9min chapter

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Immunizing Against Anti-Science with Peter Hotez

StarTalk Radio

CHAPTER

Anti-Science in the Medical Community

Exploring public skepticism towards the medical community, this chapter focuses on forgotten diseases, their impact on global health, and efforts to develop vaccines and prevent the spread of tropical parasitic infections in regions affected by climate change, urbanization, and poverty.

00:00
Speaker 2
Everybody's
Speaker 3
got an Emmy, but a Peabody. That's the one where people go, oh, you read a book. Oh, no.
Speaker 2
You still work and perform regularly with
Speaker 3
Stephen Colbert on the late show? Yeah, we go back to the Daily Show together. I was one of the original writers and performers on The Daily Show.
Speaker 2
Really good to hear that. And occasionally when I'm on Stephen Colbert, I bump into you and it's always good to see you. Yeah, it's great. And you always, Stephen loves having you on. Oh, he knows
Speaker 3
I'm serious because in reversal, it'll be like, who's the guest? And sometimes I'll be like, and I was like, Neil, oh, great, because you never shut up. So he doesn't have to do anything.
Speaker 2
Yeah, but it is. I make his job easier. Okay. Yeah, it's great to have you on. Yeah. So today is a very important topic, something that's centered piece to so much of what I do and what I care about. It's anti-science in the medical community and that is anti-science as expressed by the public about the medical community, but also forgotten diseases with Peter Hotez. Peter Hotez, welcome to StarTalk.
Speaker 1
Thank you, Neil. I'm a huge fan and of both of you and I'm thrilled to be here. It's a very exciting form. Excellent. And I'm impressed to heck out of all my kids. Okay. That was the most important thing. They're the toughest crowd of all. Anything out of them? The most important.
Speaker 2
The kids are the toughest doing process. If we can boost the domestic front, we're all in on that. So you're a pediatrician and you're dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine. That's actually a thing that's a place at Baylor College, a professor of pediatrics and molecular biology at Baylor, and you're a fellow in disease and poverty. Gosh, James Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Speaker 3
Peter, you need to work harder. I don't know
Speaker 2
what's going on with you. If I were religious, I'd have to say God puts you on this earth to do good. Okay. But I'm not religious. So I don't know how to say that then. The author of several books, Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases, The Neglected Tropical Diseases, and Their Impact on Global Health and Environment. That was back in 2008.
Speaker 1
Yeah, my kid used to call it death's forgotten book on forgotten people. Okay.
Speaker 2
But it's
Speaker 1
gone into the third edition. So I think I've proved it was somewhat
Speaker 2
wrong. Very good. Very good. And another one, The Deadly Rise of Antiscience, a scientist warning. Oof. What year did that come out?
Speaker 1
Well, you know, I'd written this book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism in 2018. And this new
Speaker 2
one. Rachel is your daughter.
Speaker 1
Rachel is your daughter. Yeah. And then the new one is called The Deadly Rise of Andy Science. It talks about how the anti-vaccine movement has transitioned over to more of a political enterprise. And so I want to describe that change.
Speaker 2
Excellent. And so that's out already. Is that correct? That's correct. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. We'll look for that then. Thank you. And you were interviewed persistently as COVID was on COVID-19 was on the rise and trying to educate and try to disassemble the misinformation that was sweeping the world. And especially misinformation, not only regarding the virus, but the vaccines to prevent it. So could you just tell me, let's back up. Tell me about Forgotten Diseases and why that matters. If they're forgotten and no one thinks about them. Yeah. Or they're forgotten. They're still out there. We just forgot to think about them. Is
Speaker 1
that it? Most of my people know me for COVID and we've made two COVID vaccine technologies reached 100 million people in India and Indonesia. But our OG vaccines are vaccines for parasitic infections. And that's been my first passion is making vaccines for tropical parasitic infections, affecting the world's poorest people on the African continent, Latin America, in Southeast Asia. So forgotten people, forgotten diseases, describes that whole ecosystem of what I call the most important diseases you've never heard of. They're the diseases such as human hookworm infection and schistosomiasis and chagas disease, lymphatic filariasis and river blindness. They're incredibly common. It's just that they only occur among people who live in extreme poverty. So we've been one of the things we do here in the Texas Medical Center is to find a way to make innovations for the world's poorest people that the pharma companies would not ordinarily be interested. So
Speaker 2
if these diseases were hitting Europe and the United States, there'd be a trillion dollars invested in it.
Speaker 1
Well, that's what I would often think. But one of the things that we're finding now, and one of the reasons we created our National School of Tropical Medicine here in the Texas Medical Center, was because of a lot of 21st century forces like global warming, climate change, urbanization, remaining poverty, we're actually now starting to see some of those same diseases pop up here in Texas on the Gulf Coast, as well as in Southern Europe. What's interesting, Neil, is that's one of the hardest advocacy jobs I've ever had, is getting people to understand that these tropical diseases are now arising here on the Gulf Coast. And not because necessarily of immigration or across the southern border is a lot of people want to say, but in fact, because of climate change and because of poverty and urbanization. And the way I illustrate that is we have 10% of the dogs here in Texas with Shagas disease. And it's not because the dogs are slipping across the border from El Salvador, right? That we've got transmission of these diseases here. And we're finding Shagas disease transmission here in the United States, as well as of some of the others. But it's very tough to get people to understand that we have an vulnerability here.
Speaker 3
We need some kind of a reality show, kind of like the voice for
Speaker 2
these obscure diseases here in America, so that then people become aware of them through like watching television or something like that. Oh, yeah, tactical measures there. So at the risk of stating the obvious here, what you're saying is as climate warms, changes and includes warming trends at latitudes that previously did not experience such warming, the diseases that previously had been constrained to the tropics are now spilling into other latitudes on Earth, presumably North and South. And so this is a spread that has been empowered by climate change.
Speaker 1
That's a well, climate change. But one of the things that I found in my writings is that it's not only climate change. It's climate change is working in concert with other social determinants, such as urbanization. That's a big one, right? Because 80s of gyptimusquitoes that transmit yellow fever or Zika virus infection or dengue live in the discarded tires that are in urban neighborhoods. So if you go into poor neighborhoods in and around Houston, where you see all the tire dumping, that's actually a risk factor together with with what
Speaker 2
I have to interject. It's not that the mosquitoes like rubber. No, it's a very fascinating fact. I'll explain. So Paul, I don't know if you knew the shape of a discarded tire is ideal to trap water inside of it, no matter how you orient the tire. So this water inside just sip pooling there. If you pick up the tire and roll it, the water just stays in there. If you tip it sideways, it curls around the edge and pulls at the bottom. So you actually have to like shake it and dehydrate it. And so so it's weird, Peter, is that this could be a major vector for mosquitoes, just discarded tires. That's a weird crazy
Speaker 1
fact about our survey. So that little vignette you just gave is exactly what I said to our mayor of Houston at the time, Air Sylvester Turner, extraordinary guy, Harvard Law graduate, and convinced him that we had to get rid of all the tire dumping in the low income neighborhoods in Houston. And and so while South Texas had Zika virus transmission in 2016, we did not have that Houston. Now whether was in spite of what we did or because of it, we'll never know. I'll take credit for it in any way.

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