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Science Friday

Heart History, Disease Seasonality, Beatboxing. Nov 9, 2018, Part 2

Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Science, Life Sciences, Wnyc, Natural Sciences, Friday

4.46.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The case presented a medical mystery. A man had entered his doctor’s office complaining of chest pain, so his doctors ordered an angiogram, an X-ray of the arteries of his heart. His condition was serious: a complete blockage of one of his coronary arteries, and a severe dysfunction of his left ventricle. The doctor realized his patient had been having a heart attack for more than 24 hours. On the face of it, nothing would seem unusual about the case. Heart disease is the number one killer of men and women in the U.S., claiming more than 600,000 lives a year. But this case was different. This man had none of the risk factors. He wasn’t diabetic, or a smoker, and had no hypertension. Even more confounding: He was only 30 years old. He was, however, of South Asian descent—a group that suffers a disproportionate risk of heart problems with no obvious cause, according to cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar. Jauhar writes about that, and the daring and sometimes tragic treatments that revolutionized how we fix the heart, in his new book Heart: A History. He joins guest host Flora Lichtman to talk about it. You’ve heard of flu season, of course (consider this your friendly reminder to get a flu shot!). But a surprising number of other illnesses also have a seasonal component, peaking at certain times of the year. Chickenpox outbreaks peak each spring, for instance, while polio historically tended to surge in the summer. Micaela Martinez, an environmental health researcher at Columbia University, believes that all infectious diseases may have some seasonal aspect to them. She collected information on almost 70 different human diseases from African sleeping sickness to Zika and looked at factors that could connect each to the calendar. In some cases, the seasonality of the disease is due to weather, while in other cases more complex interactions of host, vector, and human behavior come into play.  Beatboxers can create the sound of snare drums, bass lines, high hats and other beats all at once. And while it’s entertaining to listen to, what’s the science behind those beats? Scientists scanned beatboxers in a MRI machine to figure out how these musicians manipulate their vocal tracts to keep the beat. They found that beatboxers may use parts of their vocal tract in a way different way than is used when speaking. In fact, some of the sounds were unlike any found in human language. Linguist Reed Blaylock and beatboxer Devon Guinn break down how beatboxers coordinate their lips, tongue and throat to create a beat and how this compares to human speech.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten. Iraflato is away. Later in the hour, we'll talk about the pioneering early days of heart surgery and the first surgery that put not one but two patients at risk. But first, unless you've been living on the moon in recent weeks, which would be really cool. So if that's you, please tweet us. Someone has probably told you to get your flu shot

0:22.7

because flu season is coming. But do other illnesses have seasons too? My next guest says she

0:32.0

thinks that most, maybe all, infectious diseases have some sort of seasonal component.

0:38.6

Michaela Martinez is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences

0:43.1

at Columbia University here in New York. She wrote about this idea this week in the journal

0:47.7

Plas Pathogens, and she joins me here in our New York studios. Welcome to Science Friday.

0:52.3

Thank you for having me. So it's not just the flu.

0:54.9

No, it's not just the flu. There's evidence that all infectious diseases are seasonal.

1:00.5

That's amazing. I want to start with chickenpox. Okay. Near and dear to my childhood.

1:04.9

What is chicken pox season? So chicken pox season, so chickenpox, I should say, is a classic childhood infectious disease. And so chickenpox season, so chickenpox I should say is a classic childhood infectious disease.

1:13.7

And so chickenpox transmission tends to ramp up when kids go back to school in the autumn.

1:19.3

And that's when we see cases start to climb and climb and climb until the epidemics hit their peak in around March.

1:24.9

And then they turn around and we see the cases fall away,

1:27.8

and then this repeats like a clock every single year happens over and over in the countries

1:33.4

that don't vaccinate against Veracela.

1:35.4

I was going to ask.

1:36.2

I mean, this must have changed here when people started vaccinating.

1:39.4

Yes, we've been vaccinating since the 90s in the United States, but there are only five countries

1:45.0

right now that use the varicella vaccine. So it's still epidemic in most of the world.

1:49.8

What about sexually transmitted diseases?

1:52.2

Yeah, so I was actually quite surprised to see that there's documented seasonality for

1:57.3

sexually transmitted infections. There weren't too many studies that had actually looked into this,

...

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