 I'm Dr. Gregory Gatis. I'm a professor at White Pacific University. I'm here today to continue the series that Dr. King and I started several weeks ago on the impending collapse of industrial civilization. In that format we looked at various ways in which our whole civilization was going to be threatened and the idea being what can we do to stop it? What can we do to make things better? And we went over a series of things in the first session. One is over population which started 1 billion people at 1800 by 1850. It was 2 billion and then it just went up on a escalating curve. So we're at 7 billion now heading for 9 billion and then probably before a huge start off of billions of people which would traumatize the whole world. So that was one consideration. Other of course is nuclear war. That would be a disaster if we and the Russians or Chinese were to get into this war and launch nuclear weapons at each other given the fact that we all have like 20,000 of these. There would be so much radiation no one would survive on earth. You could be in Australia you're not going to survive just like in the movie on the beach in 1959. So we explored that. More likely scenario however since the Chinese and the Russians are too smart to do something as stupid as that is to take some of these end of times people who don't mind the world coming to an end perhaps the Muslims perhaps Iran perhaps North Korea launching something and starting something like that and may not be major may not be 20,000 ICBMs if North Korea were to launch a nuclear missile and centered into the stratosphere right above the United States and explode that and that would send an electrotic pulse down to earth and fry our electric grid and that would be disastrous for us because we would lose 90% of our people in one year according to Ted Koppel who had wrote a book called lights out maybe you've seen him on nightline. Anyway that was another major concern we don't want to have that and even if the North Koreans didn't do that there was a concern about the electromagnetic pulse coming from the sun which comes every 140 years and were due because the last time this happened was about in 1860 and at that time it did come down but there was nothing electronic on the earth to destroy so nobody hardly noticed it. The only thing that got fried was the telegraph lines out there in the west so people didn't realize how danger it was but if we were to lose our grid and it's not protected it's one of things we have to do that would be devastating for us as well. So we went over a number of these and things that we could do both Dr. King and I spent 40 years arguing about this discussing this trying to alert people to environmental disasters global warming and on and on and so forth but one thing we didn't talk about because we had no expertise in was what would happen if we had these infectious diseases which would go and wipe out populations and really traumatized people and lead to war and gang fighting and tribalization and on and on again we had no expertise in this other than history had a few things in history such as the play back in the 12th or 13th century wiped out a third of Europe and that led to chaos as we all know and that all came about actually in a sense from globalization once people started trading long distances then the rats came with those ships then the fleas came on the rats then the plague came people didn't know what the plague was caused by and so it led to chaos and disorder. So what we want to do is bring this up to the 21st century and we brought in an expert on this who did her dissertation on this Dr. Christine Hansen who is my guest here today who did her dissertation on this and we want to hear from her what are these infectious diseases that could in fact destroy the earth we had little touches of this when we saw the Ebola crisis there of West Africa when so many doctors went in to save these people and the doctors themselves died the nurses died just from being in contact with the blood and things like that fortunately that was contained so okay everybody goes back to sleep again no problem but is it really that easy is it that simple are there some waiting medical nuclear bombs waiting for us for example you've heard rumors about the resistant bugs penicillin was a great cure back in the 1830s for wiping out germs but are there super germs now that are resistant and we have no protection against it and what can we do so for the first part here we're going to hear from dr. Hansen about what she thinks are the major threats from infectious diseases to us in its globalization because globalization originally meant you just sent goods across borders you've sent money but now we're sending people from civilizations who don't have let's say protections against that just just one thing I do know about that I can speak about and that is of course when the Europeans came to America the Native Americans it was rather easy for them to take over the continent not because they killed that many but because they had no protection against colds flew John Smith might sneeze or something and the tribe catches it and they all die and so what the Europeans found is that when they go west they find empty villages well they found the empty villages because their diseases had killed these people before them so the Native Americans know this tragedy firsthand but is there something like that that can happen worldwide here and for that I'm going to turn to my guest here today Christine Hansen who also got her doctorate from the University of Hawaii the same as I did and who also teaches at White Pacific University the same as I did so dr. Hansen nice to see you here thank you so much Greg and this is such an interesting topic and I think one thing that people don't realize is we're at a turning point really in emerging infectious disease and the term emerging is often used because there is a paradigm shift and so between the period of World War two and say maybe ten to twenty years ago we had the belief that infectious disease was really under control that we were conquering infectious disease but what we forgot to think about were really two things the first was that infectious diseases can reproduce much faster than people can so because of that they can develop resistance much more quickly than we originally understood so you mentioned the problem of antibiotic resistance and that is a problem that has emerged specifically because of this ability of the organisms to reproduce rapidly the bacteria but the other factor is simply that these organisms are interwoven with the entire ecosystem so you know we have the idea that a microbe comes when John Smith sneezes but it also comes when John Smith is walking through the forest or John Smith puts his hand down because his hand is covered in microbes the surface of everything is covered in microbes and they're actually interwoven into the ecosystem and we have done so much disturbance to those ecosystems on the earth that that combined with our ability to travel in jet planes and to move faster than the incubation periods of these organisms has allowed a number of novel viruses to come out of their ecosystem niches and you know we've seen the ravages already of some of these HIV would be an example Ebola would be an example the SARS virus would be an example so we're looking at a scenario where a variety of organisms that are living in their prescribed ecological niches have been disturbed by logging by overpopulation which you mentioned and these organisms are moving out of their accustomed niches and they're getting on to airplanes through people that have been infected or through animals because the vast majority of the viruses that we're talking about are actually zoonotic organisms that start in animals and then cross the species barrier so at the moment there are a large number of influenza viruses that are circulating in birds that are of particular concern and so you know that would be probably the group that's the most worrisome and then we have another coronavirus which is closely related to the SARS virus called MERS which is circulating as you probably know in the Arab some of the Arab countries and actually has crossed over to humans from camels so in the case of SARS we came so close to not being able to contain the outbreaks and so the question is at what point might we see an organism that actually we won't be able to contain and especially the problem there is with respiratory illnesses because you can't stop breathing so it's very difficult to avoid exposure to a respiratory virus whereas you know if the contact has to happen through the skin and you know bodily fluids or something then it's much easier to avoid transmission but the the respiratory illnesses like influenza like the coronaviruses are a particular concern and as we saw Ebola we didn't really understand so I remember back when I was doing my doctoral dissertation that I had noticed you know a lot of research about the impact of Ebola in great ape populations it's decimated the gorilla populations and I thought that was kind of cause for some concern you know that there are obviously some genetic relationships between human beings and gorillas and but when I raised that people sort of thought it was silly you know and yet we found that Ebola really could cause problems and I think that's because we didn't fully understand Ebola and we don't to be honest understand most of these organisms all that well so putting the genie back in the bottle sometimes it's possible sometimes it's not but the higher the population the more people are packed together when people are overcrowded then disease is more likely to be transmitted as we saw in World War one that I talked to you before the program about the the World War one influenza outbreak that 1918 flu was caused in large part by large groups of troop movements and people in overcrowded situations people in stressed situations so as the world becomes more and more overpopulated and as we disturb more and more these ecological issues and as we encroach onto environments where animals have been living undisturbed for long periods of time we are actually putting ourselves at risk in ways that perhaps are much more dangerous than say you know conventional war between human beings and and so that's one stream of the problem the other stream of the problem is the rise of antibiotic resistance and this is something that we haven't really seen since World War two but which is very very worrying and in fact the Lancet has been talking for a few years about the possibility that at some point people might not be able to do certain elective surgeries because the risk of infection will outweigh the potential benefits of doing those surgeries which is let me just break in when you say antibiotic now we're moving from viruses to germs is that it well to bacteria bacteria so when you talk about microorganisms you're talking about viruses bacteria fungi lots of different organisms but primarily most diseases that concern human beings would be bacteria that aren't chronic diseases would be bacterial or viral so yeah and they're very very different in how we handle them a typical viral problem would be handled say with a vaccine if one were available or sometimes with antiviral drugs but they're actually much they have been much harder to handle than a bacterial disease so you mentioned the plague and most people are familiar with the fact that killed about a third of Europe you know at certain points in history why don't we pause here for a moment take a break and then we'll take these diseases that you expose us to and and and maybe propose solutions if any that you might have all right hello everybody my name is Mark schlaufe I'd like you to join me for my program law across the sea on think-tech Hawaii comm aloha aloha coco I'm Marsha joiner inviting you to navigate the journey with us we are here every Wednesday morning at 11 a.m. and we really want you to be with us where we look at the options and choices of end-of-life care aloha aloha my name is Josh Green I serve a senator from the big island on the cone aside and I'm also an emergency room physician my program here on think-tech is called health care in Hawaii I'll have guests that should be interesting to you twice a month we'll talk about issues that range from mental health care to drug addiction to our health care system and any challenges that we face here in Hawaii we hope you'll join us again thanks for supporting think-tech so we're back here with Dr. Christine Hansen from University of Hawaii PhD and HBU professor who is enlightening us about the dangers of all these infectious diseases that threaten civilization she mentioned of course the flu of 1918 actually our troops when they came back from World War one they were accustomed to death there they saw it there but there are only 24 million deaths I think in World War one but I think that flu took over 40 million deaths so they were a little devastated to come back to the United States and find that their hometowns had been devastated by the flu which we call the Spanish flu we blame that Spanish other people call the Americans I'm not quite sure which troops brought it to to but in any event the intermingling of all those troops there and killing each other led to this flu which devastated the world there for a while so you've introduced us to a number of things here bacterial and viral and so forth and fungi and so forth let's talk a little bit about what we can do if anything to minimize this I'll just say one little anecdote here that's all I can provide here anecdotes I have no expertise this there was a man at aloe canal who's gotten a fist fight and he got hit by a guy and I guess he caused a blood on his chin or something he fell into aloe canal no one understood how dangerous the aloe canal was with all those pollutants he came out and then within a few hours his his leg was turning black and running he died within you know six hours because there is this I guess a bacterial infection in the water which killed him and that still exists on the big aisle they had just recently someone who was just playing baseball it got cut on the knee and there was maybe something in the soil that his knee then touched and he picked up that and I think he had to lose his legs to as a result of that that was just recently so this is nothing to fool around with this is very serious stuff so we have to turn back to our expert Dr. Hansen who did a dissertation on this to tell us what can we do perhaps to mitigate these impending disasters of civilization okay well you mentioned water and of course you wouldn't want to go swimming in brown water I think most people know that but you know water can carry organisms such as flesh eating bacteria and so obviously some precautions after large rains and things like that are a good idea but more broadly speaking I think what our society really needs to do is the prospect of antibiotic resistance not being addressed is so potentially devastating to our society I mean if you think even about tuberculosis I think tuberculosis is an important disease to talk about because it is respiratory so it's easily contracted and it did kill 25% of the population at times so it historically it's a very very serious problem and we the last person that's airborne because person to person yes that's right the last person who was quarantined was actually quarantined for a resistant strain of quarantine from an airplane was with Andrew speaker and he was quarantined because of a resistant strain of tuberculosis so tuberculosis is something that is easily preventable with antibiotics and the problem is with the rise of antibiotic resistance we're looking at potentially the return of a disease that kills 25% of the population you know and that's not to mention the other emerging infectious diseases that we've talked about so I think our society as a whole needs to invest very urgently in research into antibiotics and unfortunately our system of health care funding is such that the research is sometimes directed toward drugs that are look like they'll be potentially profitable rather than toward what might be the most beneficial for public health so let me break in here just for a second now here's the problem we have a problem we get a drug penicillin whatever and then be admitted ah it solves a problem but as you pointed out the bacteria multiply rapidly and the next generation soon develop a resistance of that and that doesn't work or give larger doses for a while maybe that works in larger dose and finally large doses don't work and you know I got it we need something new right so we have to get something new now aren't we always shoveling sand against the tide here it seems to me technological solutions like this are doomed to failure because whatever we come up with if it's that the bacteria are too smart or they reproduce too fast for us to be permanent in our solutions and they're going to get around it someday you know and I know exactly what you mean by that and there is a lot of truth in it the problem is that if you don't stay one step ahead of them the consequences are rather grim you know so in developing the latest group of antibiotics I think is very important so that would certainly be one thing that we can do we're trying to avoid situations where people are in abject poverty and are living you know say in homeless shelters and that type of thing is also important because if you look at places where resistant strains of tuberculosis have developed and gained a foothold they tend to be impoverished areas places like homeless shelters sometimes in prisons poor neighborhoods and and that type of thing so the more that we can do to see public health as a good that we need to give to everyone and not you know germs don't respect social class and germs don't respect borders so if you're talking about public health and you need to take care of the poorest in the community in order to be able to keep everyone safe so so that's certainly something that we could do you know in terms of individual things that people can do just things like I know people who are really experts in this field and have spent their whole lives in it when they go into hotels oftentimes well the very first thing they will do will be wipe down the telephone with some kind of you know antiseptic wipe down the door knobs and things like that so that's something that you know you may feel a little embarrassed doing it if people are watching I like down the exercise machine yes exactly exactly so those little things just wiping down surfaces that people may have touched is an important thing that everyone could do using hand sanitizer and in fact in a lot of these outbreaks one of the really interesting things is there are people that are called super spreaders and we don't really understand why they are super spreaders but there were super spreaders in the Ebola outbreak there were super spreaders in the SARS outbreak and those people especially in one case with the SARS outbreak when there was a gentleman in a hotel and he touched a lot of surfaces and things like that people picked that up so just taking simple precautions when you're in a public place and you know sanitizing things can be important yeah what was that the super super spreader spreader super spreader okay and that's a person who he is more contagious or something than others yes and we don't know why so in some cases it could be people who have a compromised immune system but that doesn't seem to be true in a lot of the in a lot of the cases so we don't know why but the the fact is that there are people that seem to infect the majority of people in a particular area and you could trace back the cases to that one person which is you know statistically you would expect that each person would infect at the same rate but that's not necessarily true so we don't have to identify the super spreaders so we can isolate them right and you know I'm so glad you brought that up because isolation and quarantine I think are going to be coming back into public consciousness and I wish I didn't have to say that because I think people tend to look at that as something that is relegated to history you know that's something they did back in the olden days but the olden days in a way when you talk about public health are coming back because if we don't have viable antibiotics then we can't even prevent outbreaks of things like the plague you know other bacterial diseases so I hope these super spreaders aren't concentrated in certain races because it's going to be very very bad and volatile you know that was actually what's the whole idea of race is is constructed anyway there's no real such thing as a race anyway except in our minds except in our minds so the idea that there would be any biological basis for that it's just you know would never be true but if but but there can be scenarios where people come from an impoverished part of the world and because of the poverty they've been living in they're more likely to be exposed to infectious disease they wouldn't be super spreaders necessarily as a person they just came from an area that's contaminated right a super spreader we don't understand why some people are super spreaders and as far as we know that has nothing to do with social class or anything else you know it may just have to do with the viral load in the case of a viral illness so may I point out one of the things that's really counterintuitive and that is the the flu that wiped out people 1918 the cruelest part of it was it took young people that's right and the old people that we think well they're gonna die anyhow they're 67 years old like like new moment it was used to be called the the grateful disease or something or they something it was a good thing because it took them quickly and they're getting close to death anyhow but this flu took the young the strong people and not the old people yes that's really counter to that's that's sort of frightening yes absolutely and that particular strain of influenza it it created a tendency for the body to attack itself which is why people with the strongest immune systems i.e. the young tended to get the worst cases of influenza and it did unfortunately strike young adults you know just ravaged the young adult populations so that's one of the things that I mean about the fact that we just do not understand fully certain things about viruses and about bacteria we don't necessarily always know what it is that causes you know the influenza virus mutates extremely rapidly and that's why there are so many different strains part of the reason why there's so many different strains circulating right now so we don't necessarily understand when a mutation occurs what actual impact will that have on human beings or on animal populations and you know so obviously it is a concern and in poultry and swine and things like that as well so how about poultry and swine and things like that is there something we can do there I mean we can't I guess we can kill our animals or something like this but we've been doing you know we the the way that it's handled now is usually through culling and so that's a nice way of saying we kill all the animals and so is that the best way well you know it's really difficult to say if we kill the animals with the plant life leave us alone or they're going to get the plant like you know it's very very rare for a plant virus to be able to infect an animal that's very rare but it is very common for an animal virus to be able to infect a human and there are cases of reverse suonosis where a human virus can actually infect an animal so humans and animals as you probably know have been exchanging microorganisms you know since long before written history and most of our European crowd diseases actually come from zoonotic diseases that were passed into the populations from animals yeah in fact those populations they died off early like say in Europe but when those Europeans went to say America they were already had the immunity by that time which the which the others who had never been exposed to cattle or whatever suddenly got it and they killed them off yes well from what I gather here what we ought to do we have to become vegetarians number one and watch those pants very carefully well this has been very illuminating I'm you really added a whole dimension to Dr. Kings and my analysis of the upcoming disaster and civilizations that we have to watch out for and the other thing is you really leave us we have just keep running staying ahead of those viruses are