Meet The Virus Hunters: Before The Next Pandemic Strikes | Disease Hunters | Part 1/3

two major cities in China are on lockdown tonight due to a new type of corona

virus

as the coveted 19 spreads. A

pandemic

breaks out and wreaks havoc around the world. Attention now turns to infectious

disease

s that threaten humanity. This series will follow the best scientists hunting.

virus

es bacteria and mosquito-borne

disease

s are searching for the

next

deadly outbreak before time runs out western thailand just on the border with myanmar a disease hunter is conducting crucial new research he has spent 20 years studying the world's only flying mammal the bat means catch the bats super porn wants to study while the super porn team sets up a mobile laboratory the pratip team goes to inspect the local bat caves it's an urgent trip and it's not just any bat from then on they want to find the bat horseshoe bat linked to ongoing global

pandemic

uh Markings on the cave walls indicate hundreds, perhaps thousands of bats, but the team initially finds no horseshoe bats.

They will rely on a net covering the cave entrance, which the bats will hit as they fly out to feed on insects, as much as they can. Now it's time to wait until dark and hope for the best. Your patience is worth it. The little bat with a big reputation finally makes an appearance. The horseshoe is one of the 150 species of bats in Thailand. The team tries to catch as many bats as they can as time passes. Back at the makeshift lab, Super Porn has heard that their precious and potentially dangerous cargo is on the way.

Strange, that is, first the bats are measured, an oral swab captures the saliva, an anal swab recovers the feces, then the blood is drawn and a tissue sample will help confirm the species. Through DNA, the process continues late into the night as more bats arrive. They include species other than horseshoe bats, but they are also tested. The bats are freed and will find their way home. That's a lot of activity and attention for someone who didn't do it. Originally not wanted in Bangkok, it is the

next

stage of work for the Super Porn lab team. They have samples of a hundred bats.

They are using a variety of tools to analyze the samples, including genetic sequencing. In early 2020, Super Porn was the first scientist out. china will confirm a case of covid19 just one day after the genetic sequence of the virus was published its unit is racing to develop a vaccine like so many others the pandemic has disrupted its usual research and forced it to sleep four hours a night for months without Sampling and testing will continue for a few months to detect any Covet 19 connection in Thai bats. For now, Super Porn is not ready to reveal any results at a secluded animal research center in Singapore.

Dr. Wang Linfa is also studying bats up close, but with a twist. They are cave nectar bats and they are being bred here, not studied in the wild, this colony is one of the few of its kind anywhere, it is supported by the Singapore government and Duke Nus medical school, so I think this, you know, without bragging, makes us one. of the really world leaders in bad research, every few months the bats are given a health check, even for viruses, in terms of the number of chronologists the bats carry, no one knows, I think we currently have at least a thousand different chronomatodes already discovered and then most people think that what we discovered is one percent of what is actually in nature, yes, so there is a lot more nectar from this cave in which they can really lick very long tongues and They lick their heads and bodies and they also have very social animals, so they may have urine contamination, so we can take a sample from the head and then this sample goes back to the laboratory and we can test if they have antivirus, but the team Linfar is no longer looking for new viruses, they are interested in the relationship between viruses and their hosts. are unraveling the mystery of why bats carry so many viruses without being affected by them and the lessons that could be applied to human health Viruses can infect all forms of life are microscopic fragments of genetic information wrapped in proteins and cannot multiply without a host, so they hijack cells and, as they replicate, damage the host's DNA.

The normal immune response in humans and other mammals is for special sensors to activate inflammation. This sends immune cells to kill the virus and repair the damage, but research shows that doesn't happen. In bats, even with a lot of viruses present, their inflammation sensors barely activate and then they don't put up much of a fight to try to eliminate the virus, but we humans and most animals that do, when a new one comes in viruses, we fight, so we have a cliché, you know, biologists say that very few of us kill ourselves, we kill ourselves, so we are less likely to coexist with violence than bats, but now we find that a batter can teach us lessons.

You know they have a long lifespan and are less prone to cancer. on bats can basically offer many lessons for students and translate into medical research, but there are still threats that need to be studied. Research shows that by trying to overcome the bats' immune system, some viruses have adapted to spread more quickly between cells, which spells trouble. when those viruses encounter a weaker immune system like that of humans, but bats are not bad, they make up a quarter of all mammal species and are essential for pollination and control of disease-carrying insects such as mosquitoes. Bats have been on Earth much longer than humans, so we were the last to arrive.

You know they were the natives, so they've been around for at least 65 million years. You know it's humans that are causing the spread of viruses if we look at the last 20 years and look ahead to the next. 20 years unless we make major changes to how we treat wildlife, how we farm, how we travel, how we transport, if we don't change then there will almost certainly be more outbreaks, it's the changing relationship between humans and nature that will what are you seeing. Many viruses have been unleashed. This is dangerous. This is the kind of thing that leaves clues to the bird.

There are more animals for sale now, so they are reopening. This is not good and this is where other disease

hunters

are focusing their efforts to prevent the next pandemic in Bangkok. The link between wildlife and viruses is under the microscope. Scientists believe a bat virus may have jumped to humans at a market in Wuhan, China, through an intermediary animal that caused the Kovit 19 outbreak. Is there a similar risk at the famous Chatuchak market? Steve Galster is leading the fight against -freeland trafficking group that managed to close the animal section here when covid19 broke out for the last almost 30 years, my colleagues and I have been warning about the possible outbreak of zoonotic diseases, pseudonatic outbreaks of the trade of wildlife because all these animals can carry infectious diseases the vendors will not be happy to see steve as he walks into the market a hidden camera is very much needed different species many different smells many different types of birds here poultry you have some ducks wild we have some buns mixed on top of each other pigeons wild turkeys even vultures here this is dangerous this is the kind of thing that leads to bird flu so here in cages side by side we have adult raccoons next to the capybara which is from south america north america cages next to each other this is the largest rodent in the world and above here I think these marmosets above pepe barra on the left here we have a species of primates hello, but the market is a A little busier than I expected.

There are more animals for sale now, so they are reopening. This is not good. I think these wildlife markets not only in Wuhan, but throughout the region, really are ticking time bombs. what we just saw here is like a biological warfare laboratory, any animal can transmit a pathogen to another, someone buys it, handles it, takes it home as a pet or eats it, boom, we have another pandemic in the office, Steve's little team is using science. to track trade and disease, so we have one of our staff here extracting data from a phone. We normally do this with the police.

The police ask us to do this because we help them with technology. Phone data is analyzed using artificial means. intelligence for contact tracing algorithms can help identify who handles the finances and even who is the boss basically allows us to see who is who in the zoo this artificial intelligence basically makes us dangerous for traffickers and the team has developed an app that identifies what Animals can be traded legally and if they carry viruses dangerous to humans, so the trade on the surface looks like a bunch of normal people, sometimes lower to middle class, just making money selling birds, lizards or whatever.

There is no such thing behind it, it is organized crime and corruption that Freeland wants. Wildlife trade is banned, but it's only

part

of the virus puzzle On an early morning in southern Cambodia, disease hunter Vibal Hull of the renowned Pasta Institute is collecting traps for rodents, especially rats, this is a New research prompted by recent cases of hepatitis E jumping from rats to humans in places like Hong Kong is a sign that scientists always need to be on the lookout for emerging diseases before they can spread. The vbol team will also be testing for arenavirus after a new safiva outbreak in Africa, so this is a local truck.

It was v-ball's own childhood struggle with diseases like malaria that led him to a life of research. Rodents thrive in human environments and when ecosystems are altered, they eliminate their natural predators near the team's research work. There are scenes that are repeated throughout Southeast Asia. Humans are pushing. In return, viruses that were once kept within the canopy are spreading through the forest for use in agricultural housing and roads. The WHO estimates that about 70 percent of all infectious diseases that affect humans come from animals. For years, pasta scientists have contributed their findings to special databases with a predictive system.

The pandemic map updated in 2020 shows hotspots with increased risk of virus transmission to humans. Rodents and bats are among the main sources of disease. Unlike animals captured for testing in other research, these rodents will not come out alive. Regular sampling The animals are dissected and their organs are collected for analysis in the main laboratory Later that day the team goes out to set more traps A monitoring team will also take samples from the villagers The first stage of this investigation is to determine the prevalence of virus in rats and local residents that will lead to actions and perhaps antiviral treatments later in Phnom Penh, samples will undergo intensive testing because this actually comes from vibol breeding updates colleague Eric Carlson on his research, it seems We have a good positive in this case, yes, that's right, you have a good positive, that's really, yes, we have a good positive, it's quite interesting, this is on the market and as we track emerging pathogens, Eric monitors monitoring a serious and ongoing threat.

There is an avian influenza hotspot here in Southeast Asia, we have numerous cases and it has been circulating endemically in bird populations for over 20 years. We are still seeing cases of human avian influenza. In Asia we still see new subtypes. Emerging cases usually spike around festivals when demand for poultry spikes, but bird flu is considered such a risk that Eric's team tests markets 16 times a year, so the reason What we have to monitor influenza so closely is that it now mutates so quickly most of the time those mutations are It won't do much to the virus, however, it can sometimes change the way it attaches to a cell so it can get to better to a human being, sometimes it means it can replicate faster, sometimes it means it can get around the antivirals that we have and All of those are really big problems.

The markets themselves represent additional risk. The birds are killed on site before being taken to local restaurants. The blood makes these areasThey are what scientists call biounsafe and the chances of a virus infecting workers increase the more it spreads. in a human being, the more chances it has to adapt to human physiology to make it a worse disease in humans and eventually that will possibly become transmissible from human to human and that's when we end up with another pandemic when a virus does it. a market in other

part

s of our towns and cities the danger increases transmission can include saliva expelled into the air and a new virus reaches another person's airways hits mucous membranes and enters a cell viruses adaptable to humans have a structure like a spike of protein that fits with the receptors of the human cell this effectively opens the door the cell has mechanisms to reproduce the human DNA the virus takes to make copies of itself the copies go out and infect other cells, especially if immune system fails to generate early response Elsewhere in Phnom Penh, epidemiologist Arata Hidano is testing animals that could pose an even greater pandemic risk than birds.

He is from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Diseases, in association with the Duke Nus Medical School in Singapore. This is a pig slaughterhouse. Okay, let's take samples. The errata team. is testing for h1n1 swine flu. It's a new project funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency that typically focuses on weapons of mass destruction. That's how seriously experts are taking the threat of a pandemic. Of course, they are interested in biological weapons, but emerging ones are also interesting. Viruses that can threaten public health and also the economy of many countries in the world.

The pork industry is becoming larger and more intensive as the region's human population grows and can afford more animal protein, but the way pigs are raised and transported is bringing them into closer contact. with each other, with other animals and with humans and pigs have a special vulnerability, they have receptors in their airways that bind to flu viruses from both birds and humans and this is worrying because when these two different viruses infect a cell at the same time within the cell and they can create new types of viruses that have different genetic components than human blood and viruses, which means that we are very susceptible, we have no immunity and that can potentially cause a pandemic.

It was h1n1. swine flu that caused the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. that killed tens of millions of people that strain disappeared but new ones continue to emerge. Scientists like arata now have a more sophisticated understanding of viruses transmitted between animals and those that could affect us, but it is still not enough, we have to remember that there are so many viruses that we do not know about in the world yet, please start discovering them and, as we search more, we will find more. This trained veterinarian dedicated himself to epidemiology because he became fascinated by the role of humans.

When unleashing viruses there is always a constant feedback loop between our behaviors and how it spreads, and without understanding this system we cannot control the disease and it is partly human behavior that explains why viruses that should have already been eliminated are still a threat. a painful human cost in singapore a hospital that dates back more than a hundred years is no longer needed and is awaiting renovation, once housing patients stricken with viruses and other diseases feared around the world, such as the bubonic plague and smallpox, smallpox killed hundreds of millions over the centuries. In the late 1960s, a concerted tracing and vaccination effort was launched and smallpox was eradicated in 1980.

The hospital also treated polio victims. That crippling virus had its last local case in 1978. Experts thought polio would follow. smallpox and would be eradicated everywhere in the 1990s so what? gone wrong in the philippine community nurse claudia domdom is on an urgent mission in a city east of manila she is looking for children who have not been vaccinated against polio she has one more week to reach 95 of them in a community of 10,000 people this comes After the country suffered its first polio outbreak in almost 20 years, one of the challenges is growing parental resistance, which was officially eradicated here in 2000.

The danger now is polio derived from vaccine. The Philippines and some other countries use a cheap oral vaccine that contains a weakened vaccine. but the live version of the virus can mutate and be released back into the environment, usually through defecation, so it threatens children who are not immunized to be safe. A society needs 95 vaccines for herd immunity. The percentage here and elsewhere has been falling below that goal. For years, wild polio now only exists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but in 2020, vaccine-derived polio cases were reported in 18 countries. It is an insidious and highly contagious disease. The virus usually replicates in the intestines, but if it enters the nervous system it damages motor neurons.

They send messages to the muscles that wear out causing paralysis in the extremities. The cranial nerves can also be paralyzed, affecting swallowing and speaking, and it can affect the lungs, making breathing difficult or impossible. That's why Claudia presses. Her goal is to immunize 1,000 children this week or 200 a day thanks to hundreds of kilometers to the south, doctors continue searching for victims of the new polio outbreak al-zamir, a three-year-old boy, can no longer walk, his 21-year-old father has to take care of him all day abroad who Alzamir's grandmother lives with, his mother left this swampy and impoverished area, he has the typical risk factors for polio.

Sanitation is a challenge with a community bathroom, Alzamir can't even get that far, he defecates on the porch and his father takes care of it, it is likely that Al-Zamir was infected by local water or surfaces contaminated with fecal matter sometimes the family travels more than an hour to go to the hospital pediatrician julietta ciapno is supervising more than half a dozen children with polio they get a checkup and sometimes rehabilitation sessions, of course, it's very frustrating. I feel sad because polio is one of the diseases that can be prevented with vaccines. There is a possibility that the outbreak could worsen if we cannot control it as soon as possible.

The numbers are still in the hundreds around the world, but who's to say, just one child. is infected children in all countries are at risk and warns that if polio is not eradicated there could be up to 200,000 new cases a year within 10 years for now altamir faces a lifetime of challenges that could have been avoided in san josé del monte A month has passed and Claudia is getting vaccinated for other diseases. She has been off work because she and her husband contracted covid 19, but her work continues to fight disease and prevent further suffering. Experts say richer nations should help developing countries increase vaccination rates and eradicate polio while there is still time.

Frontline staff like Claudia do the best they can, but as with smallpox, international cooperation is the only answer and cooperation is also urgent in the case of covid19, which is still spreading here and elsewhere , so disease

hunters

are collaborating around the world, from Iceland to Singapore. We are using the latest technology to hunt and combat the new coronavirus as it spreads and mutates. Many countries still have their borders closed to visitors, but Iceland is trying a different approach. New arrivals at Reykjavik airport are tested for COVID-19 and then enter a five-day quarantine. If they test negative at the end of that period, they are free to leave, but despite the apparent normality here, hunters of diseases are working hard, they are tracking Covet 19 in real time, making Iceland a kind of genetic laboratory, a local company with a long history. in the study of genetics and diseases is taking the lead, hundreds of thousands of blood samples collected over the years are kept at a constant temperature of -24 degrees the company has been sequencing the DNA of every Icelander now the founder is applying the same approach to covid19 every time We started working on a new disease, we had to answer the question what has not yet been understood about this disease and then suddenly we have Aleppo disease with all the unanswered questions, so in many ways that was generated. a feast for us the swabs arrive at decode from the airport and testing centers approximately every hour, the company is sequencing the genetic code of each positive case of covid19, the first step is to isolate the RNA of the virus, then other tests are performed to confirm the positive case and the precise genetic sequencing of a tourist was weakly positive he probably recovered so this is what it looks like here what makes sense this virus is a chain of almost 30,000 repetitions of the letters a u g and c that represent different proteins when cells make copies, sometimes there are typos and a mutation. occurs when one of the letters changes, such as from a to g, transmission strings.

The d code takes those mutations and traces a kind of growing family tree that connects the infections to each other, we could from the beginning determine the geographical origin of the virus. in every case in Iceland, so having the sequence of the virus gives you an overview of where the virus is coming from, who is actually in who and determine if there are many infected people entering the country or if it is just a community spread understand The mutations and route of the virus also helps make decisions much faster than in the past Scientists determined that children were less likely to spread the virus, so local schools remained open Decoded scientists are sharing their information with others disease hunters around the world world in a database called gizaid was started for influenza but has taken on an urgent new role in singapore a star sebastian marastro verifies a team that processes incoming information from gizaid how many sequences do we have from iceland have you seen what we have?

New new sequences from Moldova and Montenegro. It is where the first ones are found. Singapore is working with teams in Europe and South America to keep the system running 24 hours a day, selecting genetic sequences and then uploading them so scientists can see how the virus is changing. everyone is fine because yes, we want color on the branches. I'm using computers to hunt viruses or to hunt mutations in viruses and because they move very fast, we also need to move fast in the area that we are in in bioinformatics. To make sense of sequences relatively quickly on the computer, sometimes we get this new sequence and within minutes we know that it's something interesting, that it's something new.

A-Star's powerful server processes all terabytes of information with more than 100,000 genetic sequences processed. So far, this produces detailed databases and 3D models that scientists around the world can access for free. This is the peak of coronaviruses, the colored dots are mutations. You have to be constantly vigilant because the virus often changes in random positions, but if it affects the place where your detection occurs, then you need to react to that, sometimes drug resistance can occur exactly and you can see that in the 3D structure of the virus where the drug binds and then there is a mutation and then the drug can no longer bind, this is both for antibody treatment and for vaccines that is why it is good and important to have this constant flow of sequences and the massive flow of data is accelerating vaccine development by focusing on precise areas of a virus a leading vaccine approach modifies another virus to mimic the coronavirus spike the immune system responds in two ways, immune cells outside the virus activate antibodies that bind To the surface, other immune cells enter and respond at the cellular level.

This process could offer longer-lasting immunity, and much of this is due to the work of disease hunters who are quick to share their knowledge. data with each other and with the world, I hope this serves as a model for future outbreaks and can be applied to new diseases, future outbreaks, new diseases, are inevitable and what lessons are we learning in Bangkok. Superporn has not finished analyzing its samples to see if the Thai bats carry the same virus that caused the original Kovid 19 outbreak in China, the verdict so far there is no sign of the virus, so the danger has been avoided for now , but there has been a wake-up call, it seems that we need to change the way we interact with the natural world and intensify scientific surveillance whereThe city

meet

s the forest in ways we didn't plan and our disease hunters will continue their work as the next virus prepares to spread, they will do everything they can to keep humanity safe.