03 May 2009

The week in comments

This was an especially lively week on the TED commenting front, as our community tackled debates on swine flu, race and politics, and globalization. These amazing discussions can get a little heated -- so we appreciate that there always seems to be a voice of reason that emerges from the group to soothe frazzled nerves and streamline the discussion with a nod to both sides.

This one's for the peace-makers:

On Alex Tabarrok's interview with the TEDBlog:
TED talks are supposed to create debate, not end them.. Seems this one was a success then? -- Oli

On Nathan Wolfe's interview with the TEDBlog:
Bird flu is essentially a veterinary problem. Swine Flu is essentially a human health problem, and so is alarmism and fear. But not information and prevention, those are on our side and also on our side is the augmentation of average temperatures in the coming months and...wash your hands! -- Manel via facebook

On Laurie Garrett's TEDTalk: What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic?:
I thought this was particularly insightful given the evolution of the H1n1 virus in Mexico this past week. I heard people are reusing masks even those found in the trash cans. They wash and re-sell them, this is one case where ignorance kills and spreads a flu -- Juan via facebook

On Nate Silver's interview with the TEDBlog:
But yes, he is not pinheaded nor racist. He _is_ a nerdy dude who is big on analyzing and finding relationships within information... public speaking is not his forte. -- Toby via facebook

And, sometimes, the community glue is the speaker themselves:

On Brian Cox's TEDTalk: What went wrong (and what's next) at the Large Hadron Collider:
If the Higgs bosun particle (God particle), when found, is as congenial as Brian Cox, I think we can all agree to presuppose why the elementary particles cohere. -- Adrian

Thanks for keeping the debate alive.

Posted by Shanna Carpenter | Permalink

Permalink | Comments () | TrackBack (0)

30 April 2009

Q&A with Laurie Garrett: "This is a huge wake-up call"

TED took 20 minutes with Laurie Garrett this afternoon to follow up on her TEDTalk from 2007, posted today, about pandemic flu. Garrett is the author of The Coming Plague, and a fellow on the Council for Foreign Relations who studied global health and emerging diseases. (As you can imagine, she is very busy this week.) We asked Garrett: What has changed since the last pandemic panic, 2007's avian flu? What does she worry about now? And really, should we not wash our hands?

Did the avian flu scare of two years ago prompt real action from the government?

Yeah, I think actually there's been a serious maturation in not only US response but all over the world and within the WHO. We're in a different era in terms of how the public is getting information. The CDC even has a Twitter account -- hundreds of thousands of people are twittering the CDC.

So the situation of 2007 has changed?

Yes, we're way beyond that now. All the thought processes that went on, all the practices and drills -- and criticisms from people like myself -- has paid off.

The WHO seems much more open now -- with daily briefings on the web, news releases, the announcement today that we're not longer calling it "swine flu" ...

That was because the pork industry went bananas. They've seen countries ban US and Mexican pork products. It's affecting the US meat industry in ways that couldn't be predicted. It's what we saw in the chicken industry with H5N1 [avian flu].

But it's really important to understand -- in the big picture, stepping away from the immediate situation -- it's not coincidental that we're looking at a virus that seems to have elements genetically from at least three species of host, human, bird and pig, and even the pig pieces seem to come from a minimum of six different input points. This is the most deeply mosaiced virus that we've seen circulating in humans. And it has erupted from the pork industry. So we have these giant industrial-scaled pork plants where the pigs are literally snout to snout -- you have an infection start at one end, and it just zips through the whole darn place.

One of our Facebook commenters noted this -- that "packing 500,000 animals in a space of the size of a football field is a recipe for disaster."

Pigs are passing their viruses to humans, but more significantly, humans are passing their viruses to pigs. H1N1 appears to have been a human virus that passed through pigs, through birds, back through pigs, it took a few more turns, and then back to humans.

We have these new ecologies that are complete artificial and completely bizarre. Imagine a row of neatly stacked dominoes all stacked in the same way. Think of the pork industry as the dominoes. You're creating these perfect environments for disease. We know it's better to have a heterogeneous population, and this is a huge wake-up call.

Do you feel differently now than you did then about any of the points you made -- about masks or handwashing, for instance?

I think the primary purpose of a mask is to scare the heck out of the people you're talking to, and then they stay 5 feet away. They don't keep viruses away, they keep people away.

For those who are health professionals and first responders, who have to get up close and personal with people, I remain convinced that only an N95 mask, a fitted N95 mask, offers the proper protection.

For the average person, I really think the primary person of the mask is to scare other people. Although, if you are sick and you cough, most of the droplets do end up inside the mask, so you are protecting other people.

And handwashing?

Well, I think handwashing is going to help, and you should wash your hands.

But the interesting thing is, Why do we have flu so late in the year? Usually the flu season has been over for quite some time, so this is a very unusual situation. And one of the things that's interesting about why flu is seasonal, and is the sort of bad-news endpoint of the paragraph I am now uttering: When flu is coughed or you sneeze it, the virus is suspended in a liquid environment. Ideally an environment with lots of polysaccharides and sugars, an environment like mucus. Suspended in mucus, the virus can go from your hand to a doorknob, from a doorknob to another person's hand; it can go onto the surface of a telephone ... all those things are contagious to others. Mucus also protects the virus from ultraviolet rays. One reason flu is seasonal -- as the temperature rises, these things tend to dry out. So in the summer, it's very, very unusual to see flu virus circulating. The bad new is, if this virus has indeed taken hold, it will move to the Southern hemisphere for their winter, and it will come back to us, possibly in a different mutation, this fall. As our temperatures drop, we may see a return. This is the ominous issue.

Posted by Emily McManus | Permalink

Permalink | Comments () | TrackBack (0)