Around The World In 7 Diseases

Biologist here: Bats don't carry these viruses because they're particularly unclean or anything like that. They actually transmit them because they often have exceptional immune systems that can keep them alive even though they're infected, which unfortunately gives more opportunities for a virus to spread.

"Bat infested cave" feels unfair to the bats, they're just chilling in their home

"Ebola's bigger, meaner cousin" Now there is something to induce nightmares ...

Welp, there goes my plan for a global chain of exotic bat petting zoos. Thanks alot SciShow!

Poor Savannah was so grossed out by the whole Guinea worm thing and I am right there with them.

CJD is tragic. My girlfriend’s uncle suddenly went blind completely out of the blue one day, and literally 14 days later, he was dead. The day before he died, he was diagnosed with CJD, and passed not even 24 hours later. In that time he developed dementia at such a scary rate, I think it was after a week he no longer recognised my girlfriend (his niece, obviously.) It was completely unexpected, and just as tragic. No one is sure where or when he got it, but I think there were assumptions it was several decades ago, so it was a case of a very long dormancy period.

I'm an Aussie, and used to rescue flying foxes (fruit bats) from barbed wire fences etc. I never acquired Lyssavirus, even though I received a few scratches and bites over the years. I started wearing gloves after the virus was discovered, and the source was ascertained.

Reference lab worker here. We get a CJD sample weekly. Typically a rule out, but they have been positive. We double glove and double bag those ones. Stay safe folks.

I was momentarily distracted but soon as she said “John Green” I immediately knew they were saying something about tuberculosis.

My dad nearly died from Rocky Mountain Spotted Tick Fever around 35 years ago. He initially spent a week in the hospital. It caused permanent damage to his liver which later caused additional hospitalizations years after the fact.

Please don't hate on bats, its not their fault and we need them more than they need us.

Australian here. Gotta say, bats are the LEAST of our concerns. They don’t ambush you on the toilet seat, they don’t jump out at you, they don’t… It’s easy to leave bats alone, and they return the favour. I’ve been below a swarm of bats at night. Amazing experience. And, by the amazing dexterous ability of NOT interfering with them in any way and staying on the ground, I had no problems.

Now for around the world in 81 diseases.

Do tick checks and tuck pants in socks. Check! Don’t touch bats. Check! Boil your water. Check! Don’t eat British beef. Check! Don’t go out in a dust storm. Check! I feel safer already.😂

"Bat-infested caves"? No way, they live there! Those are human-infested caves.

"Take a hike, guinea worms!" That seemed heartfelt🤣

Valley Fever is endemic in the San Joaquin Valley of California. I know several people who were infected and one landmark, Shark Tooth Hill, has been closed for decades.

I use to do BSE testing. Prions diseases are scary stuff!

"Fun" fact about variant CJD: the outbreak was largely caused by, what else, crappy UK food safety and animal welfare regulations! The huge BSE outbreak in the 80s and 90s was traced back to the delightful British farming practice of... feeding cows with (amongst other things) ground up dead cows (it's literally called "Meat and Bone Meal", or MBM) to try and improve milk yields. It worked (basically by increasing the amino acid intake of cows)... but caused a huge BSE epidemic in the UK, which is largely how it was localised here and why all the vCJD cases are clustered strongly around the UK. Turns out, if you get one case of BSE, and then casually grind that cow up and feed it to the rest of your cows, then congrats: the rest of your cows all have misfolded proteins (i.e. BSE) now, too! Thankfully feeding ruminants MBM is banned basically worldwide now, although apparently it's still used in monogastric animal feed? I still remember as a super young kid growing up in the very late 90s and early 2000s occasionally seeing like,,, troughs of disinfectant that you had to walk through to get to various places, to avoid the spread of "mad cow disease" on your shoes or w/e (EDIT/CORRECTION: it's been pointed out that I was mixing mad cow disease up with the foot and mouth disease outbreak which happened in 2001, my bad! Although tbf I was like... barely more than a toddler at the time lol. thanks to @WingedAsarath for pointing that out!). Once the link was made to feeding cows MBMs, you can imagine how many headlines along the lines of "Soylent Beef" got run in various newspapers :P

Once again, New Zealand is left off the map (0:17). 😂😂 We are real, we do exis