What vaccinating vampire bats can teach us about pandemics | Daniel Streicker
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 2019
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
Could we anticipate the next big disease outbreak, stopping a virus like Ebola before it ever strikes? In this talk about frontline scientific research, ecologist Daniel Streicker takes us to the Amazon rainforest in Peru where he tracks the movement of vampire bats in order to forecast and prevent rabies outbreaks. By studying these disease patterns, Streicker shows how we could learn to cut off the next pandemic at its source.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This TED Talk features animal-born disease researcher Daniel Stryker, recorded live at TEDmed 2018. |
| 0:10.4 | The story that I'm going to tell you today, for me, began back in 2006. |
| 0:15.2 | And that was when I first heard about an outbreak of mysterious illness that was happening in the Amazon rainforest of Peru. |
| 0:21.6 | The people that were getting sick from this illness, |
| 0:23.6 | they had horrifying symptoms, nightmarish. |
| 0:26.6 | They had unbelievable headaches, they couldn't eat or drink. |
| 0:29.6 | Some of them were even hallucinating, confused and aggressive. |
| 0:33.6 | The most tragic part of all was that many of the victims were children, and of all of those that got sick, none survived. |
| 0:44.3 | It turned out that what was killing these people was a virus, but it wasn't Ebola, it wasn't Zika. |
| 0:49.3 | It wasn't even some new virus never before seen by science. |
| 0:53.3 | These people were dying of an ancient killer, |
| 0:55.7 | one that we've known about for centuries. |
| 0:58.2 | They were dying of rabies. |
| 1:00.4 | And what all of them had in common |
| 1:02.3 | was that as they slept, |
| 1:04.2 | they had been bitten by the only mammal |
| 1:05.6 | that lives exclusively on a diet of blood, |
| 1:08.4 | the vampire bat. |
| 1:10.6 | These sorts of outbreaks that jump from bats into people, |
| 1:14.0 | they have become more and more common in the last couple of decades. |
| 1:16.8 | In 2003, it was SARS, |
| 1:18.7 | showed up in Chinese animal markets and spread globally. |
... |
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