was just too good saving lives with with lives with inventive science in the past. It was so cool. Yeah, and I'm mad at Nazis every day now.

So it was really helpful to have another story to remind me in the past, people were also mad at Nazis. But I suffer myself from autoimmune disease. And so if Stefan and I end up kindred spirits in this, I will feel, you know, I feel bad for not picking your fact. But there we are. That's okay. I'm going to get some bionic eyeballs one day. That's my plan. And now it's time to ask the science couch.

We've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. It's from at a happily. a happily why isn't it possible to make a few super vaccines so that people have to get less shots? Well, we kind of do have some super vaccines, right,

Sari? Like the MMR vaccine's kind of all at once. Just three things. Just three. Well, three's a lot. Three is a lot. If I can count it on one hand. But from my understanding, there are several reasons for this. One is that there are different suspensions.

So, like, they have to be treated differently. And they, like, are kept together by different compounds. And you can't use the same compounds for every vaccine. And then certain vaccines have different schedules. So, they have to be given at different times. Like the MMR is good because they all use the same suspension and you can do them on the same schedule.

Those are the two reasons I know of. That's like pretty much the sum of it. And like, particularly if the schedule is different between the different compounds that you're vaccinating against, then you could give like bonus doses of certain antigens, which could lead to adverse effects or not enough of the things that you're vaccinating against. It's also really hard to separate if you have a combination vaccine, if there's a

negative reaction to it, like which antigen is causing the issue. And the more you add to that, then the more, I don't know, variables there are. So MMR we've been talking about is a trivalent vaccine, which is measles, mumps, and rubella. And there is an FDA approved hexavalent vaccine called Excellus. And so it targets diphtheria, tetanus, herpsis, hepatitis B, poliomyelitis, invasive hemophilus, influenza type B, invasive hemophilius,

I think, and then influenza type B disease, maybe. Oh, so I think six pronged vaccines are the biggest that we've made. So for now, for now, you know,

when you go, when you're at the, at the fast food restaurant and you just fill your cup with like every single soda? It's like that. Dr. Pepper orange soda. That's what I always do. It's very good.

You know what I like is iced tea and Coke. That sounds great. It is really good. Oh, like Southern treat. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week thank you to at creb shouting at little chris and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this

episode final sam buck scores sari and stefan tied over with two hank and sam coming in behind with one which leads me still in the behind sam and and Stefan tied for second, and Sari in the lead. If you like this show and you want to help us out, please do it. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show, and also helps other people when they're deciding, I don't know, should I listen to this new podcast or not? Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode

so we can chuckle along with you. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stefan Shin. And I've been Sam Schultz.

SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish, and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you! And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.

But one more thing. In 2014, a Peruvian Incan mummy, I was like 500-ish years old, was diagnosed with chronic Chagas disease thanks to DNA studies of a parasite found in the mummy's butt. What is Chagas disease? It's an infectious disease caused by a parasite found in more butts,

the feces of the triatamine bug. It can cause swelling or fever. If long-lasting, it can cause congestive heart failure. I'd like to see a mummy's butt, I suppose. It's just like a normal butt, but wrinkly and like... All right, I'll Google mummy butt.

That's not what I was hoping for. It's not. It's a different kind of mummy butt. It's just a bunch of moms. It's a bunch I was hoping for. Nope, it's not. It's a different kind of mummy. It's just a bunch of moms. It's a bunch of moms' butts. It's a bunch of moms' butts. And also the mummy from Hotel Transylvania who apparently has a giant butt, too.

It's a pretty funny butt.