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BBC Inside Science

COVID reinfections, Susannah Cahalan questions psychiatry and sense of smell and COVID

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.51.3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you contracted COVID will you then be protected from further infections and illness from SARS-CoV-2 in the future? We’re starting to hear about cases of people being infected by the novel coronavirus for a second time. A handful of these cases have been published in peer reviewed journals. Nottingham University’s Professor of Virology Jonathan Ball discusses how big the problem of reinfection might be. Is it likely to be a common event which could hamper efforts to bring the pandemic under control? In the latest in our series interviewing the shortlisted authors from this year’s Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize, Susannah Cahalan talks to Adam Rutherford about her investigative journalism into the scientific mystery that is mental illness. Her book ‘The Great Pretender - The Undercover Mission that Changed our Understanding of Madness’ focuses on a fundamental experiment carried out in the 1970s by renowned Stanford University Professor of Psychology David Rosenhan. His famous study was published in Science under the title ‘Being Sane in Insane Places’ and describes using ‘pseudo-patients’ to test whether they would be spotted presenting at psychiatric institutions in the US. They weren’t! His findings proceeded to shape modern psychology and psychiatry. It has been a study that Susannah, has come to find rather mysterious, with elaborate descriptions that don’t always seem to add up. Mental illness and applied neuroscience remain tricky disciplines to navigate, but Susannah has had personal experience with her own misdiagnosis of schizophrenia when she has an autoimmune brain disease. COVID does funny things to your sense of smell: Adam got a heightened sense of smell, producer Fi totally lost her sense of smell, and Inside Science reporter, Geoff Marsh – well… his sense of smell just got weird. To find out why, Geoff called in Professors Mathew Cobb, an expert on smell at the University of Manchester, and Tim Spector from Kings College London whose symptom tracker app was instrumental in getting changes to sense of smell on the symptom list for COVID. Presenter – Adam Rutherford Producers– Fiona Roberts and Andrew Luck-Baker Produced in collaboration with the Open University

Transcript

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Newscast is the unscripted chat behind the headlines.

0:05.6

It's informed, but informal.

0:07.6

We pick the day's top stories and we find experts who can really dig into them.

0:12.4

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0:14.4

our contacts. Some people pick up the phone rather faster than others.

0:18.0

We sometimes literally run around the BBC building to grab the very best guests.

0:23.4

Join us for daily news chats to get you ready for today's conversations.

0:28.3

Newscast, listen on BBC Sounds.

0:31.4

BBC Sounds. B. C Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts.

0:37.0

Hello You, this is the podcast of Inside Science, first broadcast on the 22nd of October 2020. I'm Adam Rutherford. Now what is it like to be

0:46.3

sane in an insane world? Now it's not a review of 2020 but a famous experiment from the 1970s in which a psychologist enrolled several volunteers to fake hallucinations and check into a psychiatric hospital to see what would happen.

1:00.0

But a new investigation reveals that all is not quite what it seemed.

1:04.0

And most people seem to lose theirs. Mine became

1:07.6

hypersensitive. I'm talking about our sense of smell

1:10.5

and the utter weirdness of how it gets bunged up with the coronavirus.

1:15.0

Now if you've been infected with the COVID virus, one of the key questions is whether that will earn you immunity.

1:21.0

Donald Trump certainly seems to think it does but as far as I'm

1:24.4

aware he is not a virologist back in science world we are starting to hear

1:28.5

about cases of people being infected by the novel coron virus for a second time. It is just a few, only a handful of these cases

1:36.0

published in peer-reviewed journals. The latest of these confirmed instances comes from the United

1:40.6

States and unlike most reports of coronavirus re-infection, the illness

1:44.8

that struck a young man in Nevada was more severe after his second exposure to the virus.

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