Early Disease Warning Symptoms with Dr. Steven Morse

Welcome to another episode of "What is global Health". In this podcast, we will chat with Dr.
Steven Morse, professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. His research
focuses on the risk assessment of infectious diseases and methods of improving early disease
Warning Systems. He coined the term emerging viruses for his book emerging viruses, which
was selected by American scientist fourth list of 100 top science books of the 20th century. Dr.
Morris health faculty and Leadership positions at Rockefeller University the NIH and National
Security and biomedical policy committees. Today's talk will focus on how viral infections
originate and spread, what are preventative policies to control epidemics, and the 2019 novel
coronavirus epidemic. [...]

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Dr. Stephen Morse podcast interview transcript (via “Vocalmatic”)

[0:00:00-0:00:52]

Welcome to another episode of “What is global Health”. In this podcast, we will chat with Dr.

Steven Morse, professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. His research

focuses on the risk assessment of infectious diseases and methods of improving early disease

Warning Systems. He coined the term emerging viruses for his book emerging viruses, which

was selected by American scientist fourth list of 100 top science books of the 20th century. Dr.

Morris health faculty and Leadership positions at Rockefeller University the NIH and National

Security and biomedical policy committees. Today’s talk will focus on how viral infections

originate and spread, what are preventative policies to control epidemics, and the 2019 novel

coronavirus epidemic.

[0:00:53-0:01:42]

So can you explain for viewers unfamiliar with your work, what’s the concept of emerging

viruses? Emerging viruses are those viruses that appear like The Andromeda Strain that

seemed to come out of nowhere and of course, you know, it took a while to solve that mystery

to some degree. But more officially, there is a more formal definition: an emerging infection is

now one that is rapidly spreading in number of cases, incidence, or geographic range and that

has not been seen at least for a long time and those that have been known before and perhaps

due to lapses in

[0:01:43-0:01:55]

control measures like immunization or mosquito control which become victims of their own

success. Many people tend to call those, as I do, “re-emerging infections”.

[0:01:56-0:02:55]

But the first time we saw SARS coronavirus, for example, that was an emerging infection. It was

seemed to be novel and indeed it was to the human population and was spreading both

geographically in a number of cases. Can you give a quick rundown on how these viruses are

spread? So between humans, and between animals and humans? Actually initially I was trained

as a microbiologist and I was a lab virologist. And most of us microbiologists thought that these

emerging factions were really especially the viruses which are known to mutate very rapidly

really coming from the rapid mutation of the viruses and that sometimes happens. But as I

started to look into this, I was very surprised actually back in the ancient days of the last

century, 1988, I was very surprised to

[0:02:56-0:03:58]

find out as I think a lot of people knew, but no one had really compare their notes, that many of

these emerging infections that seem novel in the human population are zoonotic. They’re

coming to us from other species usually other vertebrates and often other mammals. That

seems very mundane, but in fact it’s not because there’s a great variety of viruses and other

microbes that are out there in the great diversity of life and some of them are unfamiliar to us.

We’ve never seen them. So the changes we make in the environment and social and ecological

changes have a lot to do with precipitating the transfer, or some people like to say, “jumping,”

species from a natural host caring a particular infection that we haven’t seen before to infect

humans, perhaps for the first time.

[0:03:58-0:04:56]

Related to that topic, it is well known that viruses and bacteria mutate. Can you explain a little

bit how this process occurs, and what causes them to mutate and infect people? Well, when

they infect people, usually what we see, is that they’re usually quite similar to the ones that

already exist in other species and in nature. And they get an opportunity to infect people. And

many of them, you know, really don’t infect people and we may never see them, but there are

some that are successful. So we know that bats, for example, harbor of large diversity of

coronaviruses. Coronaviruses have now become famous because of SARS in 2003, and now

the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, which was first identified in 2012, and now at this very

moment.

[0:04:56-0:05:55]

We have another coronavirus that looks very much like SARS except, unlike SARS, which

spread almost completely through the healthcare setting, essentially through lapses in infection

control which shows you that nobody can do this perfectly. It’s really hard to do this perfectly

because they had, even in Toronto, had a problem with SARS, when someone who came from

Hong Kong picked it up there and then went back home to Toronto. And within the hospital

setting, you know, it began to just spread to healthcare workers and others. But in terms of

mutation, we know that mutation gives us the vast biodiversity