The Future of Pandemics

what the future holds. And we're going to start by looking at some serious stuff that's going on right now. Yeah. A very present example of this sort of thing is, of course ebola, which is a disease caused by a virus that first emerged, i mean, for basically the first time that humans really noticed it in nineties six so recently.

Um when a patient in then Zaire presented with malaria like symptoms at a local in a nurse gave him an injection of quinine, which is a popular drug for managing the single celled parasite that causes malaria, but she kept the needle and used it on other malaria patients that used to happen unfortunately kind of a lot, especially in that time period, which was before we knew as much about blood borne viruses like like HIV and herpes and ebola and super especially it happened in areas with

our economic hardship and medical supply problems. So the patient unfortunately passed away a few weeks later. UM and when he did, his friends and family performed burial procedures that exposed them to his bodily fluids. A few weeks after that, eighteen of his friends and family members had also died, and that local clinic was flooded with patients who had been exposed to the raised needle who were experiencing similar symptoms. UM. It was a huge outbreak. It would kill over six

people at the time. And so this was sort of the first time we found out about the virus that's now known as ebola, and that just had another outbreak

this year, right right, Well, the disease disappeared. A couple of smaller outbreaks happened over the next three years in the nineteen seventies, and then we managed to contain it and it basically disappeared for a stretch of like fifteen years, which was awesome, but but outbreaks do continue to happen, like this one that just started in August in the

Democratic Republic of Congo. So we wanted to talk today about about what's the deal with how with all of this, Like, how can we possibly predict and prevent the spread of diseases that we don't fully understand yet, or or even the spread of emergent diseases that we've never seen before. Yeah.

So we focused a lot in this podcast in the past on preventing sort of chronic and congenital diseases and technology and science might help us fight those more effectively in the future, But we really haven't talked a whole lot about infectious disease, right, and there are a lot of terms that we're going to have to define on this, right Yeah. So I thought one the first things we should do is clear up the main three terms you

hear about infectious diseases outbreak, epidemic, and pandemic. What are these words actually mean and how are they different from each other? Um So, an outbreak, according to the World Health Organization, and outbreak basically occurs when a specific disease is found with greater prevalence than you would normally expect to find that disease in one time and place. So any given time, in particular place, a certain number of

people might be expected to carry that certain disease. If suddenly twice as many people are infected, this could be called an outbreak. But the World Health Organization says that this can also apply to a really small number of occurrences as long as it's more than normal, So that they specify that even a single case of infection could be classed as an outbreak if it shows up at a time and place where that particular disease was previously

not present or unknown. So so if a patient presented with a ball in a place that they that that no one had ever seen a bullet before, that could be considered an outbreak. Yes, it might be considered an outbreak. The term outbreak, I think, is one of the more loosely applied, right So, it's one of those that doesn't have hard and fast rules that you know you must meet these criteria in order to be called an outbreak. Right Well, I mean some people use it differently. I

can contrast it to the word epidemic. Now, the c d c S Epidemiology glossary defines epidemic as the occurrence of more cases of disease than expected in a given area or among a specific group of people over a particular period of time. So that sounds a lot. Yeah, it sounds a lot like the definition the w h O gave for an outbreak. What's the deal? Well, yeah, a lot of people do use the terms outbreak and

epidemic more or less interchangeably. In fact, the same CDC Epidemiology glossary defines the term outbreak as synonymous with epidemic. They say, sometimes the preferred word as it may escape sensationalism associated with the word epidemic, alternately a localized as opposed to generalized epidemic. So they're what they're saying is that the word epidemic can be emotionally charged in a way that outbreak may not be. So if you're talking about a report and you use the word epidemic, this

could create a more negative reaction than what was necessarily intended. Sure, possibly because people hear the word epidemic and and think of pandemic. Well, yeah, because epidemic proportions that tends to be a phrase you hear of epidemic proportions, which makes it sound like whatever an epidemic is, it has to be though in this basic definition, as we've said, ab outbreak and epidemic, both of them are relative terms. They're they're relative to what you normally expect, not based on

some specific threshold of PREVILEGCE. Right, there's no arbitrary number where ten thousand people within a given area have to have this, you know, within that population density, and then it's an epidemic. But for epidemics sometimes, in some cases officials and health organizations do make distinctions based on threshold. So not really without break, but definitely with epidemic. So for example, the CDC might wait until the morbidity rate of the flu reaches a certain percent of the overall

hospital death rate before classifying it an epidemic. All right, now we're getting confusing, because yeah, but this is but so there is that weird distinction, But overall the words are basically the same, right. It's it's because we need to have certain words to describe specific circumstances. It's just so happens that this particular word can serve two different, too similar but different purposes. Another distinction I would make

is that I haven't found any evidence. I don't know if you all have ever heard, but I haven't found any evidence of the word epidemic being applied in the case of a single infection the way the w h O said that outbreak, might I agree with you, Yeah, I have never encountered that. So basically it seems like they're they're roughly synonymous, but outbreak has a slightly more flexible definition. It can apply to more situations. All right, So what about the term pandemic That has a very

specific definition in that it is widespread. So the definition from the Dictionary of Epidemiology says an epidemic occurring worldwide, over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries, and usually affecting a large number of people. So this this isn't going to be local. This is basically a world health problem, uh for for for example, Oh well, okay, so you could have the Spanish flu of nineteen eighteen, one of the worst pandemics in the history of humanity, if not

the single worst. It killed about fifty million people worldwide. This was more than the number of people who died in World War One. Around the same time, there was the Black Death, the Bebonic plague. UM. There was the h one in one swine flu pandemic of two thousand nine to two thou ten. These are all instances where there's a single infection that spreads to multiple countries, usually multiple continents, and kills, kills or infects many many people

over a large geographical area. Now, the stuff we're covering right now is scary by nature image obviously, it's very very scary. But one of the things I want to remind people of is that that we're going to be focusing a lot on the science and technology that helps us detect these things and prevent them from becoming worse than, uh than an outbreak, but also the the idea of a global as in a global like population killing disease is pretty tough. I mean, it's it's it's hard for

that to actually happen. In fact, there's a game that that demonstrates this. It's called play Incorporated. Have you guys heard of this? So I actually got to sit on a panel with one of the developers for Plague Incorporated last year two thousand thirteen UM, and it was a game developer who worked very closely with the CDC while developing this game, and the whole purpose of it was to show how difficult it can be to actually have

a pandemic event happened. Not that it's impossible, but that there are lots of different ways that it can become very difficult. And your your job in that game, you play as the disease. Your goal. Your goal is to wipe out the human population and it's really really hard

to do. And the whole purpose of it, again was not to you know, scare people, but to actually demonstrate that, raise consciousness and say that there are all these different safety measures in place that when they come into play, make it very difficult for something like this to happen. And it's getting better all the time. That's that's really fabulous.

The board game that I was first thinking of when you mentioned that is called Pandemic, right, and and you're playing is the team of research scientists who have a great number of factors working against them. They all have very specific moves that they can make and and so it's a collaborative board game in which you're trying to

to control a number of diseases. And it is also very tough to play, but but it's it's also not realistic, like it's it's meant to be fun, and the one time I played it, we won, So I had an

unrealistic playing experience. Sure, but but I mean I do think that that unrealistic things like that, or UM or or just general panic through lack of scientific knowledge, or things like very dynamic media like zombie movies or or movies about the spread of disease can cause an unrealistic concept in in the mind of the general public about exactly how much danger we are currently sitting here at our desks. In UM we call it fear, uncertainty, and

doubt or FUD for short. That's coming to play again later. Yeah, but people are are absolutely working on these kind of problems, and they're working on them in a great number of ways. One way in which we can help prevent the spread of these diseases is early detection of outbreaks. Exactly right. So detection of a disease outbreak is one of the most important parts of fighting the disease outbreak because in many cases, the sooner we know what's going on, the

easier it is to contain. Because health organizations can communicate prevention measures to the general public doctors and hospitals can know what to watch out for, so they know, okay, here's a list of symptoms you need to keep your eye on. Uh, and if a new vaccine or treatment needs to be developed, research can start right away before

many people are sick. Right. The longer it takes public health organizations and doctors and researchers to know that an outbreak is underway, the more people suffer and the more people are ultimately at risk. And so I wanted to talk about one particular example that I think is really interesting and how we might change the way we detect disease outbreaks. So earlier this year we already mentioned Ebola. The twenty fourteen Ebola outbreak was spreading for months, obviously

before there was any formal recognition of it. But nine days before the w h O released its first public announcement about the outbreak, an app called health Map detected the presence of a quote mystery hemorrhagic fever in West Africa. That's really cool. How does it work? Okay, So there are a couple of different types of reporting you can

refer to. There's formal reporting in health agencies, so that would be going specifically through an agency like the CDC or the w h O, a public health organization that's set up to recognize when an outbreak is taking place, and those types of reports tend to be very accurate, but they can be slow to pick up on trends on the ground. But you could also look at informal reporting,

which gathers through the Internet. So this informal reporting could include not just the formal notices from health agencies, but also things like local news media that it can get in real time straight from Google News. I watched a Google tech talk from years ago with one of the people behind health Map pointing out also that informal reporting is less subject to political pressure than some formal health

agency reporting would be. So a system like this obviously isn't going to be able to pinpoint outbreaks with perfect accuracy, because, for example, this particular app, the health Map, it's sort of misidentified and uh some cases of hibola in New York when there actually weren't any, but it was because it was basing it on some popular media reporting that

turned out to be false. But at the same time, it was very good at detecting early that there was something might be abola before we had the widespread formal announcement, and so using things like this, a lot of people in the public health field are saying, yeah, looking at the Internet might actually be a good way to get the earliest possible warning about when something dangerous is on

the rise. It started. I mean not to be flip about it, but but sort of the same way that that algorithms are watching the stock market on you know, via Twitter. Actually, that's that's incredibly accurate because Google does just that. So we we've talked a lot about big data, right, We've talked about how we've also talked about how it doesn't take very much data to get some good conclusions about the person who's typing stuff in. Right, you can type in a few things that you think have no

real direct correlation to you. But it's amazing what a good algorithm can do by you know, saying, oh, well, based upon the search terms, I draw the conclusion that this person is in this particular kind of life situation. Well, one of those things is being sick. Right. What happens if suddenly in a certain geographic location, a lot of people are googling the symptoms of the flu. Yeah, and that's where the Google flu uh tool came in. It's

actually pretty cool. It's called Flu Trends, and it's based upon the fact that Google aggregates tons of data from search engine, just search engine activity as people are searching for stuff in Google. And because part of that involves kind of tagging the location of where people are when they are searching for things, Google can start to draw

some conclusion. So if it sees like we all live in Atlanta, if it sees that a larger than normal population of people are searching for things that are FLU related in Atlanta, then that might be an indication that

there's the beginning of an outbreak here in Atlanta. And so you can go to Flu Trends and take a look, and it will actually show you what the um what the activity level is, not just in general, but for you know, your your particular region, and it a our codes a map and shows you, you know, how how many people have been searching for this. When I checked this morning for the purposes of this podcast, the United States was in yellow, which means we're fine. We're not

like yellow as in baseline. It's when it starts getting read that you start to really start worrying about different areas. But we're not currently in flu season as we record this, so it's not a huge surprise, right. So Google search terms aren't the only place you could look for this. This might show up in all kinds of places in publicly available data on the Internet. So another one I thought of would be Twitter. Yeah, I mean, if people are tweeting about oh, my running nose and my which

people do exactly. Yeah, So it gets to be one of those things that if it's something that can be indexed, then it's possible to create a tool that gathers that information and plots it against a map and shows you in real time what those kind of features are. So and it doesn't have to be just related to the flu. The fact that Google has this flu one makes sense because that's a common ailment that that happens to have a season every single year some years, pretty widespread, it's

relatively easy to track. Yeah, So that that's one of those where I mean, some of the diseases may be more subtle, or they may have enough overlapping symptoms with other diseases that you can't make any kind of conclusion or more personal I mean, I'm not sure if you know herpies patients would necessarily want that kind of information being tracked by Google. I am certain that tourism boards

wouldn't want that kind of information tracked, right. And I'm going to talk about privacy again in a minute, because I wanted to ask the question about how good could technology like this get. I mean, one thing, obviously, is if this is what we can do today, I think the sort of the text mining data gathering apps will get even better at predicting and detecting, especially as stuff

gets increasingly online and right. And all of that is indirect exactly, because it's just it's just harvesting text from the Internet to look for But what if we go beyond text. Let's say you combine big databased outbreak detection with another technology we talked about just recently, tricorders. So now you're looking at red shirts getting well or tricorders or whatever you want to call them, home health monitoring devices. I think these may very well become a big thing

in the coming years. So the device might be probably not something that's able to diagnose every disease you could contract, especially rare or previously unknown diseases. But let's say we reach a world where most households have some kind of Internet enabled medical scanner. So you do your thing, you give a blood sample, or you touch it to your finger in your forehead or whatever whatever it is you

have to do to um. And if you if you want to learn more about this, you can listen to our podcast from the previous week or I guess two weeks ago. When this podcast goes out about the real star Trek tric order, people are working on it. It's it's going to be the real thing. So let's say it detects that you have a high fever and low blood pressure and maybe three or four other unique symptoms. Anonymously,

it uploads this data to a CDC database. Now, if the CDC database notices that devices all within one geographical area are logging the same collection of symptoms, it can raise a red flag for human doctors to immediately investigate. On one hand, that would be really great for disease prevention, but I do want to caution on the other hand

that that would that might be a serious concern about privacy. Yeah, because if you have anything that's going to be directly linked to a specific individual or even a group of individuals, then that is a big that's a big problem. Sure, And I mean I I do want to put in that you know any that your your doctor. If you go to your doctor and for example, you have herpes, your your doctor is required to report that kind of disease to the CDC. So so this kind of reporting

does already happen, just not from your own home. People have a nervousness about electronic devices. Sure, Sure, it's understandable, maybe with good reason, because there are a lot of reasons you don't want this information getting out. I mean, in a world with private health insurance companies and the possibility of hiring discrimination based on health conditions, I think it's a really valid concern. Um. So I think it would be imperative that a scanner has a built in

system somehow for ensuring the anonymity of data collected. The only problem I can see there was that this might be difficult once it comes into conflict with the need to geotag the health data. Because geographically locating where each case occurs is going to be one of the most important parts of this kind of automatic You would want it to be generalized to the point where it could not identify specifically who the individual is, but not so

generalized that it becomes useless. So maybe it's not your home address, but it's your zip code or something. Yeah, or even even something more general than that, although of course, the again, the more general you get, the less helpful that information is. So I've got a horror movie scenario based upon this idea to really kind of drive home

the point of how important privacy is. All Right, So we're in the future with the Internet of things, so we're surrounded at all times by sensors that can detect detect the most subtle of changes, and that group of sensors detects that one of us has has contracted a terrible and extremely contagious disease, and it lets them know who are They are mysterious people who wear maybe has mat suits. Yeah, yes, yes, two by two with the hands of blue, and they show up at your door.

They kick the door open, and they drag you, kicking and screaming into a black van and then they drive you off and you're never seen from or heard from again. Um. Yeah, this is obviously a ridiculous, over the top, you know, dystopian view of the future, but it does illustrate that if we have systems involved that are incredibly subtle that

can detect diseases. There's the other side of the coin where we want to make sure we handle that kind of technology responsibly to ensure as much privacy as is relevant, while still balancing out the fact that we want to protect the general public too. So it's a balancing act between the individuals right to privacy and the public's need

for safety. And that's always going to be an issue, and I'm sure we're going to see stories in the future that air on one side or the other and will constantly be playing the balancing act to find out

what's the right role for this kind of approach. But it's one that's really important and I think, um, I think there are going to be ways to uh add some anonymity with the reporting to to at least for the purposes of gathering information for statistical analysis that kind of thing, even even if it just means the communication of information to the public, that that will be possible. When it comes to actual actionable items where we are coming in and trying to administer medicine to a person

who is afflicted with this, that's where it really gets complicated. Yeah, I think It's interesting you said communication, because I think another one of the most important things about how we're going to help fight the spread of infectious diseases in the future isn't just the science and technology, though there's plenty more of that for us to talk about in a bit, I think it's communication with the public. Yeah. This goes back to that fear, uncertainty, and doubt I

was saying before. When you have a lack of communication, or you have a surplus of bad communication, you get misinformation out there. People either fill in the gaps of stuff they don't know with the worst case scenario or sometimes a an idealist stick approach that doesn't really take into account the actual problems that are there. Uh, they ignore things that would be helpful, and they pay way too much attention to things that aren't really relevant. We've

seen that here in Atlanta with the Ebola case. Now we had the people brought over and taken to a hospital here in Atlanta. Yeah, and this was you know, what's ostensibly one of the best, if not the best, virus experts in the world. We're bringing like two or three Abola patients into their home base in Atlanta. Yeah, and and the reaction I saw, like the knee jerk reaction I saw, which was largely based on ignorance, was this is going to turn Atlanta into ground zero for

an Ebola outbreak in the United States. Right. You get emails from your relatives that know you live in Atlanta and they're like, did you get I mean, I really did see statements on Facebook that filled me with dismay from people, from people that I I genuinely like. And the fear comes from an understandable place, but it also

comes from the ignorance. And it's through educating yourself that you learn more about the nature of the disease, how it is transmitted, and the way that it's being taken care of, that you realize this is actually the course of action that's being taken is is incredibly positive, you know, I mean, these people have real lives, that these are American citizens who have come who have been exposed to this terrible disease in the course of their work and research. Right.

So this was something that ended up being with a little research, not the hot item that everyone thought it was. But that's that's that's the role of responsible journalism as well as just responsible science communication. So The thing about ebola, y'all, is that it is not airborne. Um. You'd have to come into direct living cell contact with an ebola patient's bodily fluids in order to catch it. By that, I mean that stuff from inside their body would have to

get in your mouth, nose, eyes, genitals, or an open wound. Um. Human skin is, as it turns out, as a really good protector against viruses because the outer layer is dead and viruses are dormant until they come into contact with a living cell and a bowl of patients are not zombies. They're they're not looking to bite you. So you would have to be trying pretty hard to get infected by

one of these patients. Like you would have to go to where they are and get through the guards and security and like bring them a bottle of wine and make out with them. Well, I mean, it's easy to see how something like this can spread in certain situations where like is, say, if you're handling the dead body of someone who died, If you are if there's, say, is a sanitation problem and there's water contamination that that obviously you can understand why it happens. If you have

somebody in hospital conditions, yes, this is really not. I mean, obviously it's important to take precautions, but this is what medical professionals do, right, right, And and it is true that some viruses are airborne um and there is in fact some amount of discussion among some virologists about the potential capacity for a bola to mutate and become airborne, but it is an entire industries job to watch for that and let us know about about it if if

it does happen. So I mean, basically my conclusion of this rant is that I think the Internet should should probably come with a cover stating in large friendly letters, don't panic. Uh, but education is your friend. Yes, researches all of our friend. Yeah, it's it's important to to actually look at what the leading experts have to say about the matter and and really take time to understand that.

And don't you know, I don't think it's necessary to landbast someone who has perhaps come to the wrong conclusion, but certainly to gently say, like, I understand this is scary. I don't want to dismiss your fear because it comes

from a anuine place. However, we should educate ourselves so that we know exactly what we're dealing with rather than just react without that knowledge, right right, and and okay, like it's it's also true that we don't know everything about even relatively common outbreak vectors, like like you could unfortunately say that a bola is relatively common. Um, And new research is indicating that it's fruit bats that might be the reservoir animals for for viruses like a bola.

That's ah, they spread the diseases without getting sick themselves. Um. There's an interesting hypothesis, by the way, if I can make a small tangent that because they're flying mammals, the only flying mammals in fact, that their flight and the metabolism and internal body temperature that they need to maintain it makes them singularly able to coexist with viruses that seriously mess up other mammals and birds. Um, And that

bats might have co evolved with these viruses. You know, it's not genetically worthwhile for a virus to kill its host, right, um so, but so you know bats can handle it. And the thing is that bats live basically everywhere in the world other than humans. They're the most populous mammal on the planet. But we're basically only figuring this out like this year. Uh, that's where that interesting research thing

comes in. And now these diseases that can be spread from from animals to humans, they're called zoonotic diseases, which always sounds hypnotic, like hypnotic to me, which is an entirely different word. And I don't know why my brain always does that. Um. There's you know, there's there's zoonotic

diseases that the animals will present with symptoms of, like rabies. Um. And then there's things like like a bola and then stars for example that uh, that the animals do not get sick from, like I was just talking about to to the animals immune system can't tell just by looking at them and their behaviors that they are in fact

carrying the disease, right, which makes it a lot scarier. Um. And you know, these are situations in which basic sanitation and education about sanitation is helped a lot, you know, making sure that people wash their hands and their food, cook food to appropriate temperatures, control populations of pests like bats and rodents, or or keep bats. You know, when you can't control a bat population or don't want to because they're doing useful things like pollinating your crops, just

keeping them out of contact with your farm animals. All of that's great, um, but as human civilization expands, which it is always doing, we encroach on the territory of animals that can carry these unknown zoonoses, and those diseases can transfer when the wild animals come into direct contact with people in farm animals through bites, shared food sources, use of the animals themselves as a food source, and contamination by the animals waste. So that's terrifying. That's a

scary story. Yeah, it would seem to me that it's possible that by better understanding the relationship between the animals that carried these zoonotic diseases in the way we eventually get them, we may be able to prevent them better. Right, Oh, yeah, totally is. Science is absolutely working on this. There's a team based out of the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis that's paired up with the US Agency for International Development to study animals that live on on these

borders of human settlements. Since they've been to twenty countries testing animals for viruses, and they have found more than eight hundreds so far. The vast majority of which were previously undiscovered, So it's like sort of like creating a Facebook of the dangerous viruses that are on the edge, so we know what they are before they attack. Yeah.

So the next step after after this this data collection, which the team they're calling themselves Predict among others, are working on is to improve the diagnostic measures and education about sanitation and disease containment, So like making it easy and affordable for local doctors to test for entire families of viruses, like, for example, they're there are five known strains of ebola, and giving them data on these new viruses to possibly watch out for, and making genetic sequencing

available to confirm diagnoses. Right, So that seems like it goes right back into that very important early detection thing. Right. So we've talked a lot about detection, we've talked a lot about treatment, but what about preventing an outbreak from happening, so there's no detection needed because there's no outbreak in the first place. It sounds like science fiction. Yeah, well you know it's science fact, Joe, science fact. I'm here to tell you about it. So to be fair, it's

really kind of in the realm of prototypes. The science fiction maybe about as accurate as science fact, but it's really promising stuff. So IBM research has been on the forefront of uh, looking into ways of using polymers. Now, polymers are long chain molecules that are made up of repeating patterns of individual atoms linked together. Right. Plastics, Yeah, plastics are an example of polymers. There are natural polymers,

they're synthetic polymers. IBM has led the way in many areas for synthetic polymer development, largely for what you would expect, things like semiconductors, right, I mean that's kind of IBM s realm that makes sense. But they've also started to look into using polymers for other things like nano medicine. Uh. And so there's this one type of polymer they've developed that has been dubbed Ninja particle. Yeah. I wish there were also pirate particles because on the Ninja versus pirate

great debate. I I stand on my peg leg with my pirate brethren. But I'm sure a competing company will come up with some particles. He has probably just like a hand that's on the deck of a ship, or a hook, maybe a parrot, But at any rate, ninja particles. The you know, I was reading an article from engadget and I thought at first that was just Engadget being

kind of you know, engadgety saying ninja particles. But it turns out that's actually what the folks over at IBM have started to kind of refer to them as two. And it turns out scientists have senses of humor. Yeah, so the reason why they call them that. So these polymers are essentially synthetic counterparts to anti microbial peptides. This is something that our immune systems will generate on their

own in order to fight off microbes. Uh. And so it's kind of trying to copy what already happens in our our immune systems, but make it from a synthetic material. So what these polymers do is they seek out microbes based upon the charge of those microbes. There's like an attraction charge, so you know, opposite uh, opposite charges attract one another. So it really comes down to just that basic law. And so these these polymers have been engineered

to be attracted to specific types of microbes. Then what they do is, once they're attracted to them, they buddy on up to the microbe they get nice and close. Then they inject part of the polymer into the microbe and then they explode the diehard of polymers. No, that's really what they say. They explode in the sense that it breaks the microbe apart. But that's the that is specifically the word the IBM researcher used. This is a horror movie for microbes. So they have a they have

a robot that comes up to them. It's the terminated abs them and inserts a chain into their body and which breaks them apart kills them. This is actually cool

for multiple reasons. I mean, I'm not sure exactly what kind of microbes they're they're looking at because I haven't read this research, but a lot of the times with with viruses at any rate, it is your immune systems over response to trying to control the invasion that causes the really nasty side effects like hemorrhaging or you're running

nose or like a fever. Is the body's defense mechanism, right well, and and we've seen things like you know, allergies is just your your body's immune system reacting, uh with gusto to something that is not actually a harmful microbe. So so the so the body can do some stuff that that is unpleasant and sometimes harmful to us in the attempt to save the overall organism. So it's kind of like you know, you know, sacrificing stuff in order

to stay alive. Um, well, these microbes would not go they're not transdermal, we would not get them injected into us. There would be no point where we would have these things put into our bodies. Rather, they would be incorporated into things like deodorant or detergent or soap that would end up having these microbes beyond our skin, which, like you were saying, Lauren, it's not going to interact with our our systems at all, so you don't have to

worry as much about toxicity. Uh. And it will block microbes incoming microbes from infecting us in the first place. It's obviously not going to be something that would be perfectly a perfect shield. Anything that's airborne is another issue. Right, that's not gonna that's not gonna necessarily protect you, right right, And if you if you you know, touch the door knob and then put your hand in your mouth or yeah,

rub your eyes. Yeah, No, So that it's probably a better example of actually I want to say on the same podcast we've warned before about the overuse of antimicrobial soap. Does Does this come with the same kind of danger. No, it does not, because it's not going to encourage resistant bacteria because it's all based on that charge. It is not based on any sort of chemical reaction. It's a

physical reaction of it breaking apart the microbe. So I think of it as a physical attack, not a chemical attack. So there's no way to have the microbe mutate in such a way that it no longer has uh that that or now has resistance to that particular chemical attack. It's that physical attack. So according to the IBM researchers, it is not prone to the same problems as gaining that like a microbe's ability to become resistant to antibiotics,

for example. So this would be more like, um, Joe, you might be able to take a magic potion that makes you immune to the flu. But the hammer I have that I'm going to hit you in the head with that one. You know, you're just stuck. You're gonna take it. Um And the microbes are not going to be getting any magic football helmets anytime soon. So that's that's kind of the the analogy. There's no need to find the cure for seventeen stab wounds in the back.

We're up. Um, yeah, no, it's it's this. This is really exciting. Again, It's one of those things that I think would be great at helping prevent outbreaks from happening, because it would it would cut down on the level of infection within an area. Obviously, this is not a magic pill that would make us immune from everything forever and ever. It's not that. But it is really cool that something as unrelated as semiconductor research could ultimately end

up becoming a boon in nano medicine. So I think that's pretty exciting stuff. That's great. I mean, yeah, we we've talked about a lot of really grim topics today, but but it is so exciting that these researchers are coming up with these varied and terrific ways to help

prevent outbreaks and keep everyone safer. Yeah. So, I think if we're going to have a message to send to you guys out there, it really is to take the time to look into these matters and to learn about them and and try to you know, acknowledge the fact that yes, this is a scary subject, but that it's it's something that if you educate yourself about it, it it becomes less scary. That ignorance plays a huge role. And we're all guilty of this at some point or another.

I know. I mean, I've certainly had that kind of visceral reaction when you first hear something and then as you learn more about it, you realize you know, that reaction wasn't really warranted. It doesn't mean that I go about whistling happy tune and never worry about it again. But I have a context for it. So, uh, context is good. Research is great, um, and uh, you know, polymers that have ninja skills are awesome. So I think that's what we can conclude here. Good ninjas are good.

They're not as good as pirates, but they're pretty pretty. They don't get their own day, but pirates do. And it's coming up. You're still gonna be here when it happens, too, So I'm gonna be talking like a pirate all day long. There is no talk like a ninja day, no, because ninjas just they're just yes and be. They're just quiet. They're just quiet. They don't talk. I mean, Also, Japanese is really difficult to master. So that's true. That's true. So Sionara friends, we are going to sign off today

for Forward Thinking. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. You can find us on Facebook by searching for f W Thinking. FW thinking is of course our handle at the other locations, and we will pop to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places