presidents. rhonda moore about this at c-span.org/classroom. >> now a panel on epidemics from the ninth annual tucson jazz festival ofbooks featuring donald mcneil on "zika: the emerging epidemic". and joel shurkin on "true genius: the life and work of richard garwin, the most influential scientist you've never heard of" . this is just under one hour. good afternoon. welcome to the ninth annual tucson festival of books. my name is matt russell. i'm the ceo of russell public communications and it will be a privilege for me to moderate the session this afternoon. i would like to thank cox communications for sponsoring the venue. mr. mcneil is sponsored by research corporation for science advancements.

and mr. joel shurkin is sponsored by the university of arizona bio institute. the presentation will last one hour. including questions and answers. please hold your questions until the final part of the program. we will manage questions from the floor. immediately following the session mr. mcneil will be autographing his book and the sales and sending area and the u of a bookstore whose number 141. books are available for purchase at this location. take note, mr. mcneil will be about 20 minutes late to the signing area due to a live interview with c-span following the program. i do want to say hello to our c-span television audience. they are watching live right now. we hope you are enjoying the festival and invite you to become a friend of the festival. text friend to 520214book. this is shown on the sign in front of her more visit the front of the festival booth number 110 on the mall. of course your gift makes a

difference in keeping the festival programming free of charge and supporting critical literacy programs in the community. out of respect for the authors, ask you to please turn off your cell phone as i introduce our panelists this afternoon. joel shurkin is the author of the invisible fire. the history of mankind's triumph over the ancient scourge of smallpox. the book came out in 1979. although you might have seen mr. joel shurkin speaking about his latest book, "true genius: the life and work of richard garwin, the most influential scientist you've never heard of" . a lot of people now have heard of it and are talking about it. joel shurkin is a freelance writer in baltimore. a former science writer at the philadelphia inquirer. he was part of a team that won a pulitzer prize for covering three mile island in 1979. that same year he also won the

national association of science teachers best children's science book. award for his book jupiter, the star that failed. he has 10 published books and he taught journalism at stanford university. the university of california at santa cruz and the university of alaska fairbanks. we are also privileged to have donald mcneil with us. he has written the book "zika: the emerging epidemic".donald mcneil is assassin have reported for "the new york times". specializing in plagues and pestilences. [laughter] he covers diseases of the world including aids, ebola, malaria, swine and bird flu, mad cow disease and sars. he joined the times and 1976 is a copy boy and has been an environmental reporter, theater columnist and editor. that is like another hour for this session. he has won awards for stories about cities that have successfully fought aids, about

patent monopolies that keep drug prices high and africa and about diseases that cannot be eradicated. this afternoon we are talking about epidemics, old and new. iran ever present place for our panelists this afternoon. [applause] >> benjamin, before we really dig into these diseases i would like to invite you to offer some introductory remarks about your works. we are talking about here and really what you set out to accomplish with them. >> there is a well-known phenomenon among journalists. known as a medical writer's syndrome. that when you read about a disease he is a symptoms of it. you must have a heckuva life. [laughter] >> i wrote the book about smallpox at the time that it had enough that was eradicated.

it turns it they were wrong by a couple of months but what the heck. smallpox is or was, past tense, one of the worst epidemics in history. we think as many as one half a billion people may have died. and not nicely. it was a terrible disease. you would be perfectly well walking down the street and then did the next evening. it is carried by a virus. to this very day there is no cure. fortunately, there is no disease. one of the things, one of the reasons i like the book is because there was an awful lot of fun to write. i am sorry, but it was. i managed to go to somalia were interview the less human being every two smallpox. there was an accident in a laboratory in london a couple of years later that killed several workers. and the lab chief committed suicide shortly thereafter. the ambulance driver in somalia was the last human

being to catch smallpox. i have a son who was 47 who has the same scar that i have four head. it is here someplace. the smallpox score that every child in america, every child in the western world has. avicenna was five years younger who has no such score because this doctor vaccination. the virus itself still exists. it is in a deep freeze in atlanta at cdc and the russians have a sample nobody knows exactly where. as long as they stay in the deep freezer safe. if it ever gets out we are in very serious trouble. >> do you have scores of medical writer's syndrome? >> just a little while ago i had went to the dr. i was feeling lousy. i had come back from columbia where i was covering zeke. and i was thinking i couldn't have been so unlucky.

i start to talk about this and the dr. hardly compensate get up on the table. and he took one this is my justice that i know what you have. it is not exotic. had pneumonia as it turned out. but i diagnosed it of course as zika virus. the book i had written, is about zika. i've been covering diseases since 1997 when i was a correspondent in africa. i started caring aids there. i went from being a theater, respondent to science news. about 10 years ago i read a series about diseases on the brink of eradication. this discussion then zika, is just beginning in this hemisphere. we will see it around for quite a while. it will be a long time before anybody thinks about

eradicating. actually there were two diseases eradicated. nobody remembers the second one. it is --. people do not know about it because it is an animal disease. it kills hooved animals. -- it wiped out all of the, virtually all of the games and cattle in west africa. and one third of them starve to death. the disease, a group of veterinarians realized they couldn't keep doing this and they trained other people to go through the herds and stick them with the vaccine. so the second disease was eradicated. so my partner and i wrote about polio, guinea worm.

those should be eradicated any your nokia measles, elephant titus, i done deficiency. when you go to eradicate a disease, once you have a solution, once you have a really good working vaccine that works with one dose which provides loss lasting protection, which many diseases do not have. was he a big insulation, it is relatively easy to get the first 99 percent of the disease. and it takes years, sometimes decades. fighting polio. the effort to fight polio was started by rotary international back in 1988. it was going to be there millennial gift to the world. back and they raised $200 million for the fight and got down to more than 99 percent. and we are still fighting polio and bill gates is putting about $1 million a year into the fight. where down to below 100 cases

this year. we thought it had been eradicated in africa and then other cases popped up last year. the reason the diseases persist in places where people not only are poor but there is stuff going on. you can't wait to find out if people have it and do the testing. so now we know that there is polio in nigeria and we also know it is on the border of pakistan and afghanistan and the no go areas along there. it is a combination of war and also just bad luck sometimes. and guinea worm, there are very few pockets of the left in the world are recently admitted just from people into dogs. people were giving rockfish question the dogs and the dogs picked that up from the fish guts.now they have more cases in dogs than people. and the dogs affect the drinking water with the people pick it up from.

so that will be a whole new struggle over that. you can see it is a long complicated discouraging effort. every disease is different. but it is fascinating to write about them. >> will get to the heart of the battles with these diseases in just a bit. which i think have all the makings of a major hollywood thriller. and as you hear there are even some lying, cheating and stealing going on. but let's talk before the pen even hit paper. the first case of smallpox was reported thousands of years ago. with the medication and victory declared, fewer than 40 years ago. how did you get your head around researching this disease that literally change history? >> it was my job. it fascinated me. smallpox is actually an easy disease to eradicate relatively speaking. it has several characteristics of polio for example or that zika probably does not have. they made the brief

announcement that smallpox had been eradicated and it turned out there was a book in there. i traveled all around the world. i must say i had a good time doing it. we spent some time in northern india demonstrating to the people who live there that the vaccination was painless, it was not a big deal and they would stand up in the back of james and go with this. i am now about the most immune smallpox human being or pretty darn close to it. it was a challenge and the people involved with our challenges as well. i should point out that this book is somewhat controversial. there were times when the virus was not the enemy. the bureaucracy of the world health organization was the enemy. and give her the lying, cheating and stealing.

people were on the field and kept running up against the world health organization repeatedly. dan learned to get around the bureaucracy. i should add that da henderson, the man who was, who ran the smallpox program died just a couple of months ago by the way. he blames me and my book over not getting a nobel prize for medicine.i hope he is not right. they honestly deserve it. >> what about you donald? zika didn't really hit the scene until 1947 in uganda. one might assume you have a bit of an advantage since you have only had to put 70 years of stories. >> and there were very few stories. zika was discovered in 1947 in a monkey. the cage was hoisted in the tree in the forest. then it disappeared and there were no tests for it for a long time. it really only came on the radar a couple of years ago when it started, and somehow left asia and started with

outbreak that the cdc investigated. this is one of the others that we fought over with the japanese in world war ii. there are some resources that they provide there. the cdc went there and figured out that this mystery virus was zika. but there were no serious side effects. they did not notice anything. then it turned up in french polynesia in 2013. and they are, it was pretty well investigated. they race into the population. 66 percent of the population was infected in six months. and they knows that uptake in a former temporary paralysis. the very terrifying. but they didn't notice anything about babies. only when the disease got to brazil, that it took the brazilians some months to discover what was going on. and then they were relieved. health minister this is actually good news.

we were afraid of this was a new strain of --. it was only in late august, early september in the northeast where they had a tremendous epidemic of zika none must before that doctors in the icu and pediatric icu began to talk with each other and it was a mother and daughter team who worked in two separate hospitals.they said i have, i enormously wanted to microcephaly babies a year and i have five of them and the others that i have seven. they started calling other doctors and relates something happened.they started interviewing the mothers and relates quite a few of them had symptoms of zika 6 to 9 months before. that is when the alarm went out. in my case, i had heard of zika two or three months before because i got a phone call of the blue from a person for the university of texas university branchburg is a dr. here that would like to talk to about

some diseases. i said i know i should be writing about that but they've been around for a few years after i have a lot of other things to do. i'm not sure there's anything new to say about them. and they said there's another disease called zika. as it is fairly catchy, what is it? and he told me some of the background about asia and french polynesia and the fact that there was a connection to -- but there was no engine microcephaly. i took notes as i often do. i signed and dated them and put them in my head scratcher pile. of things i will get to eventually when i can get through this file which is a must do it now pile. it was a week after christmas last year and i was waiting for, looking for an item, i read 300 word column every week. along with other coverage. i was looking for an item and suddenly saw to brazil, it was in health ministry has asked

women start having children. that made my antenna go up immediately. yes china has a one child policy but of the night never heard of a health ministry asking women to stop having children. obviously it is not a failure to follow because if you keep it up there will not be any more brazilians. i called the only dr. i knew in brazil at the time as it is this true? are these baby really as damaged as you say? and he said it is terrifying, we do not know what it is. last year, lots and lots of mosquito bites. we do not know if the disease zika is closing by so. we don't know if the mothers had previous infections. we do not really know much about the disease. but it is devastating. so i heard a story that day on december 29 think. and then we called the chief and he and i collaborated on the front page story a day later.

we got off to the races. >> is the sound of the alarm. you know we won the smallpox battle in the late 70s. it has been said that the engagement was really more like conventional warfare. can you talk about that? >> yes, one of the weaknesses of the smallpox virus is it has no animal reservoir. it goes from person to person. it does not hide in birds, animals, it does not fly around with mosquitoes. so if you could break the chain between one infection and another, you have stopped the infection. the standard way of doing it was to vaccinate everybody around. now give some thought to the idea of vaccinating everybody in india.. india, vaccinating everyone in back bingo - or nigeria clearly doesn't work. it works in western countries. smallpox was unheard of by the middle of the 20th century and most of the western countries. some of the smallpox spectators, mostly but not entirely, were american. they figured out that you didn't really need to do that and that

it was impossible to do that. they found out that if you had a case of smallpox, you would find every person who had contact with that person and then you drew a circle around them and vaccinated everybody within that circle. so if you had somebody with back smallpox in town a then you didn't bother about town bc and that was how it was done. they also had several other advantages. the vaccine goes back to 1769 who discovered soros on their hands and when they had cowpox they never got smalltalk to figure out the material from those orders from their hands and gave it to somebody but that give them immunity as well and it turned out it was a-old

17-year-old boy. he took some cowpox and then deliberately put the virus into another wounded later on. what happened was nothing. she was immune. so you have a very good vaccine. the second of all you could freeze dried the vaccine and carry it for months without having to worry aboutor mon electricity. they also invented something called a bifurcated needle that goes something like this. what they would do is put fluid glycerin into the dried vaccinei and put fluid on your arm and f then they would just go like this and that's all it requires it most certainly doesn't hurt and i can tell you from that

experience we learned to smile as we did at this. [laughter] it's not like any other disease, so once they got themselves organized and people from the cdc and the world health a organization figured out a way of isolating the victims, that's what did it. >> two days ago they recommend women not travel to any area where there is a risk of the virus and infection so what does today's battlefield click on the front? >> it is still cold and most of us have been through year number one we are failing to fight zika. the advice to where deet is not

enough. not a single city with the exception of miami all those trucks blowing all about the backward public relations. the mosquitoes live in close proximity there are some in tucson. you're going to be a high risk area sometime in the near future and it may be a race between the virus and the vaccine. it's mostly a mild disease but it's devastating fetuses. what upsets me is neither the cdc or the who would speak out and say if you can avoid and we

will help you avoid it by getting contraceptives. contraceptives. they were sneaking contraceptives into puerto rico in large amounts of. many of them don't have the doctors and allow this as teenagers and it is absolutely true that it's difficult to present themselves from getting pregnant and the other thing is abortion.e there are parts where abortion is legal and for others you may have seen a story in "the new york times" today. they have tiny heads and they will never have anything liketh memory or thought. they often are cramped up like this.

they are at risk of death for seizures and have those mothers been able to choose, some may have chosen and in the countries that should have been made clearer and available. no one should force anyone tony use contraception or abortion but to have it available is something they refuse to do ands it was a public-health failure. politics and money emerge as central players and ironically find themselves battling the science itself. we will get more to the who because i want to get back to that, but talk about the role politics plays through good, bad or otherwise on the pathway towards smallpox eradication.

>> it's one of the shining moments. the americans were helping the russians, the guy that was leading was czech, it was a communist country. the money was available and this happens with many diseases they would either die or they would die. it became relatively easy to keep them out of the country. the united states spent millions of dollars t to put people at every port of entry to look for somebody coming in with smallpox

to read all it needed was one person. it was one of the best examples i know of international cooperation and could end the without it. fighting others doesn't and that doesn't seem rational. can you talk about that?s this more people die of tuberculosis than any in the world but it's sort of lost its faddishness and there is a un aids with specializing in fighting aids. it's immune systems that end up dying of tuberculosis but that is a disease that is out of

fashion. it becomes popular as a cause. the diseases around the world but ignore entire area and pneumonia kill most kids under the five around the world and that means fighting a whole lot of different things. it catches on and one group decides this is a disease.

has it made its way through the public sector and funding? >> they all go along. it's a combination of newspaper coverage, advocacy. it's believing to the congress passing the money. >> the world health organization weekend in an outwar and outwarf just on the who. >> you said that the world health organization was the here in the village and in your book. you talk a little bit about it, but it sounds like there is a bit of drama. >> the world health organization is a large bureaucracy as most organizations were. it is my theory that the reason they are the way they are is because they are based in geneva switzerland on this gorgeous

title. there are countries of the world i always thought that if it took a kid with scabies and put him on the front lawn of the organization to remind them what they ought to be looking the world would be a better place. they get the permission to do what they needed tthat they nee. for example they needed morere trucks and jeeps and for some reason or another they decided they didn't really need more jeeps or trucks, so they store them and when they were done with them they returned them to wherever they stole them from and they are inoculating people. there was a woman i will never forget, a french researcher like many internationalists had

exactly two dresses. she would wear 11 day and watch it and where the second address the second day and this is how she went through life because she was always out on the field and she told me she learned when necessary to cry she would go up to a bureaucrat and they would say you can't do this where on cue she would weep. she swore she always got what she needed to get. the fight between the people in the fielonthe field and at the n in geneva was so bad that when the book came out he tried to disown what he told me and i have it on tape.th the world health organization to not geget the nobel prize that s deserved because they were sabotaged. >> if you are talking about the world health organization i see this absorbing grand --

affirming grand. you said the world health organization despite it'ss important is essentially powerless. talk about that. >> at the times editors would come to me and say we want to do something big on the foundation. it's 800-pound gorilla and my action is always yes it has become the 800-pound gorilla of global health but the truth is what has gone before it is the world health organization and absolutely needed somebody else but at the same time the world health organization has a tiny budget is $2.2 billion.

i'm writing a piece for the director of the world healtht organization right now. they have 8,000 employees and $2.2 billion budget which is a quarter of the cdc budget inof c half of the new york presbyterian hospital of new york city. many of the employees are scattered in the local offices so there's a great deal of time wasted back and forth in genevao and the offices don't do what they want them to do so they have terrible leadership problems. about three quarters of the budget is from donations. united states, bill clinton, bill and melinda gates giving them three quarters of their budget and that often comes with

what we might call strings attached and it's been referred to as a straitjacket. you can spend it on this, this and this. one of the things that gets spent on proportionately is polio because that is a project. i'm in favor of eradicating polio but it does take time.ak at the same time it is essential for doing things like fighting the ebola. it took them months to get cranking and doctors without borders was fighting the disease pretty much alone in africa. they used to have teams and they tackled 19 different epidemicsem between 1976 and 2013 and beat back each one by isolating patients and decontaminating. but the last one completely got

away from them where the academic fled to three different countries and they began to spread and at that point it was outbe of control. >> think for a minute you are in the field in central alaska driving around in jeeps and you can imagine what the weather is like, snakes and alligators, whatever it is and you were having a battle over postage stamps.the same >> at the same time it's the only organization that can declare a public health emergency which you need to do e to get the countries alerted and it also gets a lot of countries to start cranking out their own equivalent to fight the disease. also when they oversee the coordination of the network of the national laboratories and

sometimes state laboratories around the world making thememsh share virus samples with each other, the who also countries don't like to report the fact they have diseases they don'tp like to report it because it means either tourism and scum of business travel and where you can no longer export food from your country or it is just a wound to your pride to say yes we have this disease we are not able to control ourselves so they often don't report as members of the united nations and the world health organization they have to report that they get the news about the mystery fever which turned out

to be sars. you need to have hundreds of doctors fighting and because they had a few hundred doctors each and many of them died in the first wave of the epidemic so when they send 100 doctors te the scenes often they are in the military or the public health service. when several hundred troops landed in your country your national pride can be wounded quite a bit if you are liberia or sierra leone so the fact thaa they are there to turn them into medical peacekeepers rather than invading doctors for the mobile

devices and in the absence of the digital driven media sphere, what role did the media play in the 1960s and 70s in the eradication? >> smallpox disappeared in north america and pretty much disappeared in south america by the 70s certainly not in japan or china. it is mostly in undeveloped countries and we tend to ignore. we were successful keeping people that might have smallpox out of the country by guardingvr our borders.

some of you may be old enough to know that when you travel overseas you had to carry a little yellow card that said yoa had been vaccinated from a number of things including smallpox so when you got off the plane from london one of the things they wanted to see is your passport and toldrt certificate and it worked. there was an occasional case where someone came from overseas carrying the virus with them. but it had been wiped out so we were not paying much attention. >> we were certainly paying attention to zika last year, travel advisory, olympians deciding whether or not to go to rio to compete, budget battles to spray south florida. where their immediate game changers last year?

>> i was shocked when i realized i was casting around for an idea for a column and it was a local affiliate and if they said whata about this. it appears to be attacking the babies of pregnant women. as i reported on it, i was getting phone calls from

pregnant women saying i don't know what i'm supposed to do. i'm supposed to go to a family wedding, three months pregnant and i am on the phone like i'm a reporter with a ba in roderick. you should give medical advice from your doctors and they said it should be fine.gu >> i said on the understanding i'm not giving you medical advice, do not go to. they had me screaming why are you not issuing a travel alert and they said we are working on it. finally, i'm getting more calls from pregnant women and theallso attitude is why men shouldn't just be careful about gettingcd bit by mosquitoes and where long

sleeves and we have plenty on our cruise ships so we don't plan to stop. i finally demanded an interview with the migration andw quarantine who is a doctor that i know and he was very cagey but he said we are discussing it with our partners. he said we have to let our partners know before we let the media know. they demand we are calling mexico and all the cities in the caribbean to let them and their ambassadors know we are about to drop a bomb on their tourism and business travel and let them know.op i said that should come later. it's january in new york city, r lot of pregnant women arelot lo getting on planes and ships and they are in danger. finally it took them until 7:00 at night.

i'm curious with smallpox having been wiped out what is next on the horizon are we still on the 1% we've gotten 99. it's the closest we've gotten but it may take years. there may be viruses out there that is my guess.us >> it will be down to fewer than a hundred cases a year that they've been down below 300 cases for many years and problems keep popping up.

i asked him ten years ago and he said absolutely it's looking more dicey and he is aware of it. i'm hoping the money doesn't run out before polio is ended. >> what lessons can we learn to give us some encouragement we are not going to be talking about these outbreaks next year unless there's a second edition of your book in the works. >> i learned today i have ae. sponsor. i didn't know that. i gets to place all the time. i think we will be talking about it again. right now what stopped it and it could almost come back when i was a reporter of the police woulthe police wouldsay who wase

force,is jack frost because peoe both indoors and stop killing each other. jack frost is also the best author of mosquito borne diseases. we don't know how much herd immunity there is, probably more than a quarter got infected in the first wave and we don't know if you can get infected again. a lot have had zero cases because everybody got infected but in a lot of places including the united states there is no herd immunity. >> every expert i've talked to t will say the word flew in the first two sentences.

it's not if, but when. >> people don't take the flue d serious enough because the flu shot and it loses its credibility but when the 1918 events comes back which occurred at any time, people will be crying for a vaccine. >> i would like to offer the opportunity to ask questions here on either side of the center part. we will only be able to take questions if you step up to the microphones. please introduce yourself and direct your question specifically to one or both. >> why is there so much misinformation about vaccinations and what can be done to combat that

misinformation? >> i have absolutely no idea. it makes no sense whatsoever. ft the vaccine first was in 1769. we have proven that they've worked since 1769. so either the earth is flat or not. >> the vitamin industry is behind a lot of the sentiment. people have been pushing the idea. i saw this in south africa. a doctor basically said you don't need to take thoseeir pois antiretrovirals they are placing. they are poisoned but if you have aids the aids they are whag to save you. there was a vitamin salesman and a lot of the anti-vaccine sentiment is being pushed by people that have alternative cures or treatments so i find that pernicious. at the time we now treat vaccine denial lists with the same trade

as holocaust denials and people that believe the moon walk took place at a station in los angeles. we don't say on the other hand the vaccine information center says it doesn't work. there's no question they do have side effects and the need to be tested ferociously for safety but most of the routine vaccinea some do come up and some children do occasionally guide to go on the internet and look at old medical films of kidsdyin dying of tetanus or adult dying of tetanus you would see what the results would be. >> i'm studying to become an epidemiologist and i was wondering how difficult you found the balance in alertingng

about a disease outbreak versus inducing panic. >> usually it is in the second paragraph. and i would point out to you people that have the disease if your uncle was dying of cancer and you see a story about a study done on mice and austral australia. i see my job as trying to calm down the panic and try to also spread a little panic. the early days there was another example of trying to spread a

little panic. at the flu every year i keep an eye on the cbc and you can see the lines go up. every year they try to push the panic about it being a bad flufs season. i try not to keep writing to the ringing the alarm bells. sequenccessfully predicted early on 15 out o 15 of the last two s so he was really accurate on tos of the other 13 times i have to say i'm going to keep an eye on it i know it might go crazy but i'm watching it. >> do you remember the panic over swine flu, it never showed up.

>> truth of disclosure i had a maternal grandfather that was ar veteran in world war i and died of tuberculosis 14 years later. my question is the fact that edward jenner as you pointed out had already discovered the vaccine for smallpox, however it was very rare at the time and i don't know why if it disappeared but if it did, is that something we need to keep in mind and the other question i have is for all of you and i've been told if you have a disease called spanish flu you can be sure that it is not from spain but some other country and for the measles the last country you can blame as

germany city do you have any thoughts as for the sources? >> there's a reason it was called spanish flu but i can'tr remember what it was.'t >> there was no military censorship in spain if the it me been from fort riley kansas, but it devastated the armies of germany and england and france and the united states but there was a military censorship imposed. only when it got to spain it became known as the spanish flu. i don't know about german measles. >> i found out that the man i thought was my grandfather was my great uncle because myra grandfather died of the spanish flu and his brother married his

brother's wife. what happened in that case and other times of the past us without our modern medicine, communities do what they can to try to stop pandemics. there was a movie about six years ago called contagion but i thought was good in terms of everything that was on screen but i was disturbed by most of the stuff offscreen because they didn't have any recognition that there might be problems of getting food and that sort ofacs thing. i'm wondering if you can comment on what the past epidemics in previous times have done and what communities have done to try to stem epidemics when they didn't have our modern medicines. >> most of them used isolation.

they wouldn't let anybody in or anybody out. keep in mind most come in waves, they can't go an come and go ant the time. one wiped out half the population of europe and they would isolate the towns and villages. i want to point out there is no cure for smallpox or most viral diseases and if you can't smallpox now, which you won't there would be almost nothing they could do for you. comes the word quarantine is of italian. when boats came into the harbor they would have to sit there for 40 days on the assumption any disease would burn itself out.

now we have ways to make a vaccine. it's hard to impose a quarantine, people get over voters one way or another -- people get over borders one way or another. virtually no disease can be stopped by quarantine. i remember when the swine flu came out in 2009 i was thinking wait a minute the first outbreak was caused by a group ofhigh sco catholic school students who'd been to mexico on their spring break are we going to close the east river and let nobody leavea queens?? the flu is one of those things you can't stop by a quarantine and vaccines only work against viruses, not bacteri bacteria ie bubonic plague was a bacteria. i >> regrettably we are coming to

the end of our time. this is live television, i'm so sorry this isn't fun for me really but anyway, we do want to thank the authors for a rich discussion about these epidemics.me [applause] and i want to thank all of you for your support of the festival and complete forgets to become a friend to support programs in the community and remember donald will be about 20 minutes late due to a live interview. thank you for coming. >> is the seven a new dea