Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Many of us are feeling

helpless in the face of the current pandemic, but the good news is there are things we can do right now

to reduce our risk of falling seriously ill and dying from COVID-19 and preventing even greater

infectious disease threats in the future. We start our series with an origin story of the coronavirus.

In the last 17 years there have been three new deadly coronavirus epidemics, but where do emerging

diseases emerge from? It was December 30th, 2019, New Year's Eve's Eve. When Dr. Lee Van Leon,

an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital in the Hubei Province of China, messaged his fellow

physicians alerting them to the appearance of a concerning cluster of pneumonia cases.

In response, he was detained for spreading rumors summoned to the public security bureau and

reprimanded for making false statements that disturbed the public order. 39 days later, after

becoming infected with the very virus he tried to warn his colleagues about, he was dead at age 33.

By that time, the disease had already spread to dozens of countries. My new book, How to Survive a

Pandemic, is dedicated to Dr. Lee's memory. His initial message read seven SARS cases confirmed

at the Huanan seafood market. SARS stands for Severecute Respiratory Syndrome, which

17 years earlier had been the first deadly global outbreak triggered by a coronavirus. Sadly,

the doctor who first alerted the world to that pandemic, Carlo Urbani, also succumbed to the disease.

Coronavirus is a name for their crown-like appearance under an electron microscope from the Latin

corona for crown as in coronation due to a fringe of protein spikes that radiate from the surface.

Before the big outbreak of SARS in 2003, only two coronaviruses were known to cause disease in

humans and both caused a little more than the common cold. But the SARS coronavirus went on to

kill nearly one in ten people. It infected a 10 percent mortality rate. A decade later,

in 2012, another deadly coronavirus emerged. Merged the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome,

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