 I like a couple of science. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. And we're going to look at Berkhold area, Suda Malai. And there's very little that we know about that. But I'll tell you the truth. I think about it all the time. Do you think about it all the time, Ethan? You're a scientist. You're supposed to be thinking about these things. Well, I just read the interesting piece about they've now discovered it in the soil in the US, which Mississippi, Mississippi, wasn't it? Gulf Coast, yes. That took some people by surprise. So that made me think a little bit about it. Well, I mean, from a point of view of just zoning in on this, we have so many scary diseases now we are finding. And query whether it's because they existed before or whether they are part of the flat world, the interconnected world. And humanity touches each other. And our global biome is changing. And maybe also you have to say that over time, climate change is changing the global environment and therefore the global biome. And these things are coming around. It's hard to say how long this existed, but it's certainly at top of mind for a lot of scientists in the United States right now. So what is it? And where is it? And how threatening is it? So it's interesting. In a sense, it's not very trendy. That is, for a really last number of decades, the big diseases that we've worried about from AIDS to Ebola, to MERS, to SARS, and COVID are all zoonotic. That is, they've been transmitted to us from some animal host. Basically, they jump from animals to people. And those are all viral diseases. Melodosis is a bacterial disease. As you mentioned, it was a bacterium that caused it. And it just lives in the soil, basically. So you can pick it up from ground, from water. So it's sort of not following the trends. Although, yes, why and how it showed up in the US is a little puzzling. It may have been there all along. It's generally distributed around the tropics, moist tropical areas. And yes, it's getting a little warmer these days. So it probably is moving around and moving a little bit north in an area where there's enough moisture. Yeah. Well, it seems to have started out, at least in terms of the number of cases in Southeast Asia and northern Australia, I find interesting. And it's in the dust in the soil. So if you had, how about this? If you had an area that was being changed in the way the soil works, by climate change, like a drought, and drought is hitting a lot of places, including Europe right now, where you have the dust coming off the soil, right? It's that dust that gets into your lungs and starts affecting a number of your organs. You know, your lungs to start, but the liver, the spleen, I'm sure there's other ones, too, that get affected by this bacteria. And I suspect that if you want to look at the number of cases, you would find an increase in the cases identified anyway. And I think you would look at the dust as the primary thing. But as you say, it's also in the water. And you're a water scientist, so I wonder if you can speak to that. What's the connection between the dust and the water? Well, this bacterium is not typically associated with a real dry desert-like climate. That is, you're not seeing it from the countries in Sahara and Africa particularly, but you're seeing it from more of the moist areas. So it apparently doesn't do too well in really dry areas. Now, as many bacteria likely can survive drying out for some period of time, it will go into a spore state and wait until it's moist again before coming back to life. I don't know how well it lives that way, how long. But as our climate gets warmer, there's also more moisture in the atmosphere, which means a lot of places are getting more rain. And it may spring back. But meanwhile, if it gets dried out and lifted up in dust, then it can blow anywhere around the planet, right? Well, there was a piece about Thailand. A lot of the scientists and universities in Thailand are working on this. They probably have a higher incidence of it there. And they have found that in rainy spells where it's raining monsoon weather, the number of cases goes up. So you're right. It's the water in the air. And maybe it stays in the dust. And then somehow, when it gets wet, the dust gives the bacteria into the water in the air. Yeah. And or, I mean, you can also pick it up very locally. That is, if you have a cut on your foot or anything and you step in a puddle where you can start a local infection there, that may stay local. It may, if it gets in your bloodstream, move anywhere else. Or as you say, you can inhale it and get it in your lungs. And from there, it can start moving to other organs. It's a very variable disease. The onset of symptoms varies in terms. Some people will get symptoms about a day after being infected. In other cases, they have found it's been a matter of decades before the person gets infected. Yeah. Some people get it and then don't ever really get infected. Basically, they get it in their systems and have no symptoms at all. Their immune system is good enough to knock it down, basically. Yeah. The customary period is like a month or something. They could start the average one day to a month or something. And if you get it, not a lot of doctors know about this. It's the old thing where the doctors don't know. So they can't make a differential on it. And they wind up letting it go or treating it for something else. Exactly. It's symptoms are so variable and resemble so many other diseases that unless you're really looking for it, you're probably not going to find it very quickly. You're going to find it by the process of eliminating a lot of other things, basically. And then you have to take a sample, right? Take a sample, blood sample, and skin sample. I'm sure there must be now specific tests for it. I don't really know the details on that. But what you do when you start treating it promptly, it's not a lightweight treatment. It involves antibiotic injections, I think, twice a day for a matter of weeks. Long time. Yeah, long time. This is not like a regular infection. You have to take a combination of shots of infusions. That's pretty serious. Infusion, a long term infusion. I mean, hours of infusion. And then later on, you have to follow it up with the oral. Yeah, for like two months, three months. Yeah, it's apparently fairly tough to knock it all out. But it's a kind of disease where you don't want to let it, for a half, you don't want to half knock it out and let it come back. Because you're giving the disease a real break here. You're putting evolutionary pressure on it then to develop a drug-resistant form, which we don't really want to have with this. Enough of those evolving anyhow, right? Well, you know, it points out something that is more and more pronounced than our time. And that is this, is that people have to learn about this. They have to watch this show or other shows, have to read up on it. By the way, it's called Whitmore's disease, right? That's the popular name, Whitmore's disease. Easier to say, Melioridosis, right? That really puts it beyond the pale. And to know about it, to know how it presents, to know what the risks are, to know the treatment and the course of treatment and so forth, really gives you an edge if you wind up getting an infection that looks like this or feels like this, because then you can suggest it to the doctors. And it's a thing I've been playing with for a while. You know, watch TV and you get an unending scream of all these high-tech medicines. And what is this? What, I should write the name down? What do I have to do? Go to the doctor and give them the names, all the names, and there's dozens and dozens of names repeating these as. And I said, this is really BS that they do this. The doctor, he's supposed to know. He's supposed to go to school to learn this. Why do I have to learn it? And the answer is he doesn't necessarily know. And it is incumbent on the individual citizen to at least know what these diseases are and that there is a cure and what the cure is. And it's the same thing with Whitmore's disease. You know, you really have to know because he may not know. Right, and it used to be pretty easy to guess because you'd find all the cases that would show up in the US where people who had fairly recently traveled to like Southeast Asia somewhere or at least some moist tropical environment. But then they had a matter in cases, I think in 2020, 2021, the people who hadn't and they found they had all been using some aromatherapy compound in India that apparently had been made with contaminated water basically. And so they're all essentially, you know, sniffing this bacteria in and they find that they've quashed that whole batch. They put an alert on that and basically said, you've got this stuff, throw it away because it's bad for you. But then they had those two cases down in Mississippi, which were, they could trace them to a very different, it was a different signature, different genetic makeup. And they then began doing soil samples and found, I think, three samples out of 40 or 90 samples, something like that, that had this bacteria in it. You know, I just some thoughts here. It seems to me that we have to explain why it got to Mississippi. Because there's been no reports of it anywhere else in the US, just Mississippi, but it's here. It's been verified by the University of Mississippi Medical Research Facility. And we have to know what, let me suggest something. Going back to the point that you are a water scientist, I know this, okay? The pose, we look at the climate, okay? All over the world. And we say, well, we got plenty of it going on in Thailand. So what about, you know, this bacteria is somehow getting into the water system being evaporated. I don't know how big the bacteria is. I think it's not very big. And now it's in a cloud somewhere and the cloud travels, clouds travel and they travel differently with climate change and they travel over Mississippi and it rains. And when it rains, the bacteria comes down with the water. So that, if that's true, I'm really interested in your thought about this. If that's true, it could go anywhere, no? Exactly, exactly. I would not be surprised to find out what that was. You know, I'm sure they're working on tracing it right now and trying to figure out which strain from what part of Southeast Asia it's most like, whether there was, were people or other animals, other animals can also carry this. They got brought back somehow and could have dropped it into the soil there. Because if, as you say, it's spreading through the dust blowing around or the clouds, then yeah, it could be basically anywhere, including Hawaii, of course. And again, unless you're looking for it specifically, you're not particularly going to find it, right? You have to be testing for it, rather. You'll have to see if somebody presents with the possibility and it's different. It's, I mean, difficult to find the possibility. It could be any number of skin infections and you'd have to rule them all out. It's a typical process to exclude and find this one. The other thing is that I remember that if you touch somebody who has a sore, you know, a bit more of a disease sore, you're going to get it. So you have to be careful about touching skin of somebody who might have it, right? As I understand, it's not typically past person to person, but yes, if you have close contact with their open wounds, for instance, if you're cleaning their open wounds and then don't practice very good hygiene yourself, you can easily pick it up, I guess, that way. It's, as I say, it's not its primary mode of transmission at all, but certainly feasible. So yeah, again, just what you're saying, people need to become aware of it, need to know about it, doctors probably need to start getting, you know, a little more alert for it, get tests, specific test kits out, a little professional, you know. I think they should watch this show. And we know, we have the drugs to deal with it. I think that's clear. I recall that Amoxifilin and Doxacilin, they're both, you know, standard, ITEC, bacterial, antibacterial, antibiotics, and they, of course you have to infuse it and then give a course of oral treatment, but they will, they will cure this disease. Yeah, I thought it was supposed to, but yeah, there are doubtless, different anti-material agents. About five of them, you know, that will do the other, the other thing that's very troubling, and this goes to, you know, the whole thing about COVID is that we do not have a vaccine. So if you're going to travel, for example, through Thailand and the monsoon, you may want to think about this, but there's no vaccine out there. And my guess is that right now, for the lack of identifying, you know, the genetic makeup of this, of this bacteria, there, nobody's working on it. Yeah, I mean, that happened, unfortunately with a lot of other medical stuff during COVID, right? It's estimated quite, quite a few people ultimately died from diseases that they shouldn't have because they, you know, weren't going in for their treatments or their, you know, their medical provider was overwhelmed and not calling them in for some regular checkups or they couldn't get scheduled into appropriate surgery or whatever, you know, because of COVID. And yeah, that sort of pushed everything, you know, off the stage for a couple of years here. Yeah, even Anthony Fauci, who's leaving at the end of the year now, and, you know, a most and most interesting quotable quote that came up in Reuters today, it was very interesting quote. He said, would you stick around if you were being followed all day by federal security agents carrying guns? It's not a happy time. And I think what he was saying is, well, if you have the guys with the guns following you around, you had a real risk out there and there were people making death threats on him, even now, you know, so maybe he could help or work on a vaccine for this particular bacteria. That would be helpful. He has nothing to do. He's the kind of guy who sits around twiddling his thumbs, you know? Well, I want to talk to you about the most disturbing, threatening thing of all in my reading on it. I don't know if you caught this, but it seems to be a candidate for bioterrorism. And I don't know why it might be, but they have put it in the category of a candidate for bioterrorism. Can you see, you know, modifying this, changing his makeup, maybe with CRISPR or something so that it becomes a real candidate for bioterrorism? Sure, I mean, I'm sure there are people out there unfortunately working on just that kind of thing, playing around, get its transmissibility up, get its lethality up, you know? Hopefully, at the same time, you're working on a cure for it because once you release that, you know, it's going to come back to bite you. Yeah, well, nobody's sure about COVID. I mean, there are still books written on both sides of the issue, you know, advocating for the proposition that it was just out of the wild, you know, transmitted by animals or other books that the Chinese actually created it in that laboratory. And I suppose you could take either thought of that question. And there are the rogue countries out there, I'm afraid to say, who would see any candidate for bioterrorism as something they should explore and develop. I don't know why they would want to kill so many people, but there are those countries that have no guardrails on that sort of thing. Right, and then there are non-state actors all around, too. Yes, thank you. What's that worth, you know? What's that worth if you develop it and then you want to sell it to a state actor? Right. Could be any price at all. And I mean, CRISPR technology, which you mentioned, would likely be a bioterrorist, you know, first choice is increasingly cheap and available and, you know, just become a really sort of cookbook now. So it's easy to use. So, you know. Yeah, and the other thing about this is that, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't live in the world of microbes. But so viruses are very, yeah, it's a good thing. Varses are a very tiny thing. They're really tiny particles, you know, and they're all DNA and nothing much more. But bacteria are bigger. And right in general, I don't know how big this one is, but this one would be an easier candidate because you can see it at less of a telescopic magnitude. And so maybe CRISPR is easier or some other kind of technology would be easier working in a bacteria? Yeah, bacteria are basically cells. Similar to the cells that make all of us up, they have some differences. They have a cell wall instead of a cell membrane. They don't have a nucleus, but they're basically living cells. They're doing all the same kinds of things. They're taking in nutrients, they're processing them, they're excreting stuff out. They're living basically. Viruses are a whole different thing. Viruses are on that really shaky line. Are they living or are they not? A lot of people will say viruses are not living when they're not in people. They're living when they get into an organism and they're not living when they're not in an organism. Because when they're not in an organism, they're not doing anything. They're just a protein shell with, as you say, a bunch of genetic materials stashed into it. It's not respiring, it's not metabolizing, it's just sitting there, showing none of the characteristics of life until it clamps onto a cell. So yeah, viruses are a little trickier to deal with in some sense. We know more about bacteria. We know more about disrupting cells early. Yeah, we've had a hundred years of science looking at bacteria from the early days of penicillin and the like. We haven't had that much time, much experience with virus, right? My old Edward Jenner in smallpox, right? It was one of thepox viruses. I mean, he got very lucky. He's a very observant, smart guy, he got very lucky. Fallon, he realized that the dairy maids were not getting smallpox. He thought that was very interesting because they would get a mild form of cowpox, right? Yeah, well, you haven't mentioned Ignaz, Semmelweis. I'm not kidding, that was his name. 1880 or so in Europe, looking at bacteria, looking at sanitation, taking those first steps at trying to find a way to stop the growth of the bacteria. So anyway, it seems to me that they're coming faster now. I would have expected a kind of a pause, if you will, after COVID, what you call it, COVID, SJ67, I mean, they keep it coming with COVID, but you would think after a while, we get a handle on a very sophisticated vaccine that will deal with any variation of COVID. We haven't got that yet. And I don't know exactly what the drug companies are doing, but here's another challenge. And you know, Ethan, we talked today about this disease, burkulria, sururumali. Next time you look, there'll be another one and another one and another one. And we live in a world where they're gonna pop up, right? Right, and we are steadily because our populations, particularly in developing countries, are still expanding. They are intruding on woodlands, forests, jungles, where lots of other animals live. But this has been and will continue to be for next decades, the big thing is we're gonna be exposing people to viruses they haven't really seen before because they haven't been around these animals so much. But whether it's bats or civets or pangolins or whatever it may be, they all carry their own load of special things and some small percentage of those can jump into us and be nasty. So we're gonna see a lot more of those zoonotic diseases before we see fewer of them, unfortunately. Yeah, and talking about this, it's not really a zoonotic disease because it doesn't jump from the animals to the humans. But what we don't know, and maybe you have a handle on this, what we don't know is whether it jumps from one species of animal to another. Well, let me go further than that. Suppose you have very small animals, tiny animals, even bacteria themselves. And what this is is an aberration of the bacteria and it jumps from one bacterium to another bacterium and you have a similar kind of low levels zoonotic experience happening below before you ever get to the human species. And so I think you're right to suggest with some CRISPR technology, you could take this and make it into zoonotic that goes not only among animals, but from animals to humans, it's not that complicated. Yeah, I mean, that's precisely actually what the bacteria are constantly in a battle of viruses. Most of the viruses that are out there are attacking bacteria basically. And mostly they're not interested in us, they're interested in bacteria and using bacteria to reproduce themselves. But yeah, we live in interesting times, right? We live in interesting times. Well, I mean, more than that, we live in interesting times that are likely to become more interesting. Not necessarily in a good way. Yeah, so. So what should the scientific community do about this? I mean, for example, I feel there's a pause on COVID. We're all, I went to New York a few weeks ago. Very small percentage of people wearing masks. I went upstate to Connecticut, Massachusetts and the like. Very few people wearing masks. We have come to this kind of, I don't know if people put it in these terms, like a herd immunity feeling that it's not so troubling anymore. And if it's not so troubling anymore, then we're not gonna worry about other such diseases that are happening and will happen and will continue to get worse like Burkholderia Studomali. And just the projection that we make, the dynamic of these diseases and their interactivity with bigger cities and bigger populations. And of course, climate change, changing everything around us, including us. I don't think we're paying enough attention either in the US scientific community or in the World Health Organization to deal with the things that are coming down the pipe. We're always retrospective about it and that's not the way it should work, right? Right, no. It was nice to see the CDC has basically been fairly self-critical now and basically sort of said, hey, we blew this. We screwed up in a number of different ways. We see how we screw up or we're gonna change things around. So hopefully it won't happen again. But yeah. The proof there was that we found to our chagrin that the CDC was subject to political manipulation. I don't think there's any other way to look at it. And hopefully that will not repeat. Hopefully their remarks a few days ago indicate they're not gonna let that happen, knock wood. But even then, you gotta put more money in. You gotta train more people to be biochemists and water scientists, by the way, that too. And you gotta have it all over the world. You gotta have a global focus, no? Absolutely, absolutely. All right, well, it's all happy. But before we go, I have to tell you a story. Right after this show, okay, we're doing our bi-weekly movie report and we're reporting on a movie that came out in 2019 called Laundromat with Meryl Streep. Anthony Banderas and my favorite actor of all, Gary Oldman. And this is a movie about laundering money. And it's based on real situations and a real book and so forth. And it starts with, in the first part of it, first five minutes, it starts with an event cook place in Lake George, New York, where Meryl Streep lost her husband when a boat capsized in Lake George. And you have to guess, you get one guess on this. You have to guess the name of that boat. If you haven't seen the movie, you should see the movie. But I'm gonna tell you now, maybe nobody will be listening. The name of the boat that starts this movie, Laundromat, very, very good movie, is the Ethan Allen. Before. That's where he's from. That area. I thought you would. Okay, we'll watch the movie and next time we'll get together, we'll find some other really happy topic to talk about. Sounds good, Jay. Take care. Thank you, Ethan. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.