Learn from virologist Paul Duprex how vaccines in developing countries in places like Africa and southeast Asia actually make you safer, and how modern medicine could some day completely eliminate the measles. Duprex is the director of the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh and a professor of microbiology and cellular genetics. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer also discuss the following story from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Repeating a Word Until It Sounds Weird Is Called Semantic Satiation — https://curiosity.im/2tIFJUS Additional resources from Paul Duprex and the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research — http://cvr.pitt.edu/ Paul Duprex on Twitter — https://twitter.com/10queues @PittCVR on Twitter — https://twitter.com/PittCVR Measles: Why it’s so deadly, and why vaccination is so vital | The Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/measles-why-its-so-deadly-and-why-vaccination-is-so-vital/2019/02/15/a452e5c4-2fd0-11e9-8ad3-9a5b113ecd3c_story.html Research from Paul Duprex — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=duprex+wp%5Bauthor%5D Pitt Announces New Director of the Center for Vaccine Research — https://www.upmc.com/media/news/duprex-announcement If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn from virologist Paul Duprex how vaccines in developing countries in places like Africa and southeast Asia actually make you safer, and how modern medicine could some day completely eliminate the measles. Duprex is the director of the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh and a professor of microbiology and cellular genetics.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer also discuss the following story from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Repeating a Word Until It Sounds Weird Is Called Semantic Satiation — https://curiosity.im/2tIFJUS
Additional resources from Paul Duprex and the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/how-vaccines-in-africa-protect-everyone-in-the-world-w-paul-duprex-and-semantic-satiation
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn why repeating a word a bunch of times makes it sound weird. You'll also learn from virologist, Paul Duprex, how vaccines in developing countries like those in Africa and Southeast Asia actually make you safer wherever you live and how modern medicine could someday completely eliminate the measles.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Have you ever repeated the same word over and over again until it starts to sound like it's not even a word? Like it's just a noise, and it loses all its meaning? Well, there's a term for that, and scientists have actually figured out why it happens.
What you're dealing with is a thing called semantic satiation. The term was coined in a psychology student's doctoral thesis in 1962. And what's basically happening when a word stops making any sense is that your brain gets tired. The technical term is reactive inhibition.
When a brain cell fires, it takes more energy to fire the second time and more the third time. And finally, the fourth time, it won't even respond, unless you wait a few seconds. What's more, when you say or read a word, you're also recalling its meaning. That takes energy. And the more times you repeat a word, the more energy that takes.
So eventually, your brain starts resisting. It's basically like a muscle getting tired, to make a crude analogy. By the way, words with more associations like explosion will make your brain tired less quickly. You might get tired of it faster with a word like erudite.
Semantic satiation isn't necessarily a bad thing, by the way. Sometimes a songwriter will repeat a word over and over to trigger the effect on purpose. Hear the word baby enough times, and it becomes less of a word and more of a musical motif.
CODY GOUGH: I think I know the word that we all think of where this happens the most. Keep rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling. Limp Bizkit?
ASHLEY HAMER: What about in ain't no sunshine when she's gone? I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. I think it's like 10 times he does that.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
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CODY GOUGH: It feels like vaccines have been coming up in the news pretty much nonstop lately, right? I mean, there's a lot of really great research in the world of vaccines right now. Researchers are using genetic technologies to develop new vaccines that are useful all over the world. Not just here in the US, but in say, developing countries in Africa and Southeast Asia.
But do you ever hear that and wonder how a vaccine in Africa might actually affect you? Well, we found out that it does. And today, we have a special guest to take you beyond the clickbait headlines you see on the rest of the internet and dig into why you really should care about this medical technology.
Paul Duprex is the director of the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh and a professor of microbiology and cellular genetics. In this extended interview clip, he explains the concept called herd immunity and tells us why we should care about vaccines everywhere in the world.
PAUL DUPREX: Well, we care about it, because the number of people who move around the world at this moment in time is just phenomenal. If you ever look at some of those flight trackers and you see the number of planes in the sky above the city that you live in, people are moving around the world all the time.
How do viruses move around the world so effectively? Well, they, in fact-- a kid in India-- the kid in India gets on a plane. The kid flies from India to Chicago. The kid deeply ends in Chicago. He's in a gate for about 40 minutes or so, and then flies on to Florida.
And what was really interesting, because this is a true story. There was a businessman who left Minnesota, who also happened to be in the same gate as this kid who had flown from India. This businessman was on his way to Massachusetts.
The kid and the businessman met at the gate in Chicago O'Hare Airport for probably no more than 40 minutes. And because that person was not vaccinated, he-- because the child was infected with measles, he didn't have the antibodies, which meant he wasn't protected. And because measles is one of the most transmissible pathogens on the planet, he got infected.
But we only find out that he's infected after he goes to Massachusetts, after he comes back 7, 8, 9, 10 days after the infection. He starts to show the clinical signs of measles. And then we have to deal with the fact that measles is back in the US.
Why is measles back in the US? Well, because if a virus has a host and the host has a plane and the plane travels, so does the virus. The number of people in the world who were dying in the 1960s, '70s, '80s '90s is where you started at 500,000 individuals. It goes from 500,000.
In 1996, I think there was about 110,000 globally last year. And that is because of the implementation of this really, really efficacious, very, very useful vaccine. The really nice thing, which is useful for humanity as far as measles is concerned, is the virus can't hide out anywhere else. It really is exquisitively a disease of people.
So if we keep vaccinating people, and we keep vaccinating over 95% of the population, and we had 97% protection in those people. And it's a sort of a mathematical model. That says that we can stop the endemic transmission.
What's endemic transmission? Well, it's just breaking the transmission events within this country, which means we can essentially eliminate measles from the US. And the only way that measles can go back into the US is, as I just told you, is imported cases.
So if those imported cases can make people who are unvaccinated very, very rarely, because everybody gets vaccinated here, the likelihood of triggering these outbreaks is really going to be very, very slow. But because people forget, people forget what these diseases do, people forget that measles kills one in 1,000 children.
Even in this part of the world that the virus has this propensity to infect the brain, that the virus is so so immunosuppressive. What's immunosuppressive? It basically hammers the immune system, so so hard that kids in Africa who get this measles infection are so so immune suppressed. Bacterial infections cause pneumonias, and that's what kills the kids in Africa.
So whenever you realize what that virus does, whenever you think about blindness and all of the other complications associated with it, I think it's a very, very straightforward argument that vaccination is a good thing for our society.
CODY GOUGH: One of our listeners, Luke, on Discord actually asked-- He's a friend of ours down in Australia, by the way. Luke wants to know, how can I explain how herd immunity works in a basic way?
I know you gave us a really great detailed the answer, but I mean, is there like a two to three sentence quick jab you can give somebody as an elevator pitch? If you're at a party and they say, I don't understand why vaccines are so important.
PAUL DUPREX: Herd immunity is really important, because not everyone can be vaccinated. Therefore, the more people we vaccinate, the lower likelihood that the virus will find someone who isn't and cause an outbreak.
So it's basically like putting up more and more and more barriers to stop the virus jumping from one person to the other. Because measles is the most transmissible human virus on the planet. And that's why we have to vaccinate. That's why herd immunity, we have to vaccinate lots of the herd, lots of us. Because it's so so infectious.
If the virus is not as infectious, we don't have to vaccinate as many of the herd. And then it just becomes a numbers game. Herd immunity, it's a numbers game.
ASHLEY HAMER: Herd immunity, it's a numbers game. Paul Duprex is the director of the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh and a professor of microbiology and cellular genetics. You can find links to his organization's latest research, social media accounts and more in today's show notes.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
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