INDIA - Highest Global Single-Day COVID-19

"Modi punts responsibility to states as India records highest global single day infections" PBS NewsHour 4/22/2021

aka 'The Pointing Finger game' (it's not my fault)

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  This week, India set grim and global new high records Thursday with 315,000 cases in just 24 hours and another 2,100 deaths — the highest one day number of new COVID-19 infections of any nation since the pandemic began.  The country's already stressed health care system is overwhelmed.  Amna Nawaz speaks to epidemiologist Ramanan Laxminarayan about the situation and the Indian government's response.

AGENTS FOR CHANGE - Larry Brilliant

"Stamping out smallpox is just one chapter of his Brilliant life story" PBS NewsHour 3/9/2017

SIDE NOTE:  The three rock groups mentioned below are some of my favorites.  Especially Pink Floyd and their "Dark Side of the Moon."

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Larry Brilliant jokes that he doesn't live up to his last name, but he has lived a remarkable life, from his early days in the San Francisco hippie scene, to his work as one of the world's leading disease fighters who helped eradicate smallpox.  Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro sits down with Brilliant to look back at his career and current work identifying today's global threats.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour):  The shiny red T-bird convertible is a nod to its owner's Detroit roots.  But it's in San Francisco that he first made a name for himself.  It was quite a name to begin with.

DR. LARRY BRILLIANT, Epidemiologist:  It's so arrogant to have a name like Brilliant that I put 'Sometimes Brilliant and Sometimes Not So Brilliant.'  And that's what I sign.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO:  The memoir Larry Brilliant is autographing chronicles a life of unusual journeys, a civil rights, an anti-Vietnam War activist, and hippie, who helped eradicate smallpox from the world.

Today, he's an adviser to Silicon Valley philanthropists who are helping him tackle other major diseases.

DR. LARRY BRILLIANT:  In the last 30 years we've had 30 pathogens, viruses jump from animals to humans.  We know some of them, SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu, Ebola, Zika.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO:  It all began in 1969 in San Francisco, where Brilliant had come for an internship after medical school and volunteered to work at the recently closed federal prison on Alcatraz Island, which was occupied by a group of about 100 Native American protesters.  That stint got him on the evening news.

DR. LARRY BRILLIANT:  Somebody from Warner Brothers saw me on television, and they called me the next day and they said, we're starting a movie in two or three days.  We're going to be gathering at the same place I got off the boat, and it's going to be a movie about hippies and rock 'n' roll.  It's going to have the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd.

EBOLA - Cracking the Genetic Code

"To crack Ebola’s code, scientists search for elusive animal host" PBS NewsHour 6/4/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The deadly Ebola virus normally spreads among animals but occasionally spills over to humans, to dire effect.  To understand how such diseases make that jump, scientists must find the animal host.  But the hunt for live samples of Ebola in animals has never turned up a smoking gun.  Science correspondent Miles O’Brien follows epidemiologists in Sierra Leone on their hunt for deadly diseases.

LINA MOSES, Tulane University:  Kenema became the epicenter of the outbreak in July.

MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour):  Lina Moses is back at it, on the trail of a killer virus near Kenema, Sierra Leone.  She is still haunted by memories of the worst days of the Ebola epidemic last year.

LINA MOSES:  We didn’t go searching for Ebola.  Ebola came to us.  It came with a vengeance.

MILES O’BRIEN:  She took us to the remote villages of Kpalu.

LINA MOSES:  This is the first time we have trapped for a while since the Ebola outbreak started.

MILES O’BRIEN:  An epidemiologist and disease ecologist with Tulane University’s Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Program, Lina leads a team focused primarily on a virus with Ebola-like symptoms, Lassa fever.  Lassa and Ebola are so-called zoonotic diseases caused by viruses, parasites or bacteria that are normally spread among animals, but occasionally spill over to humans, often causing severe disease.

Understanding how these viruses make the jump into humans is at the core of her research.

LINA MOSES:  Any time you’re looking at zoonotic disease, you have to start looking at the animal that carries it, the animal that maintains it in nature, and that’s the only way you can start to control it.

"Why isn’t there a better test to detect Ebola?" PBS NewsHour 6/5/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In Sierra Leone, health care workers use infrared thermometers to monitor those who may have come in contact with Ebola.  It takes 21 days before they can be deemed virus-free.  That’s why researchers are trying to create more precise infection detection.  In the second in the series, science correspondent Miles O’Brien looks at the efforts to create faster, more reliable testing for the virus.