Unseen Enemy

CBR900RR

Hello, good morning. This is "Breakfast..."

CR900RR

Thanks for joining us, everyone.

I'm Zoraida Sambolin. It is 5:00 a.m. here in the east...

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to "Early Start"...

[overlapping voices in various languages]

The Centers for Disease Control today issued a health warning

following a worldwide outbreak of a mysterious form of pneumonia.

The highly contagious virus SARS killed nearly 300 people...

8,500 people around the world have come down with SARS.

I feel very worried.

I feel anxious for the health of the masses.

The World Health Organization

has declared a swine flu pandemic.

...spread of the H1N1 swine flu.

The outbreak has spread widely and cannot be contained.

Woman: I don't think we can contain the spread of this virus...

Influenza pandemics must be taken seriously.

A big outbreak

of a deadly Ebola virus has killed more than...

The Ebola outbreak that started

in the West African country of Guinea has now spread.

Our people know nothing. There is no cure.

Man: They don't have the resources to actually contain...

Male anchor: Governments around the world are considering new measures...

Woman: I'm calling from the New York City Health Department...

...your temperature reading from last night.

The U. S. Department of Agriculture

confirmed another case of bird flu.

One and a half million state turkeys

have been killed to prevent the spread of...

Woman: It is really critical that they control this...

Man: We have to respond to the challenge.

Female anchor: Three latest victims

of the new respiratory virus called MERS

have come from Middle Eastern countries.

They believe it originated in bats or camels.

Man: It causes pneumonia and rapid kidney failure.

As the Zika virus continues

to infect people across the globe...

The outbreak started in Brazil,

a suspected link to severe birth defects.

Zika typically is transmitted through mosquitoes.

Man: When the weather starts to warm up,

more of those mosquitoes could start coming north...

Barack Obama: Because I believe there is such a thing as being too late.

- Jeffrey Wright: Our home. -

You can almost hear the biological chatter.

Wright: Just when technology and science were supposed to make us safer,

we suddenly seem more vulnerable to outbreaks.

Dr. Peter Piot: Whether we like it or not,

our world is globalizing evermore.

And that's not only true for markets and for production,

but it's also true for behaviors, for diseases.

So we're more vulnerable because of our mobility.

Secondly, we are far more people,

and we are also living more and more in very crowded cities.

That's fantastic from the perspective of a virus,

because in no time,

it can infect hundreds of thousands of people.

Dr. Larry Brilliant: Over the last three decades, there have been

about 30 newly emerging diseases

that have the potential to be pandemics.

If we do nothing--

it's not a matter of "if" there will be a global pandemic.

It's just a matter of when

and which virus and how bad.

Wright: The world changes around us at increasing speed.

We cause a lot of that change

migrating to cities,

stripping the Earth of its resources,

and altering primeval jungle.

Laurie Garrett: We are seeing whole, entire ecologies

that which you can see with your eye

and that which you can only see with a microscope,

one system after another, completely reshaped.

Is there a sense...

In every case,

this affords opportunities for viruses and bacteria

to seek out new homes, cause new havoc,

including disease for human beings.

Wright: When contagion happens, life alters in an instant.

We don't feel safe. We lose trust.

- -

Peter Sands: Fear spreads very quickly

when you have an infectious disease outbreak.

Communication is so much more pervasive.

People know what's happening in another part of the world

so much more quickly, so much more vividly than ever before.

So the contagion of fear moves faster

than the contagion of the pathogen, the disease itself,

and the fabric of society starts to deteriorate.

Brilliant: There's something that destroys the soul of a community...

that happens when an epidemic is out of control.

It's not just the large number of casualties and the deaths,

which are itself unthinkable,

but it's what it does to a--

the social fabric of a community or a nation.

Dr. Soka Moses:

Ah?

Hmm?

[Man speaking over P.A.]

Man: Ebola is transmitted through bodily fluids--

saliva, blood, urine, feces.

This is an invisible foe.

Wright: Ebola first surfaced in West Africa

in a remote rural community.

But in our increasingly connected world,

this Ebola outbreak didn't stay in the countryside.

The virus quickly found its way to the region's largest cities

and health systems that were completely unprepared.

Moses:

[woman leading prayer in native language]

Moses:

Piot: I think we all underestimated,

absolutely everybody.

I know that one case of Ebola is an emergency.

Every new case can give rise to more cases.

So it's really act now or pay later.

Christiane Amanpour: Right now, the World Health Organization and other doctors

are saying it is out of control in this area of West Africa.

It's the worst outbreak ever that they've recorded in this part of the world.

It's unprecedented for several reasons.

One, first time in West Africa that we have such an outbreak.

Secondly, this is the first time that three countries are involved.

And thirdly, it's the first time that we have outbreaks

in capitals, in capital cities.

This could explode into a really mega-crisis.

I think so, and it is already a mega-crisis...

I really thought, how can this epidemic be controlled the usual way

when there are so many outbreaks in different places?

Piot: The three countries in West Africa

that are affected by the Ebola outbreak

have some of the worst health indicators in the world.

There are not enough doctors.

There are not enough nurses.

It is a system that is understaffed, underfunded,

and where the infrastructure is very, very old.

Let's go back to 1976 when you were a younger man,

and you actually codiscovered this virus.

- It was in Zaire. - Piot: Yes.

Amanpour: Now the Democratic Republic of the Congo...

Piot: And they said that there was a mysterious epidemic.

This was very lethal, high mortality.

There were nuns who had died.

A small group would go to the mission

where the epidemic had started, apparently.

They asked for volunteers, and I think I was

about the first one to raise my hand...

although I had absolutely zero experience

in doing this.

Our mission was to-- one, to put in place

some basic measures to contain it

and using quarantine.

That's what we thought.

And two, to find out how is this transmitted?

Because that's the key to stop epidemics--

to know exactly what the risk is.

How is it transmitted?

It's really a detective work.

So we tested whole villages,

talked to the population,

and then have a very primitive questionnaire.

How old, where have they been, have they traveled?

And what we found was that there were very few survivors.

Very few, and that indeed

the what we call "case fatality rate"

was over 90 %.

Nearly all new viruses come from animals.

I mean, we are also an animal.

We are, you know, human primates.

So, during the outbreak, we started collecting samples

from all kinds of animals.

I even took blood from pigs

because a number of pigs had died

at the beginning of the epidemic,

so we said, "You never know."

But we didn't find any trace of Ebola.

My boss at the time, Stefaan Pattyn,

had always told me, "Watch out for the bats."

And it became a bit of a joke.

But the old man was right

because the only reservoir

that we think where Ebola is hiding

are some kind of fruit-eating bats.

Dr. George Gao:

Garrett: If we look around the world,

we can see that bat populations

are being severely stressed by climate change.

Some of them because they live

in the upper tiers of rainforests

and feed on wild fruit.

But the upper tiers of the rainforests

are getting the most impact of this heat increase

and increased UV radiation.

Add to that that humans are encroaching into the rainforest,

into bat habitats, precious caves.

They're very shy creatures.

They do not seek you out,