Nathan Wolfe's jungle search for viruses.

About this talk

Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering deadly new viruses where they first emerge -- passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa -- before they claim millions of lives.

Summary:

                Today video’s title will be ‘’Nathan Wolfe's jungle search for viruses’’, which is a presentation made by Nathan Wolfe in TED Talks. The overall idea of this talk is about the process where dangerous viruses such as HIV or AIDS jumping from animals to humans and spread all over the world.  In this presentation, Nathan Wolfe mentions about AIDS and the viruses cause it, which were discovered in the 1980s. However, the fact is that those viruses had been affected to human many decades before 1980s. Those viruses jumping to humans were originally from chimpanzees hunted by people. After that, Nathan presents 2 questions: 1. Why did it take us so long to discover those viruses which might have originated to humans before? 2. What happened in the years when those viruses affected to humans? To answer for those questions, Nathan has worked on African countries more specifically in African rural villages. At these villages, villagers usually go hunting in forests and that is the case when viruses can jump to human from hunted animals. When people hunt wild animals like chimpanzees, they may get blood contact with the animals. Therefore, Nathan Wolfe and his team collected blood specimens from the villagers and from the animals they had hunted. Then, Nathan checked and compared the viruses found in the blood from the villagers and the animals. Thus, it will provide for Nathan and his team useful information about how those viruses spread to the populations and ways to identifying which viruses come from which animals. The most important things about Nathan’s work is to advise and help the people in those areas realized the potential risk of hunting wild and get infected with viruses.Until today, Nathan has spent over 10 years at sites on Africa and Asia countries to help the people there to narrow the chances of infecting by viruses from animals. He hope in the future, the sites will expand more so that there will be a wider net over the world.

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Response:

Nathan Wolfe’s work is very confidential and practical. As you know, HIV or AIDS is one of the most dangerous diseases the world. There have been lots of people dying due to HIV and there are no medicine can get rid of it completely at the present. Moreover, HIV was not widely known until few decades ago when it rapidly spread in human’s population.  I had read an article before that: the carriers of HIV were sailors since when they traveled to faraway area, islands and returned to homeland with HIV germs. The people in Africa rural villages hunting viral infected animals , who are referred in the video is one possible source of the viruses. However, who can blame them for that? They do that because of their situation, they have to feed their families. Therefore, Nathan Wolfe and his team are doing a brilliant job there by informing to those people the risks they may possibly get. It will lower the chances the viruses spreading to other parts of the world. In conclusion, I really appreciate the devotion of Nathan Wolfe to this project for a long 10 years. It does not only help the people in those rural areas but also help other people in the world have healthier lives.

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