- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for the Division of Extension
and Wisconsin 4-H.
And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers,
PBS Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce
to you Tony Goldberg of the School of Veterinary Medicine.
He was born in New York City in Manhattan.
He went to high school at the Westhill High School
in Stamford, Connecticut and then he studied biology
and English at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
He got his PhD at Harvard in physical anthropology.
And then went to the University of Illinois
in Champaign-Urbana to get his DV,
Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine
and his master's degree in epidemiology.
Tonight, he's here to talk with us
about something quite germane,
given the coronavirus outbreak.
The title of his talk is
"Discovering New Pathogens in Wildlife
"from Wisconsin and Beyond."
Please join me in welcoming Tony Goldberg
to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
[audience applauding]
- Well, thanks very much Tom for the invitation
and to everyone for coming tonight.
Back when many of us were younger,
our relationship with nature was quite different
from it is today.
It was an enchanted kingdom of sorts,
but clearly that's changed.
[audience laughing]
We live in a different world,
a world in which our relationship
to nature is more microbial than magical.
This New York Times Magazine illustration shows us connected
to the natural world through a highway of deadly pathogens.
So it is indeed timely that I'm giving this talk today
because we are in the middle of yet another pandemic.
This one caused by a novel coronavirus from Wuhan, China.
This phenomenon really is new to science in a way.
When I was doing my graduate studies,
this idea of emerging infectious disease
really was not on the scene.
This is a graph of the frequency of that phrase
in the medical literature by year since 1980,
and you could see it didn't really even figure
in to science before the early 1990s.
And then it sort of has taken off in this upward trend.
I was doing my graduate work then,
and I am pretty sure this can be attributed
to the remarkable story of the origins of AIDS.
That in the early 1990s, we discovered that AIDS was a virus
that originated from chimpanzees in Central Africa,
and really that decade between the early '90s
and the early 2000s filled in the elements of that story
so that to me, the HIV pandemic
is the mother of all pandemics,
and the mother of all diseases of zoonotic origin.
So chimps, very important.
And that's why, even though this is a talk about Wisconsin,
I'd like to start in Africa, where I've done work
for many years, including during my PhD years
in a national park in Uganda called Kibale,
which is famous for its primates.
And most notably its chimpanzees,
as shown by these lovely photographs
by my colleague Ronan Donovan.
The chimps of Kibale are famous and have been studied
almost as long as the chimpanzees
at Jane Goodall's site at Gombe.
And they're wonderful creatures, but they suffer problems.
We recently did an analysis of causes of death
over the decades of this chimpanzee population
and found that respiratory disease,
which was a little surprising to us, accounted for over half
of the documented deaths during the time
that we've been able to follow these chimps daily.
And this came home to me in 2013
when I was there during a remarkable epidemic
of deadly respiratory disease,
where we lost 5 of the 50 chimps
in the community shown here.
And I'd known many of these chimps my whole career,
like Stout, for example, charged me
when I was a graduate student, and I'll never forgive him
for that, but I still miss him.
The course of the epidemic was this.
There were three waves beginning in about February of 2013
and ending in about September.
And being there, it was very scary
because when chimpanzees are coughing and sneezing
and dying, you're not sure what's killing them.
So in situations like that, you have to be very careful
about wearing personal protective gear,
sort of the moon suits.
This is, again, me looking like a superhero
thanks to Ronan's fabulous photography,
but you have to be very careful.
So we're investigating this outbreak,
collecting biological samples for analysis back in the lab.
So what do you do if you don't know
what's killing wildlife?
It turns out that many years ago,
there wasn't much you could do.
There were traditional diagnostics.
You could say well, maybe it's this bacteria,
and maybe it's this virus,
and you'd send the sample off to a lab,
and you'd get a yes or no answer back.
These days, things have really changed,
and that's gonna be a theme
that goes throughout this talk.
Namely, we can rely on techniques now
that are broadly known as metagenomic techniques
as shown in that figure.
Basically, we can take our chicken
or rat or human or swabs from a sick chimpanzee
and randomly sequence millions upon millions of molecules
of DNA or RNA in those samples,
and then feed all those sequences into a computer
that will tell us what's there.
Most of it will be your salamander or your person
or your chimp, but hiding in there,
kind of the proverbial needle in a haystack,
will be the thing you're looking for,
and you don't have to have
any prior knowledge of what it is.
So these techniques are sometimes called agnostic
or unbiased, and they're very powerful.
They're the future of infectious disease diagnostics.
So we did this.
This is something that at the time,
I had just begun to do in my lab.
Now we do it routinely.
And out popped a remarkable answer.
It turns out that these chimpanzees had been dying
of a human pediatric virus called rhinovirus C.
Rhinovirus C is the most common cause
of the common cold in people worldwide.
And this is a great story about UW-Madison
because as soon as I realized what the culprit was,
I only had to glance out my window down the street
to realize that Ann Palmenberg,
the world expert in rhinovirus C,
was right there within walking distance.
So I jogged over to her office.
That's the kind of place this is.
It turns out what these chimps had,
and this particular isolate was from Betty,
was a very typical C45 strain of this virus.
The bottom line is there was nothing special about it.
It wasn't a mutated chimp version of the virus.
It wasn't some strange out of nowhere virus.
It's just the sort of thing that you would find circulating
in kids in the hospitals here
in Wisconsin during cold season.
So why in the world was this happening?
Again, due to the expertise of my collaborators,
like Ann Palmenberg and Jim Gern
in the pediatrics department, we happen to know quite a bit
about how this virus latches on to hosts.
This is actually an atomic structure,
that's how detailed we can get these days,
of the binding complex of rhinovirus C
and its host cell receptor.
And I don't understand this either,
but what I do know is that we know the receptor quite well.
It's called CDHR3, and what we know about this receptor
is that it's critical for human health.
There are two versions of it.
The most common version actually resists infection
with rhinovirus C and other infectious agents in people,
but if you have this rare version,
if you're a person, called the risk allele
with a single amino acid change
at a single position of the protein,
you're highly susceptible to rhinovirus C infection,
and interestingly, you have a 10-fold increased risk
of having asthma.
So if anyone's ever done 23andMe,
it's one of the most informative loci in 23andMe
because most people who have asthma will realize
they have this variant CDHR3 locus, allele rather.
So what we did is we genotyped the chimps
at this field site in Uganda
and we looked at chimpanzee genomes
from across Africa, and we found that every single one
of those chimps had the allele of this gene
that makes people highly susceptible
to the virus and highly susceptible to asthma.
The basic idea here is that we have evolved
with viruses like rhinovirus C
and we have adapted to them, genetically in this case
whereas chimps have not.
They've only recently been exposed
to these common cold pediatric viruses of people,
and they're exquisitely susceptible.
So all chimpanzees everywhere are genetically susceptible
to rhinovirus C infection, and as it turns out,
to a suite of other human respiratory pathogens.
This concept is actually called reverse zoonoses.
I think most people here have heard of zoonoses,
diseases that go from animals to people,
but it's not as well-known that there are plenty of diseases
that go from people to animals,
and they present a global threat
to domestic animals and wildlife,
and there have been a few papers written about this.
I wish I had more time to tell you all the interesting facts
about this particular outbreak,
but one thing I can't really tell you yet
is how this happens.
We don't know exactly how these viruses get
from people to chimps.
There are plausible mechanisms.
There are tourists who visit these sites,
people like me, people in local villages.
Chimps will sometimes leave the forest to go raid crops
and they'll come into close contact
with people and the places where they live.
So there's all these different possible ways
and we're looking at that now,
but I wanted to start the talk
with this story to kind of reinforce the idea
that infectious diseases don't care
which direction they go in.
We're concerned about human health because we're humans,
but they're just as happy to go in the other direction.
And they're just as happy to go
to other places, like Wisconsin.
So this is a group of nine photos
that the USGS puts out on emerging diseases in wildlife,
and we have six of the nine in our state.
So we are not by any means shielded from this phenomenon.
I think a lot of people in Wisconsin are aware
of a few of them.
The two big ones being Lyme disease
and chronic wasting disease.
So Lyme disease, of course, is a huge problem here.
We're a real epicenter for Borrelia burgdorferi,
the bacterium that causes Lyme disease
that is transmitted by ticks,
and in fact, we have a Midwest Center of Excellence
in Vector-Borne Disease here, funded by the CDC,
that specializes in Lyme disease.
Chronic wasting disease, we don't know if it's zoonotic yet,
but it certainly is emerging, and we're certainly aware
of the spread of chronic wasting disease
among the deer herd of Wisconsin.
It's also a disease of major concern,
but these two diseases that get a lot of popular press
are not the only ones in Wisconsin.
So I wanna go through a few other ones
that you may not have heard of, starting
with a disease of fish.
One of the reasons I moved to Wisconsin
was because I like to fish.
So when this disease popped on to the scene,
I became very interested in studying it.
It's called viral hemorrhagic septicemia,
and it's actually caused by an invasive species,
an invasive virus.
If you do go fishing, you might see these signs posted
at the rivers that the DNR puts out
to inform people about it.
But it started out as a disease
that was popping up in association with fish kills
in Lake Michigan and Lake Winnebago
in the early 2000s, and this was a big issue
because fishing is a huge industry in Wisconsin.
It's responsible for $2.3 billion
of annual economic impact,
and we are third behind Florida and Michigan
in the number of nonresident anglers
who buy fishing licenses in the United States.
So that's everybody from Chicago coming up
in the summer on the weekends.
And we catch and keep a lot of fish.
And this virus came in 2003 to the Great Lakes region
and started causing massive fish kills
in a number of fish species,
and it turned into a major regulatory issue.
It shut down, for a while,
the interstate transport of bait fish.
So there is a thriving bait fish industry in Wisconsin
and surrounding states, and USDA came down
and shut that down.
Believe it or not, it's related to rabies virus.
So fish get rabies-like viruses too.
Rhabdoviruses are all over the place.
And it causes this hemorrhagic disease
and massive fish kill.
So some people in my lab joke
that we should be calling it Fishbola.
[audience laughing] It's like that.
The first thing we did with this virus,
that's me trying not to get seasick on Lake Winnebago,
was to develop a new test for the virus
because before we did this, it was impossible to test
for this virus without killing the fish.
We developed a blood test that you can take a blood sample
and then test it for antibodies.
And what was interesting is
when we applied this test to Lake Winnebago,
sort of the ground zero
of viral hemorrhagic septicemia in Wisconsin,
we were able to show that the virus persisted
even when there were no fish kills,
that it sort of hung out at low levels
in the lake from year to year,
even when we were seeing nothing on the surface of the water.
Now, you don't know what's going on under the water,
but we found lots of fish with antibodies to the virus,
and the antibodies were going up and going down,
and we even found one fish, Typhoid Fish Mary,
who is a 24-year-old freshwater drum collected in 2012
that was positive for antibodies
and had active live virus in the tissues,
in spleen and kidneys.
So this was a carrier fish that was swimming
around Lake Winnebago, ready to see the next epidemic.
What we're doing right now,
and I don't have results for you yet,
is to go around the state with the DNR
and test these four species of game fish
from the water bodies shown here
and in Michigan, where there've been several kills caused
by this virus, and we're hoping to map the distribution
of this emerging pathogen in the state of Wisconsin.
But what we realized when traveling
around the state of Wisconsin
is that we would encounter fish kills
or stories about fish kills or reports of fish kills
to the DNR that were not viral hemorrhagic septicemia
and were just stuck on the shelf
because they couldn't figure out what they were.
So we launched a side project informed
by some of the chimp work I'd been doing,
that I like to call the Bass-O-Matic Project
for those of you who remember the old SNL skit.
So basically, find a fish, grind a fish,
sequence a fish, and figure out what pathogens are in it.
And guess what?
We have been finding loads of new, undiscovered viruses
in the fish of Wisconsin.
For example, largemouth bass reovirus,
which we published a couple of years ago,
which is a divergent virus, again, new to science,
that's most closely related
to a pretty serious viral disease of farmed salmon,
but it'd never been found in a bass before,
let alone in Wisconsin.
This thing is known from the Pacific Northwest and Norway.
So that was surprising, and we're working on other viruses,
like a virus of brown trout that popped up and a virus
from some private hatcheries around the state
that's actually related to really nasty human pathogens
with names like Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.
So we don't know what these things are doing,
and fish, have fun, eat fish, that's fine,
but it's surprising when you start to look,
just how much you find, especially in cases like this
where you have animals dying of unknown causes.
And that's really important for people in Wisconsin
because we love our animals.
At the School of Veterinary Medicine,
I think we have somebody studying the health of every one
of these animals except for trilobites
because they're extinct. [audience chuckling]
We are a state that loves the outdoors.
We are a state the loves our wildlife,
our pets, and our livestock.
So these things are upsetting to us.
They strike not only at the health of our animals,
but sort of at our core values as residents of Wisconsin.
Not on this poster is one of the most iconic
of species around here, the bald eagle.
Isn't that a great shot? [audience murmuring]
That went viral.
So the bald eagle is obviously an iconic species of bird.
It's important I think to realize
that the Founding Fathers did not discover the magnificence
of the bald eagle.
It was revered by Native American cultures for millennia
prior to the arrival of Europeans on North America,
but it was chosen as the symbol of United States of America
by the second Continental Congress in 1782,
and it appears on the Great Seal of the United States.
Now, I'd like to address and dispel a myth.
Benjamin Franklin did not want the turkey
to be the national bird of the United States
as some people have said.
This is indeed an urban legend
that that would have been our seal if he had.
[audience laughing]
But Benjamin Franklin did not like the choice
of the bald eagle.
That is true.
He wrote about that
because this is how we think of bald eagles,
as these magnificent hunters of the sky
who fish and swoop down and are majestic.
But they're actually dirty thieves.
They engage in this behavior
that's called kleptoparasitism
or sometimes piracy, where they mostly make a living
by stealing food from other species.
In this case, a fox has been lucky enough
to catch a nice rabbit and here comes the eagle,
swoops down, grabs the rabbit,
and the fox is going crazy
because he just stole dinner.
So bald eagles are notorious for this behavior,
which made Benjamin Franklin not like them,
and he actually called them a bird of bad moral character
[audience laughing]
because they don't make an honest living.
So he was quite the natural historian.
So a little history on the bald eagle in our country
and of course, if we're gonna talk
about bald eagles in the United States,
we can't forget Rachel Carson and Silent Spring ,
where she exposed the deleterious effect
of DDT on eggshells,
and because of this chemical and other challenges,
bald eagles, at one point, were reduced
in the lower 48 states to only about 400 breeding pairs.
They've since rebounded to 16,000 or more since last count.
So this is a Fish and Wildlife Service timeline
of the path to recovery for bald eagles.
It started before Rachel Carson,
but really her writings inspired the public
to take serious action, and through a series
of legislative changes and enforcement,
bald eagles were brought back from the brink of extinction.
That is the same for Wisconsin as everywhere.
25 years ago, that was the distribution
of breeding pairs of bald eagles in Wisconsin.
In 2017, it was that, and it's even higher today.
So we are awash with eagles, which is great,
but eagles are not without threats.
So there are lots of things that kill eagles these days.
This is from a nice publication
out of the National Wildlife Health Center here in Madison,
which shows that many eagles suffer poisoning,
if they scavenge carcasses
that maybe farmers will leave out to poison carnivores,
trauma, this is if they're hungry
and they're by the side of a road,
they might get hit by a car,
electrocution, landing on electric wires,
like that poor eagle there.
People still shoot them for reasons I don't understand,
and some of them just don't make it
because there's natural selection out there
and they'll starve each winter
because they haven't learned how to hunt properly.
Among infectious diseases, we really don't know very much
about eagle infections.
There've been scattered reports
of different infectious diseases
that have afflicted eagles over the years.
A case here, a case there.
The exception to that is West Nile virus,
which we know when it arrived
in 1999 in the U.S., did take a toll on bald eagles,
and in fact, they're exquisitely susceptible.
This is a paper by my colleague Hon Ip
on the right there at the National Wildlife Health Center
who showed that bald eagles in Utah
were actually getting infected with West Nile virus
not by mosquitoes, which is how West Nile
is usually transmitted, but by eating infected eared grebes.
So they're so susceptible,
they can get it by eating another infected species.
So that's the one we knew about.
Ron Seely, in 2005, wrote this brief report
in the Wisconsin State Journal
about this strange syndrome of bald eagles
that had baffled scientists.
I don't know, I've never felt more baffled
than when I became a scientist.
It's what journalists like to say,
"such and such baffled scientists."
Well, we were baffled for awhile.
But there was this syndrome that'd been noticed for decades
in Wisconsin called Wisconsin River Eagle Syndrome.
Eagles had been dying mysterious deaths.
They would be okay one day
and then they would just go into seizures and vomit
and be deathly ill the next day and die.
And it only seemed to happen
along the Lower Wisconsin river way.
So Wisconsin River Eagle Syndrome.
My colleagues at the DNR
and the Wildlife Health Center looked
at all the things you might expect:
every toxin under the sun, all the known infections.
Couldn't find a thing.
The images on the right are what a typical liver looks like
under a microscope from an eagle
that has died of Wisconsin River Eagle Syndrome.
These are kind of nonspecific changes,
but these big vacuoles, these holes in the liver cells
are what you would typically see in this case,
although they couldn't really figure out
what was causing it.
So I guess when you've got a hammer,
everything looks like a nail.
We decided to take this one off the shelf
and see if we could shed some light
on it using metagenomic diagnostics.
In other words, take the tissues from these sick birds,
put them through our fancy DNA sequencing apparatus,
and let the computer tell us
what in there was not a bald eagle.
We did that, and came out with a really surprising finding.
We discovered a new virus
that we have called bald eagle hepacivirus.
It's shown there on the right
with the eagle soaring off the screen.
It is part of a group of viruses
that contain two genera, pegivirus and hepacivirus.
You probably have never heard of the pegiviruses before.
They don't really cause disease,
but you probably have heard of the hepaciviruses
because that is the genus
that contains human hepatitis C virus,
which was interesting, because the end stage of infection
with hepatitis C virus looks very much like
what those eagle livers looked like.
So we had a relative of human hepatitis C in a bird
that nobody had any idea it would be.
And just about the same time, there's a group from China
that published a similar virus in domestic ducks,
but it wasn't clear what it was doing.
So we found this very interesting,
very suspicious virus in bald eagles in Wisconsin.
And we kind of went crazy with analyses
because we're trying to understand it.
What this graph is showing is
we constructed a phylogenetic tree
or a family tree of eagles themselves
because we had their livers
and we could do molecular phylogenetics on the birds,
and the viruses that were infecting
each of those birds on the right.
And we tried to say,
"Okay, are these family trees matching up at all?"
And the answer is no.
So we thought maybe that this was some virus
that was being transmitted from mother to offspring
or father to offspring,
vertically transmitted from eagle to eagle
and was just sitting there in the eagles.
That doesn't seem to be the case.
This argues against that
and suggests they're getting it in some other way.
So we looked across the coterminous United States
from Florida to Washington State,
which is where we found these viruses in eagles.
And we tried to ask, "Well, is there any effect
"of geographic distance on the genetics
"of the eagles or their viruses?"
In the case of the eagles, it's clearly no.
Eagles are eagles are eagles genetically
no matter where they're from,
which isn't particularly surprising
'cause there were only 400 pairs
of them back in the 1960s.
So they went through a severe population bottleneck.
You wouldn't expect a lot of genetic diversity.
But the viruses showed a very different pattern.
The viruses from those same eagles clustered
into tight little groups,
and the farther apart in space they were,
the more different they were genetically.
It's called isolation by distance.
So what we think is going on
is that the virus is being maintained
through local cycles of transmission.
And it is not necessarily being carried around by eagles.
So basically, we don't know
how this virus is being transmitted,
but it's decoupled in a way from its hosts.
What this graphic shows is a bit of the epidemiology
and what still makes this very suspicious.
It turns out, we found this virus in eagles
all over the United States, so not just in Wisconsin,
but eagles from Wisconsin were nine times
more likely to harbor this virus
than eagles from anywhere else.
And if we only counted eagles
from counties where Wisconsin River Eagle Syndrome
had ever been diagnosed,
there were 14 times more likely to have been infected
with bald eagle hepacivirus than eagles from elsewhere.
So where we are right now is sort of in the murky waters
of emerging infectious disease.
We found an interesting virus in an interesting species,
infected or suffering an interesting disease,
but we are moving towards testing the idea
that this is actually the cause or not.
It could be the cause,
it could be an incidental finding,
but a very interesting virus in an iconic species.
And I didn't realize until I had done this work
and it was published, just how popular eagles are,
because this went viral a little bit.
It got covered all over the popular press.
I think I was unprepared for it
because as a scientific finding, it was not definitive.
It was suggestive and interesting to me
and to virologists and ornithologists,
but the popular press really picked up on it
and I think the reason for that, as you can imagine,
is that we love our eagles.
They are deeply ingrained in the national psyche.
They're all-American and here in Wisconsin,
they are part of our own iconography as well.
So everybody loves eagles is what I learned.
So getting back to the broader question here,
emerging infectious diseases.
I don't wanna give you the impression
that all emerging infections
or all new infections are viruses.
These days, listening to stories about Wuhan coronavirus,
you would think so or Ebola, but they're not.
There are some weird ones out there.
So I wanna return to my roots a little bit
and talk about apes in Wisconsin.
Yes, there are apes in Wisconsin, at zoos.
So this was an interesting case that came
about a little earlier than what I just talked
about with the eagles, involving an orangutan
at the Milwaukee County Zoo, named Mahal.
I don't know if anybody remembers
this particular orangutan,
but it was a great story.
He was born in Colorado at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo
and he was rejected by his birth mother.
This happens sometimes.
We don't know exactly why,
but he was actually flown on a private jet
from Colorado to Milwaukee
and introduced to his surrogate mom,
who took to him right away and raised him like her own,
and was this wonderful story of hope and redemption
and second chances,
and they even wrote a children's book about it,
Little Mahal and the Big Search for a Real Mom .
It doesn't get more heart-wrenching than that.
And he died suddenly and unexpectedly
at five and a half years old,
and all we knew was that
it was a severe acute respiratory disease
of unknown cause.
These are, again, for some reason I'm on livers today,
but this is Mahal's liver showing
these cysts, which are not normal,
and inside some of the cysts,
these cells that are not orangutan cells.
They're some other thing that has infected him.
And try as the zoo vets might, they could not figure out
under the microscope what this was.
They sent it around the world to experts in parasitology
and fungi and all these different things.
So I got a call from Annette Gendron,
my colleague who recently retired,
could this be an obscure primate pathogen
called hepatocystis which makes cysts in the liver,
hepatocystis, liver cysts,
which I had been studying in Africa
at that same site I told you about with the chimps.
So I told her, "Well, it could be,
"so lemme run a quick test and I'll give you the answer,
"and I'll be home by dinner and you can say what's going on."
Never say that, [audience laughing]
because I ran the test and it was negative,
but I'd already shot my mouth off
and told Annette and the folks at the Milwaukee County Zoo
that I was going to solve the case.
So I was left, for those of you
who do infectious disease work, with a very unenviable list
of differential diagnoses,
basically anything with a nucleus.
[audience laughing]
So this was in the early days,
but we adopted this technology
that I've told you about a few times now
for pathogen hunting, where we took Mahal's tissues
and put them on the machine and said,
"Okay machine, tell us what is not orangutan."
Most of it was orangutan, 97%,
but seven of the sequences that we got off of the machine
that were not orangutan actually matched Taenia solium,
which is the pork tapeworm.
Now, Mahal did not have the pork tapeworm.
But it allowed us to zero in on this particular branch
of the tapeworm evolutionary tree,
the Taeniidae which contained, at the time,
two genera, Taenia and Echinococcus,
which anyone in veterinary medicine
will be intimately familiar with.
So that was enough information
to let us design more specific tests
and figure out, did Mahal die of Taenia or Echinococcus?
And the answer was no, neither,
because we found Mahal's tapeworm
to be something in between the two
that I show here clustering with this thing
I've abbreviated V.
Right at the time we were doing this,
we saw in the literature a publication
proposing a new genus
of Taenia tapeworm called Versteria,
named after Anna Verster,
a famous South African tapeworm biologist.
You learn these things.
And it turned out we had stumbled on
the first primate infection with a tapeworm
of the genus Versteria, which was really fascinating.
So we had no idea Versteria was in Wisconsin,
and we happened to find it in an orangutan in Milwaukee.
Doesn't get any weirder than that.
Can't make this stuff up.
So what actually happened?
It's a little confusing because when I say tapeworm,
you think of the long tapey thing,
or maybe you've seen these in your cat or dog's poop
and you run screaming to the vet.
So this type of tapeworm,
in a normal situation, that long tapewormy thing lives
inside the intestines of a dog or a cat or a carnivore.
And they deposit that onto the environment
through these little packets of eggs called proglottids,
which then release the eggs into the soil
and along comes a mouse and picks those up off of the soil,
eats them, and those go into the tissues
of a mouse and just wait.
And maybe they'll even slow the mouse down a little bit.
And then they just wait for a cat to eat that mouse,
and then those eggs hatch inside the cat
and migrate to the gut
and become the long tapey thing again.
That's a tapeworm lifecycle.
What had happened in the case of Mahal the orangutan
is he inadvertently played the role of the mouse.
This can happen sometimes.
It's called cysticercosis,
where an animal will ingest the eggs
and the eggs will hatch, and kinda not know where they are.
They know they're in some animal,
but it's the wrong animal, so they grow out of control
and they forms cysts, and they can grow
out of control and kill animals.
This can happen in many species, but Mahal loved to eat dirt,
as any good orangutan does,
because it helps with the digestion,
and he must've picked this up from the soil.
So we conducted a two-year investigation
into the origins of this thing
by going all over the United States
to places where trappers and hunters
and pest control people were collecting weasels,
because in Europe, the closest relative
of this thing lives in weasels,
and we dissected so many weasels.
And we wound up finding a few adult specimens of this worm,
showing that this genus does in fact live in weasels.
We found one in an ermine from Wisconsin,
which got us very excited, in Horicon Marsh actually.
But that particular one was not very closely related
to the variant that killed Mahal.
But a colleague of mine in Colorado
at the Denver Museum
gave us an ermine
that had one of these tapeworms
that was an almost identical match
to the one that killed Mahal the orangutan in Milwaukee.
And what's really interesting about that
is if you recall, Mahal was born in Colorado
and flew on the private jet to Milwaukee.
So we think that Mahal picked this thing up in Colorado
by eating the eggs of a tapeworm from an ermine,
and flew with the quiescent infection
on a private jet to Milwaukee,
where for some reason, five years later,
it started to grow out of control and killed him.
So this is the lesson for emerging infectious diseases.
The ways they get around are virtually unpredictable.
I should say that I'm very proud of this study
because in both of our publications,
we said at the end,
"Hey, orangutans are not very different from people.
"We should really be paying attention
"to this as a possible zoonotic agent."
And last year, three papers came out
based on our results showing that it can affect humans.
We predicted it.
So one in a kidney transplant recipient,
another in a historic case,
and a third in a woman from Pennsylvania
who reported spending a lot of time with fishers.
I don't know what she was doing.
I think she may have a been a wildlife rehabilitator,
but it turns out that in elderly
and immunocompromised people
these abhorrent infections can happen,
if you come into close contact with a definitive host.
So we predicted a novel zoonotic agent
before it entered humans.
And I guess it's for that type of reason
that I've developed sort of a street reputation
around here for being a disease detective.
It's a very flattering way of saying epidemiologist,
so thank you On Wisconsin magazine for doing this.
[audience chuckling]
But I guess when one has that label,
you're sort of expected to say something
about why everybody fears these things, which is pandemics.
It's fine, it's not fine, but it's not the worst thing
in the world if one animal in one corner
of Wisconsin gets one strange disease.
But if it starts to spread around the world
and threaten global trade and global human health
like the pandemic going on right now, then we worry.
And a question I get very often is, "Should we here,
"in the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, worry?"
And the answer is yes we should,
because we are by no means isolated.
We get these things every year with the flu.
Flu breaks out in Wisconsin like clockwork every year.
Most years it is simply the seasonal flu,
which is really a term for the mild form of a pandemic
because it's coming from Asia.
Some years it's more severe,
in which case we call it pandemic flu,
but it is a globally-spreading disease.
And then we have weird ones
that hit people here in Wisconsin,
like you may remember in 2003, the monkeypox outbreak.
That was, again, how can you predict this?
Gambian giant rats imported to Texas
from Ghana carried monkeypox
and were sent in a shipment of pets to Indiana
and then to Wisconsin, where it made people sick.
So a virus from the rainforest of Africa
infecting people in Wisconsin through the global pet trade,
through a Gambian giant rat.
I mean, it's just very hard to predict these things.
What we do know is that this happens often these days
because of global transportation.
Globalization is a fact of life for us.
You can't even see the U.S., let alone Wisconsin,
in that blob of red.
This represents connections among airports.
So it's not surprising things can get around.
What are some of the other ways that
these things might be able to get around and to Wisconsin?
Well, this is a tick, and what's remarkable about it
isn't that it's a tick
or that it's a tick of the genus Amblyomma,
but where it was discovered.
I don't know if anyone remembers this.
This one was discovered inside my nose.
[audience laughing]
This is the famous Ugandan nostril tick.
So about ten years ago, eight years ago I guess,
this was my claim to fame.
No matter what I do in my career from now on,
on my tombstone it's gonna say
"Here lies the nose tick guy,"
[audience laughing] 'cause I came back
with this thing in my nose.
I'd had a few of them before.
They're not uncommon in Uganda where I work,
but of course no one's heard of them here.
I pulled it out and I sent it to a colleague of mine
at Texas A&M who's a tick expert, Sarah Hamer,
and she sequenced it,
and the sequences were in no known database.
So what I had in my nose was a new species of tick,
or an old species that had never been sequenced.
We're still not sure, but it was a nostril tick,
and this went viral.
[audience laughing]
I had a full-page spread in The Guardian .
I was in National Geographic , Science .
Twice, I was on "Lightning Fill In The Blank"
as a quiz question answer.
That was perhaps the greatest of honors.
But yeah, this was my 15 minutes of fame
because it was completely gross,
and a scientist came back to Wisconsin
with a tick in his nose.
But what the press missed
and I thought was the most interesting part
of it was just why did I have a tick in my nose?
With the help of some of my collaborators
in this forest I told you about at the beginning
where the chimps were dying of respiratory disease,
there was a study going on to measure the age
at which the molars of chimpanzees erupt
because as anyone with kids knows,
molar eruption when they start to teethe
is an important moment in growing up.
So how do you do that in wild chimps?
You wait for them to yawn
and you take a picture of their face.
99% of the time, you miss 'em.
They're looking away or their mouths are closed.
So what we had was
this gigantic photo archive of baby chimp faces.
And we looked through them and found that
about 20% of them had ticks in their nose.
So you can see them here inside the nostrils,
up in there of these four chimps and many more.
So what I had in my nose was a chimp tick.
And for anyone who knows about chimps,
this will make perfect sense because what do they love to do
to bond their societies,
but groom each other?
So if you're a tick out in the open
on a chimp, you're dead meat
'cause you're gonna get groomed off and eaten.
So you have to find a place to hide.
There's a few places you could think of,
but the nose is a really good one
because it's warm, it's wet, it's vascular.
So if you can get in there, it's great.
And I'm pretty much a chimp with language.
So the tick didn't care. [audience laughing]
It got into my nose, flew on a trans-Atlantic flight
back to Madison where I discovered it.
Now, as far as I know I haven't sparked any pandemics,
but it's a nice example of how globalization comes home.
And I should just mention
because I love these types of stories.
This is an evolution story.
Chimp nose ticks are not the only things that do this.
This is the chimp louse, Pediculus schaeffi.
It's unique among lice
because if you shine a flashlight onto it,
it will let go of whatever it's holding on to
and drop to the ground, which is suicide if you're a louse.
But if you think about it, if you're a louse on a chimp
and another chimp parts the hair to groom
and the light shines on you, you better jump chimp
and find a new chimp, or else you're gonna get eaten.
So this is--
in the School of Veterinary Medicine,
as on this campus, there are researchers
who are wonderful at studying all the intricacies
of how viruses evade the cellular and humoral immunity
of their hosts through these complicated
biochemical pathways and strange mechanisms.
Parasites do this too, but behaviorally.
They have adaptations like the microbes
inside us to avoid host defenses.
So I just like that story because it's another example
of an evolutionary arms race with host and pathogen.
So my intent here partially was to scare you
by letting you know [audience laughing]
that yes, we really do have to worry
about emerging infectious diseases,
and there are more and more of them every year.
I guarantee you that Wuhan coronavirus will not be the last
of the emerging infectious diseases that any of us see.
These things are happening all over the place,
and I often get asked, "So what are you doing about it?"
So I'll just hit very quickly on the fact
that there are interventions being designed.
You may have heard in the news
that scientists are rushing to develop a vaccine.
That's great, but that's not an outbreak response.
That vaccine will be ready for the next outbreak.
So the honest truth is that
there are no magic bullet solutions
for halting pandemics in their tracks.
Once they've started, they keep going.
So it's one of the unfortunate aspects
of being an epidemiologist that when you do your job,
nobody notices, because if you prevent an epidemic
or prevent a pandemic, how does anyone know?
It's only when something breaks out
that people say, "Well, you should be doing your job."
Well, I prevented seven pandemics last week,
what do you expect of me?
[audience laughing]
But what we do in between epidemics and phone calls
from the press about strange viruses is we try to do
sort of basic public health interventions,
things like education.
In Uganda, we have a new project
called Healthy Children, Healthy Chimps or HC Squared,
where we're trying to examine
how these pediatric viruses are getting
out of the children into the chimps,
and at the same time, use it as an avenue for educating kids
and their families about basic health,
basic healthcare and basic health prevention.
And for some of the emerging pathogens in Wisconsin,
all I can say is that I'm working
with the various agencies
in Wisconsin that have established programs
on interacting with the public.
We can do things.
We can do things like set management zones
or put up signage or change the way we monitor.
So none of it is like a vaccine
that's gonna save everybody tomorrow.
It's not like the movies.
This is kind of hard, slogging public health
that happens at a slow pace
without necessarily the fanciest technologies.
So I will stop there except to say
that all these projects are big projects
of which I'm only a part,
and I'm grateful to all the collaborators
and funders who have helped over the years,
and I would be, of course, happy to stop
and take any questions.
[audience applauding]