This is Michael Bublé, host of the Junos, Canada's biggest night in music. And trust me, this lineup is going to be everything. With performances by Akilah, Baby No Money, Josh Ross. Nemesis, Snotty Nose Rez Kids, a special final performance by Sum 41, and Michael Bublé. Now that's what I call a party. Don't miss the Junos. Live, March 30th at 8 Eastern on CBC and CBC Gem. And you're all invited. This is a CBC Podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quirks and Quarks. On this week's show, keeping an eye on polar bears. Researchers watch the great predators emerge from their winter dens. We saw things like three cubs that came out with their mother. They were tumbling around. We saw one cub that fell down the slope. We saw a mother go down to retrieve her cubs and bring it back up. And an orbital traffic jam. Our space junk problem might be getting worse thanks to...
Climate change? There's debris that if it was created in the 60s, it would deorbit in 50 to 100 years. That same debris, if it were created today, could take well over 100 years. plus why modern life makes us sleep wrong, Australian evidence for catastrophe on the early Earth, and the silent health costs of COVID. All this today on Quirks and Quarks. Right about now, across the Arctic,
Polar bears are emerging from their dens after six long months of hibernation. And as mama bears venture into the outside world, they'll be followed by their cubs, taking their very first steps onto the chilly Arctic land. landscape. It's a pretty magical moment, but it's also when the bears are the most vulnerable.
And so researchers who want to protect the bears, like Dr. Louise Archer, are trying to learn as much as possible about when and how bears emerge from their dens and what that means for their chances of survival. Now, for the first time, Dr. Archer and her colleagues have combined satellite caller data with specialized cameras to capture incredible footage of polar bears in Svalbard, Norway, as they emerge from their dens and shed light on this.
secretive stage of the animals' lives. Dr. Archer is a Polar Bears International Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Hello and welcome to Quirks and Quarks. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Well, what's a polar bear den actually look like? I mean, do they just dig into the snow? What do they do?
Yeah, that's essentially it. So in Svalbard in Norway, what we see is polar bears build their dens on the slopes of mountainous areas and fjords. So they'll dig into the snow. We've got a lot of snow drifting over. that hole the female has made. So essentially what you have is this snow-covered slope, very difficult to identify that there's a polar bear den under there. It just looks like this white tableau.
And critically, that snow cover is what provides the insulation that provides that nice, stable, thermal environment for the cubs. So it's warmed by the female's body heat. So it really is this very contained, insulated. environment that provides a very stable condition for cubs to develop and can keep temperatures more than 20 degrees Celsius warmer than the cold Arctic conditions. Well, how were you able to capture the magic moment when the polar bears come out of their dens.
Yeah, so we tackle this using a combination of what we call satellite collars. So these are collars that are worn by female polar bears. They're deployed as part of long-term monitoring by the Norwegian Polar Institute in Svalbard, Norway. These collars send location data of where the female is and also information about temperature and activity rates of the bear. So using this information, we were able to identify when a female had likely entered a den. So we see that.
her movement rates drop, her temperature remains stable above the external environmental temperatures, and her activity levels are pretty low. So we were able to locate where this female had built her den. Then in the springtime, our team of researchers would actually go out to these densites in Svalbard.
So we would get there either by snow machine or by helicopter. We make the final approach on ski or by foot so as not to disturb the bears. And then we deploy camera monitoring systems at these densites. So these are remote camera systems that record a time lapse.
We leave them in place for several weeks or several months. And then when we know the bear has left the area based on her satellite collar data, our team goes back and retrieves the cameras, downloads the footage, and we start to analyze and extract behavior. behaviors that we've observed remotely during this time. So it's a super nice non-invasive kind of study, minimizing any disturbance to the bears. So when you looked at your footage, what did you see?
Yeah, it really was incredible. So we were looking at 13 different den sites over six years. So we were able to see when a female pops out of the den for the first time. We saw her cubs follow her. Cubs really spent most of their time outside the den with the mother. They only came out on their own for about 5% of the time. So they're really strong maternal cub bonds during this period. We saw things like a lot of various...
variation in when mothers and cubs came out of the den and how long they remained in the area. This is kind of an interesting thing because we know that the mother hasn't eaten for up to as much as six months or so during this time in the den. But she still remained in and around the densite for an average of 12 days after emerging. So that told us that this was a really important time for cubs to acclimatize to the external conditions, develop their strength, learn how to move around.
and get a bit more used to the environment outside the den. So it's really a transitional period as they're learning how to face life outside the den and become ready to follow their mother and begin to hunt and learn how to live out on the sea ice. Now for the Cubs, is this the first time they're seeing the outside world?
Yeah, absolutely. It's the very first experience they have of life outside the den. So although they will have been born in around December or January, they're extremely underdeveloped at birth. They're only about 600 grams. grow for three to four months until they're about 20 times bigger and they have a
thick coat of fur that allows them to deal with the cold outside the den. Well, what kind of behavior do you see in the cubs? I mean, wow, what a big place. Yeah, it was fascinating to see. Some of the footage was really remarkable.
things like three cubs that came out with their mother they were tumbling around we saw one cub that fell down the slope in Svalbard like I mentioned the the females build their dens on these very steep slopes that I would never dream of even going up yet We see cubs taking their first shaky steps on this very, very steep, challenging terrain.
And we did see some fell down. We saw a mother go down to retrieve her cubs and bring it back up. What do these observations about the polar bears tell you that we didn't know before? Well, some of the things that we learned were that there's a lot of variation in how polar bears are behaving at this time. So for example, we saw one female and her cubs that left the area just two days after.
first coming out of the den, whereas another family remained in the denning area for 31 days, so a full month. So there's a lot of variety in how bears are behaving this time. So that tells us that there's not a one size fits all approach. to protecting and monitoring bears during this time. Another kind of aspect we found was that bears in our study, they actually departed from the den site about a week earlier than had previously been recorded in Svalbard.
This is an interesting trend and something that we'd like to continue monitoring to see whether bears are actually abandoning the den earlier, because we know the time they spend there has a positive impact on cubs' survival. moving away earlier, that could have consequences for the ability of Cubs to survive down the line. So it's something we'd like to continue to monitor. Now, I understand you just came back from Svalbard where you were installing more cameras. What was that like?
Yeah, it was an incredible experience. I think getting to see the areas that females are choosing to build their dens was just remarkable. You see these really steep mountainous regions, these kind of white snowy landscapes, and it's hard to believe. that there's a polar bear and her cubs.
Being under there, under that kind of snow-covered, almost featureless-looking terrain in some cases, getting to experience the weather as well was really interesting. We had a really warm period for the last few weeks. Svalbard so that actually was challenging in itself because with all the warming
A lot of snow melted. That made it difficult to get out and deploy our equipment because we rely on the snow to pull sleds with our cameras. So really kind of seeing some of these changes in real time and then thinking more broadly about how that affects the bears. was a really interesting thing for me to see. Dr. Archer, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to speak to you today.
Dr. Louise Archer is a Polar Bears International postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Space isn't so empty anymore. At least the chunk of it nearest the Earth isn't. Three quarters of a century into the space age, we've launched thousands of satellites into Earth orbit. And so, low Earth orbit is occupied by a multitude of satellites, stray boosters, and other debris from launches, and even collisions in space.
And here's this week's really surprising news. A new study indicates that this crowded real estate is likely to get even more crowded because of, wait for it, greenhouse gases. Will Parker is a PhD candidate in Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He led this research. Hello and welcome to our show. Hi, Bob. Thanks for having me.
Can you describe the low Earth orbit environment that you've been studying? What's it like? Sure. Well, it's a place that is very useful, I think, to everybody on Earth. We rely on satellites in low Earth orbit. to do everything from weather forecasting to collecting science data. We use it for communications, for access to internet, even for banking and navigation. We rely on satellites in low Earth orbit to do all sorts of things that we depend on every day. How high or low is low Earth orbit?
So Low Earth Orbit starts around 200 kilometers and goes up to about 2,000 kilometers. And what is that environment like there? Typically, satellites are moving really, really fast, around seven and a half kilometers per second. And it's very busy. This is where we send a large majority of the satellites that we launch. How many are up there?
I think now we're actually closer to about 12,000 active satellites. But beyond the satellites, there are tens of thousands of additional debris objects that we can track. Things that are smaller than we can track are closer to millions. There are up to 100. million objects if you get down to the really small scales holy smokes wait why is there so much stuff up there where did it all come from well we've been launching things to space since the early 60s
And so that pace has really picked up over the last few years. Most of the stuff that we launched to space, if it's outside of the atmosphere for launching into the higher orbits, that stuff will stay up there pretty much forever. And so that's the problem with space sustainability that we have to worry about is that we rely on the atmosphere to deorbit a lot of our debris. But the thing that makes this a lot worse is that when satellites explode or collide or there's a attack.
on a satellite, which we've seen a few times, it can generate thousands of pieces of debris that will typically stay up there for decades or even longer. Tell me about deorbiting of satellites. What do you mean by that? There are a few ways you can take a satellite out of orbit.
That can either be done actively. So if your satellite has a propulsion system, we take it down on purpose and try to take it to a lower altitude so that the atmosphere can remove it entirely. For lots of satellites, though, at least historically, we've relied on the atmosphere. to deorbit those satellites. So basically what that means is that as your satellites are moving in low earth orbit, you're still sort of within the atmosphere, the very upper reaches of the atmosphere.
the atmospheric density causes a little bit of drag on your satellite, and that drag slowly dissipates energy from your orbit until you start spiraling towards the Earth, and it removes the satellite completely. Oh, I see. So in low Earth orbit, they're not... totally an empty space there's still some air at that at that altitude
Just a little bit. And that little bit of air is very important for cleaning up low Earth orbit. We rely on that because most of the junk that's up there, we have no way to get down other than through the atmosphere. There's tons of debris that is so small that we have very little ability to track it, but it's big enough to cause serious problems for satellites in orbit. So all of that debris, the only way we can take it down is through atmospheric drag.
So how do greenhouse gases affect this whole process? Greenhouse gases, as we're mostly familiar with, cause warming closer to Earth's surface. In the upper atmosphere, things work a little bit differently. The warming that happens in the lower atmosphere means that less of the heat that radiates from the Earth makes it into the upper atmosphere.
And the heat that does make it there, the same greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere actually make it more efficient to transmit that heat into outer space. And so the effect of these two components, right, is that we're seeing a cooling in the upper atmosphere.
And that cooling over time leads to contraction. So if you ever put a balloon in a freezer, you'll know that the balloon will shrink over time. And that's exactly what's happening to the atmosphere. Okay. So how is that affecting satellites? The shrinking of the atmosphere means that there is less atmosphere to cause this drag force on our satellites and our debris objects. And so we rely on that drag force to clean up low Earth orbit. We need the atmosphere as our natural.
cleaning source. So how much longer will aging or non-functional satellites be occupying this very valuable real estate in space? Well, we looked at a variety of scenarios. In some cases, there's debris that If it was created in the 60s, it would deorbit in 50 to 100 years. That same debris, if it were created today, could take well over 100 years. Wow. Well if the atmosphere isn't clearing out this debris are there any other ways to get rid of it?
So active debris removal. So that idea is we send up a satellite specifically with the task of attaching to a large defunct satellite or a debris object and removing that object from orbit. But the reality is that that's an incredibly expensive way to clean up low Earth orbit, and that will only work for the really big objects.
The really tiny objects are the ones that we're actually more concerned about because they are very, very numerous and they are very distributed. The idea here is that it's always a lot... easier and cheaper to not make a mess in the first place than it is to have to clean up a mess that's already been made. Right. Stop putting our junk up there. But what about trying to clean up the smaller stuff, the debris?
So right now, there aren't a lot of great tools at our disposal for removing that debris. There are some ideas for using things like lasers from the ground to be able to effectively nudge our debris in a way that could potentially be used.
to help deorbit some of it. But that is very much in the realm of research at the moment. And there are lots and lots of hurdles technologically and politically to try to make something like that happen. What does this mean then for the... near and not so near future of low Earth orbit.
Well, I think that it's important that we need to consider these long-term effects. People today are designing satellites that will launch in the decades that follow. And so it's really important that we start thinking about these problems now. One of the things that we discussed in our paper is that if we want the spacecraft to stay in orbit for the same amount of time and we want it to deorbit, that means that we have to start launching at lower altitudes.
So that's one thing we can do to sort of mitigate this retreat of the atmosphere is to sort of follow it and make sure that we're still seeing the same effect. So space is not quite as empty as it seems. Certainly not. Maybe we just need a huge space net to go up there and just scoop everything out. Yeah, that would be nice. Mr. Parker, thank you so much for your time. All right. Thank you.
Will Parker is a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So, how did you sleep last night? If you're like me or my producers here at Quirks, you replied with a resounding, meh, not great. Recent surveys suggest that many of us here in the Western world believe that we're not sleeping as much as we should. Whether that's because of too much screen time, our over-scheduled lifestyles,
children or pets waking us up before sunrise, or just the general stressful state of the world. But scientists don't always trust what people tell them without some independent verification. So in a recent study, anthropologist and sleep expert David Sampson and his colleagues took an objective look at the idea that we're suffering from a sleeplessness epidemic.
And what they found is that for many of us, sleep is different these days, but not in the way you'd think. Dr. David Sampson is an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi Bob, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. So my first question is how did you sleep last night?
I actually had a pretty decent night's sleep despite having a one and a half year old at home. I've been trying to strengthen my circadian rhythm as much as possible and practice what I preach, which is something we'll be talking about today. Now, before this study, did you think there was a sleeplessness epidemic happening? OK, so that's what I think and what society thinks is two quite different things because.
In 2014, the CDC proclaimed that we were undergoing, especially in large scale societies, that we were undergoing a sleep epidemic, meaning our sleep has been systematically restricted over the past century or so. in a way where we are reducing overall sleep duration and sleep quality. But basically, as a evolutionary biologist, I love the comparative method.
And one of the big things that I realized when I was looking at sleep research across the globe is that there was a major bias to weird societies, Western, educated, industrialized, democratic, and rich societies. But one of the things that we hadn't been doing really well is measuring it in other cultures across the globe. So with the advent of actigraphy, basically think of it as a super Fitbit that you can put on your wrist, kind of like a watch.
But these things are about a thousand bucks a pop and they are validated to PSG, polysomnography, meaning they they have been validated to the gold standard of sleep research. So we have a really good estimate of total sleep time and sleep efficiency. And myself and my colleagues, we went out into many different small scale societies. Personally, I've done work with the Hadza foragers. So they live in Tanzania. They are still.
actually physically hunting and gathering and foraging for a majority of their calories. So this is a population that is exposed to its environment 24-7. There's no respite from it. You're going to feel the sun when it comes up and feel the light when it comes up, and you're going to feel its shift in temperature throughout the day. Okay. And when you compared the two types of societies, what did you find? This is what surprised me.
I figured there would be a difference. I didn't think it would be so drastic. So in the small scale, in the non-industrial societies, we see a global average of a... About something around the lines of 6.4 hours. So six hours and 24 minutes. When we looked at weird or large scale societies, we actually saw 42 minute increase. Averaging about 7.1 hours. If you look at the small scale societies, they're getting much less sleep. And the other measure that I hinted at their sleep efficiency, which.
Mind you, the National Sleep Foundation recommends we have a sleep efficiency of about 85% or above, meaning you're asleep 85% of the time that you're in bed. We are sleeping, as in large-scale societies, we're sleeping at 88%. but in small scale societies, sleeping at 74%. So it's a 14% bump. That is biologically very relevant. Wow. So you're saying that in our industrial society, we're actually sleeping longer than people in less industrialized.
what they're getting better quality sleep? Okay. So this is where the plot thickens, right? The other hypothesis that we wanted to test was, is circadian function Is the strength of our circadian rhythms, is that different across societies? In those small-scale societies, we actually found significantly higher circadian function. Basically, the circadian rhythms that...
that the master clock is the suprachiasmatic nucleus, it's in your brain, and it directs the other independent clocks in your body in sort of an orchestra of timing. Like, when is my cortisol going to go up? When should I produce melatonin? All these things that really help us feel like we're in sync. The circadian function drives this. And so these small scale societies have much stronger circadian function as to where.
Because you and I are in the rooms that we're in, we're blunting it. We're throwing a wrench in the system because we don't get enough exposure to the shifts in our temperature and our light outdoors. Okay, so you're saying that the societies that don't have all the distractions like we do, they're more in sync with their circadian rhythms, even though they're sleeping less. That's absolutely it. Okay, so what does this do then to our health? Yeah.
So this is the very, very interesting thing. And this is something that we highlight in the paper. The science is showing there is some independence. between circadian rhythms and sleep and the outcomes are different in people that are well slept but have poor circadian function you see a 40 increase in depression risk this is because of the
the scrambling of serotonin signalings that help us feel like we're in a good state of mind. There's a 15 to 20% increased likelihood of disease risk for heart disease. There's even for women, there's a 36%. increase in breast cancer. And this is all likely due to the misfiring of our genes, particularly PER2 and clock genes. These are genes that regulate.
the timing of protein synthesis related to these really core mechanisms that I just described. Wow. Yeah. So it's not so much length of sleep, it's quality of sleep that matters. Quality is important. And then certainly one of the best things we can do in terms of takeaway lessons here, one of the best things we can do is worry less about our...
Our sleep. We kind of tend to problematize our sleep. And Bob, I'm not a clinician at all. I'm just an evolutionary anthropologist. But some of the literature suggests that if clinicians adopt an evolutionary perspective, an evolutionary medicine perspective where. If somebody is coming in, they have insomnia. Instead of telling them they have a disease, reframing it. Hey, you know what? Your ancestors were likely hypervigilant and that meant they survived and reproduced and you.
got to play this game of life because of it so this might not be maladaptive it might it might be some sort of adaptive hanger on from our evolutionary history. And I think we need to frame it that way. And really, we need to take the gains that we've made in terms of sleep site security and comfort in large scale societies, we need to hold on to those. But we need to double down.
on enhancing our circadian function. So anchoring yourself and your circadian rhythm and your physiology by going out early in the morning, anchoring yourself with the light and the temperature outside. Eat outside whenever you can. Just get that exposure. And then at night when the sun goes down, try and minimize the blue wave lights in your environment and don't eat before bed, three hours before bed. And you're going to really do your circadian function.
really, really good bump to it. Dr. Sampson, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Bob. It's been a pleasure. Dr. David Sampson is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Did you know it was nearly eight o'clock at night in Washington when Donald Trump set a date for Canadian tariffs? I think we'll do it February 1st. And his plan for steel and aluminum?
just sort of slipped out on the way to the Super Bowl. The United States is going to have a 25% tariff. The new U.S. administration is making news that matters to Canadians whenever and wherever it wants. And we stay on top of it. Susan Bonner, host of Your World Tonight from CBC News. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bob McDonald and you're listening to Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1 and streaming live on the CBC News app.
Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, COVID's silent menace. Researchers are finding that with repeated infections, COVID can do subtle and accumulating long-term damage to our health. Beyond long COVID, there's also effects that SARS-CoV-2 infection is having on the bodies of the general public. that manifest in a way that might be viewed as silent. There's no such thing as a COVID infection without consequence.
You might have heard the recent buzz around the discovery in late 2024 of a near-Earth asteroid that seemed to pose a risk of hitting Earth in about a decade. It wasn't big, between 50 and 100 meters in diameter, but that could smash a city. Fortunately, as astronomers got more observations of the object and were better able to calculate its orbit,
they realized it posed no actual risk. However, there was a time early in Earth's life when this kind of danger was much more extreme. Indeed, Earth was being shaped by frequent, gigantic asteroid impacts. And researchers have found the earliest known evidence for this, a 3.5 billion year old crater in Australia.
Now this was not any normal impact. It was a massive hit that could have played an important role in how the Earth's crust formed, and may have even provided the conditions necessary for the origins of life on Earth. Dr. Chris Kirkland was co-lead on this research with Dr. Tim Johnson. He's a professor of geology at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. Hi, welcome to our program. Pleasure to be here. Lovely to talk to you, Bob.
First of all, tell me about this crater. How big is it? Oh, so estimating the crater size is actually quite challenging because it's, as you can imagine, at 3.5 billion years old, it's completely gone. So it's a bit of a flat landscape. but the geological maps that have been produced are actually very useful and they give us this indication of the central uplift area.
And from using some scaling relationships from other craters, like on the moon, we can work out that the original diameter of the crater must have been at least 100 kilometers, if not larger. Wow. And you're saying that there's no sign of it today? Well, there's signs within the rocks that we find, but in terms of the actual crater surface itself, it definitely doesn't look like a traditional crater with a hollowed out central region, but the rocks have that very distinctive surface.
shape in their outcrop pattern but also more importantly we find these really special shatter cones which are very distinctive rock features that let us know for certain that we're dealing with a huge hypervelocity impact. in this very region in the center of the Pilbara Kraton in Western Australia. Shattercones, tell me about those. What do they look like?
Oh, they're beautiful, delicate little features. So I like to describe them as an upside down ice cream cone with none of the ice cream there, but the ice cream cone upside down. So they're conical shaped and they're scratches within the rock. but they're on all sorts of scales. So they range from, you know, the size of your fingernail right the way up to the size of a hand to even bigger up to several meters in size. So they've got this kind of fractal relationship of size.
But they all point the same direction and they can only be formed in one of two ways, either a nuclear explosion or a impact. We know they're definitely not man-made, so that leaves the only option. There was a huge impact crater right in the center of this ancient region in Western Australia. What part of Australia was this crater formed in?
Yeah, so it's right in the center of the Pilbara Kraton. So the Kraton basically means very old crust and it's in the Pilbara region. So that's a region very famous for iron ore and also gold mineralization. But it's also famous, you know, for things like stromatolite. fossils, so early life forms. So it's right in the center of this region and all the rocks around it are basically in this circular pattern, consistent with the fact we're looking at an ancient impact site.
What were conditions like before this impact happened and how far reaching were the effects afterwards? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think most geologists, you know, think about... processes on the early earth from a view of the processes that we see today so that's things like you know plate tectonics but what we would say is that on the early earth
The impact flux, so the number of meteorite impacts coming in was much higher, and that probably was a very important energy source, bringing in thermal energy, so heat energy that melted. the proto crust the early crust of our planet which would have been a wet planet covered with ocean water and that's
those impacts will have generated melt. So as an impact comes in, it basically will remove a huge amount of material and much like taking the top off a champagne bottle and popping a cork and having lots of molten rock rising up, just like... frothing up champagne, we see a similar sort of process. And that's probably the process that might have generated our early continents.
So you're saying that this large impact was not the only one. There was a series of them and they reshaped the surface of the Earth. Absolutely. That's exactly right. So what we're looking at is telling us about an early Earth process.
going to be the only one in fact we reckon if you look carefully on many of the other cratons including those in canada you'll probably find evidence for the similar sort of process We have a large impact crater in Ontario here in Canada, Sudbury, and they mine nickel there. And we have a science center called Science North and they have a shatter cone in the rock. You can actually see it. They point it out to you. It's quite neat. Yeah, that's awesome. So Sudbury is about 1.8 billion years old.
But loads of the features that you guys see in Sudbury, we actually see in... this North Pole region within the Pilbara Craton. So we see the shatter cones, but we see the overlay of breccia units as well, which is exactly like Sudbury. So Sudbury is actually quite a nice model potentially for some of the features that we see in the Pilbara region. How would this impact or all of these impacts have helped create the conditions for the emergence of life on Earth?
Yeah, so what we think is a meteorite coming in, striking the Earth, bringing with it lots of energy that will decay to heat. And we know there was a water world at that time. So we start to set up hot water circulation cells, but we also have buoyant crust rising out of those oceans. So we've got these crustal nuclei is the technical term for it.
We've also got fractured rock and those fractured rocks along with the hot water circulation cells are the perfect places to start generating these chemical reactions that ultimately may have led to life. And what's beautiful about this North Pole site is... It also preserves evidence of some of the earliest life on the planet in the form of stromatolites. So these are cyanobacterial mats, basically, these crinkled rock formations, and they sit.
pretty close to where we're talking about within the same broad sequence of rocks. So we find that quite amazing. We're looking back so far and being able to piece together this rock record like a detective story. It's almost like these huge impacts provided the heat and stirred up the ingredients of the primordial soup. Yeah, exactly. I love it. That's exactly what we think.
Dr. Kirkland, thank you so much for your time. It's a pleasure talking to you, Bob. Thanks. Dr. Chris Kirkland is a professor of geology at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. Can you believe it's been five years? On March 11, 2020, the Director General of the World Health Organization made this chilling declaration. WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock. And we're deeply concerned. We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.
COVID killed at least 7 million people worldwide, including more than 60,000 Canadians. And the virus continues to circulate, though we're far better protected now thanks to several generations of vaccines. Still, we've seen the rise of long COVID. As many as one in five Canadians have experienced a range of long-term symptoms, shortness of breath, muscle pain, extreme fatigue, and brain fog.
And this can last months to years. Well, now it seems we're starting to see yet another kind of long-term impact from COVID infection. Scientists have uncovered evidence of widespread silent cell and organ damage that may be accumulating with every COVID infection you get. It all means that just because you might have been done with COVID... doesn't mean COVID is done with you.
Dr. David Putrino is at the forefront of research into these lingering effects COVID can have. He's a professor in the Department of Rehabilitation and Human Performance at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Hello, Dr. Putrino. Welcome to our program. Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Now, first of all, you've been studying long COVID since before we even knew there was such a thing. How do you tend to think about the potential long-term effects with long COVID and beyond it?
Yeah, so maybe it might be helpful to start off with a working definition of lung COVID. And in 2024, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine pulled together a consensus paper on... on on how to describe long covered and it's you know it's a lengthy document but the the upshot of it is Long COVID is a diagnosis that can be given to anybody who has survived an acute infection of SARS-CoV-2.
whether that is confirmed with the PCR test or suspected by their physician. And after a period of three months, this individual has still failed to return to their... pre-infection health status, meaning that the individual is either telling the doctor or
The doctor can see from blood tests and other functional tests that this individual has failed to fully recover. Okay, so that's long COVID. But what about this new research about cumulative silent effects that can happen just with COVID itself? That's a great question. And I think that we should also be aware of the fact that there is more and more literature emerging to show that beyond long COVID.
There's also effects that SARS-CoV-2 infection is having on the bodies of the general public that manifest in a way that might be viewed as silent. So what I mean by that is no one's going to their doctor and saying, I feel different or I feel depleted or I feel as though my functional status has changed. But what's happening is silently in the background, things are changing. A good example of that is...
the effect that SARS-CoV-2 infections can have on cognition. There was a recent study that showed us that individuals who survive an acute COVID-19 infection and... These are not individuals who are getting diagnosed with long COVID. These are just individuals out in the community, on average, will lose somewhere in the neighborhood of two to six IQ points per infection. Really?
With each infection? According to the most recent study, yes. So there is a cumulative effect that can be occurring with each infection. And early in the pandemic, we... We actually published a paper with Michelle Mongey at Stanford and Akiko Iwasaki at Yale, where we showed that even in animal models, when we infected mice with a very, very mild case.
of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which only caused lung inflammation. It didn't spread to anywhere else in the body. We still saw these inflammatory chemicals called chemokines. emerging from the infected lungs and starting to attack central nervous system structures such as the spinal cord and the brain, indicating that even... the most mild of infections, can still produce this inflammatory response that causes central nervous system damage. So is that damage to the nervous system permanent?
Well, typically when we see central nervous system damage, so that's the spinal cord or the brain, it's much harder for cells in the central nervous system to regenerate. It's not... impossible for regeneration to occur, but it's very rare, which is why damage to the central nervous system like stroke or spinal cord injury can often be permanent. So we do worry about the lasting...
effects of the central nervous system damage. Wow. So in other words, COVID is doing more than just infecting the lungs, it's going to other parts of the body. Exactly. You know, this is a virus that once it enters the body... is very capable of entering the bloodstream, creating immune responses that travel all over the body and it can affect every single organ system and cause many, many symptoms, a multitude of different symptoms.
Now, COVID is largely known as a respiratory disease. Can you walk me through the range of other body systems that might be vulnerable to long-term damage? has emerged on long COVID. We've seen that it is a very diffuse clinical syndrome where every single organ system can be affected.
At last count, over 200 symptoms have been catalogued as potential symptoms of long COVID. The reason that this is occurring is because when we actually dig into the science of why long COVID is causing... the symptoms that it's causing and the problems that it's causing within the body, we see that there are problems such as what we call viral persistence, meaning
the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not being effectively cleared by the body and it's sticking around. It's hiding out in tissues. It's hiding out in different areas of the body in what we typically call immune privilege sites, which mean that... immune cells don't actually go there and can't sort of seek out and destroy the virus. So that can happen in a number of different locations in the body, which leads to a wide array of symptoms.
We also see that the virus can cause prolonged chronic inflammation and inflammation can be whole body wide. So, you know, it can affect every single organ. And so often. many of the symptoms that people who are experiencing chronic inflammation experience is more related to which organ...
is most susceptible to them given their past medical history. So we see things that are quite insidious. People who were pre-diabetic are suddenly diabetic. People who were having a few issues with gallbladder. problems and we're doing fine but we're just on the edge of a gallbladder problem suddenly can't digest fat anymore you know and all sorts of issues of that nature
Well, what is it about the coronavirus that enables it to spread throughout the body like that? Because we think about it as an airborne virus that gets into the lungs. How does it manage to migrate out? Yeah, you know, this is a really... Good question. And in 2021, two colleagues of mine, Amy Proel and Mike Van Alzacker, published a really wonderful paper that I think is very prescient. And it was ahead of its time and it spoke about...
why SARS-CoV-2 is special and different and why it presents such an increased threat to cause persistent symptoms. And the reality of that situation is that...
This is a virus that has a lot of very unique qualities that specifically cause immune damage to the host. So it's not just about... infecting you and causing respiratory illness and you know and fever and all of the things that we usually get with a viral infection this virus also specifically causes your immune system to become weaker it disrupts what we call interferon signaling which is part of the immune system that helps you to fight off infections or keep latent infections such as
Bardonella as an example of a bacteria that could be latent within your body, or Epstein-Barr virus as an example of a virus that could be latent in your body. Typically, our immune system can keep these things suppressed. But when SARS-CoV-2 enters the picture, it starts to cause altered interferon signaling and it causes immune damage and dysregulation. And suddenly, not only does your body have trouble clearing the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, but it also starts to have trouble to...
keep some of these other viruses that have been latent from reactivating and causing problems. In addition to SARS-CoV-2's ability to... dysregulate the immune system and suppress the immune system the spike protein itself is very damaging to blood vessel structures as well as red blood cells and platelets themselves and so if you could think of a structure that is unfortunately just
very well set up to cause a lot of havoc in our bloodstream, that's the spike protein. And so between those two features, the ability to dysregulate the immune system and the ability to cause systemic damage throughout the bloodstream. you have a very dangerous novel virus on your hands. Well, if it has the ability to suppress the immune system, how does that affect our ability to fight off other external pathogens that we might be susceptible to?
Yeah, so it's a great question and it's something that we worry about a lot because... In 2023, my colleagues at Yale, Akiko Iwasaki and myself and my team, we published a paper together in Nature where we showed that individuals with long COVID were much more likely than... a cohort of healthy controls to express signs of what we call t-cell exhaustion meaning that their t-cells which are parts of the immune system that are typically used to fight off infections
starting to present as exhausted, meaning that there has been a persistent stimulation of these T cells for long enough. that their responses over time are starting to weaken. And as a result, what we also saw in this study that we published in Nature was that
We saw immune dysregulation. We saw hormonal dysregulation. We saw reactivation of herpes viruses that were previously thought to be latent. And as we have... made leaps and bounds in our ability to understand the role of these persistent pathogens, these things that we used to think, oh, you know, everybody's got Epstein-Barr virus, but don't worry, it's sort of just...
lays dormant in your body and it doesn't cause any trouble what we're learning is that well it very much can cause trouble if it's mixed with another pathogen and that pathogen causes the reactivation. Then people can get very, very sick. And these are some of the problems that we're trying to solve. And so for the longest time in the field of immunology, there was the sort of adage that you're...
immune system, you know, needs to be tested every now and again to stay strong. You got to keep it fighting. That's an old fashioned idea. You know, the more new fashioned and evidence based idea is that. Although your immune system can take on infection, you want to avoid testing it as much as possible because your body is sustaining damage with each infection that it survives.
What about people who think that since they're living a healthy lifestyle and they're eating well, they don't experience any of these acute symptoms, that COVID isn't really a worry for them? Yes, I've heard this opinion over and over again, and unfortunately it's not backed by science. I wish I could say that there were certain things that were protective, but the reality is... You know, our clinic has now seen over 3000 people with long COVID. And to this day, we still cannot predict.
with good accuracy, who's going to get long COVID and who isn't. And we have seen individuals who are mountain climbers, marathon runners, triathletes, and they're showing up in similar proportions. to individuals who are sedentary and didn't do any of these things and didn't necessarily eat healthy or not drink alcohol or things of that nature. And what I can tell you anecdotally from our data set is...
This is something that affects all ages. It is something that affects all lifestyle types. It is something that affects people of every gender, every race. It does not appear to discriminate in who it's going to affect. How far do you think this might go towards explaining the huge spike in excess deaths around the world since the pandemic began?
Excess deaths and things of that nature, just because correlation is not causation. And these are things that need to be studied. But certainly, if something is causing cognitive problems. and then we start to see spikes in car accidents like we are, you know, these are questions that deserve to be investigated. If something is causing vascular events...
like we see that SARS-CoV-2 can do. You know, that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in early 2020. We were seeing publications emerging saying, listen, SARS-CoV-2 appears to be vascular and it appears to cause strokes in young people. That is something that we should be investigating and trying to understand better if overall this caused a spiking number of deaths.
How does the SARS-CoV-2 virus compare with other viruses when it comes to potential long-term effects that they can have on our health? more deeply researched. But at a glance, when we take a look at a snapshot of the different studies that are...
Looking at the sort of long-term sequelae of COVID and looking at the diagnosis of long COVID, Depending on the study that you're tracking, you'll see this range of people saying that somewhere in the neighborhood of 4% to 20% of people who survive a SARS-CoV-2 infection go on to develop. long-term symptoms and that far outpaces the percentage of individuals who tend to get you know infection associated chronic illness diagnoses from other
viral or bacterial infections. So I do think that there's probably something to do with the novelty of the virus. You know, our bodies have been dealing with flu A and flu B for many, many years. not so much SARS-CoV-2. And I think that that might lead to a much higher risk of going on to develop long COVID.
But do we also see chronic issues developing with other pathogens? Yeah, absolutely. In 2022, Akiko Iwasaki's team published a really wonderful paper just talking about the history of post-acute viral syndromes. that were associated with... All of these viruses such as Coxsackie virus, Ross River virus, Ebola virus, you know, like all of these viral infections that we often hear about the viral infections themselves, but we don't hear about the post-acute.
sequelae associated with them and and her team did a really good job of publishing this work and just talking through the way that viral infections can cause these prolonged chronic syndromes. And this is the same with bacterial infections. We see this with tick and vector-borne illnesses like Bartonella and Babesia. And we also see these with parasitic infections as well.
And I think that SARS-CoV-2 has shone a light on it because it infected so many people all at once. And I hope that that raises the level of research being conducted. Just to wrap this up then, what do we do with this information now that most people think the threat of COVID is gone? Yeah, you know, I do hope that people listening to this will hear this information with the spirit it's intended, which is Just understand what your risk is and understand that no one should be welcoming.
infection from a virus, especially not a virus like SARS-CoV-2. And so what we should be doing is talking to government officials about better ventilation in schools and public places. We should be talking about the use of far UVC lighting. In places, this is lighting that can actually eradicate pathogens that are in the air. We should be thinking about masking, especially when you're indoors in poorly ventilated spaces, surrounded by people.
just thinking about changing your risk calculus up a bit so that you can remain healthy, so that you can have a good long life with less chronic illness. I'm really strongly hoping that people will hear this, which is... Solid data that has been published and is very, very clear in the literature that there's no such thing as a COVID infection without consequence. And understand that these are things that are important to living.
and maintaining a good, healthy life. Dr. Putrino, thank you so much for your time. Oh, thank you for having me again. It's really important we talk about these things. Dr. David Putrino is a professor in the Department of Rehabilitation and Human Performance at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. He's also the Nash Family Director of their Cohen Center for Recovery from... complex chronic illness. And that's it for Quirks and Quarks this week.
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