Patient Zero Podcast Analysis PDF

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Patient Zero Podcast Analysis...

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Patient ZeroThe podcast begins by taking us back to 1906 when a daughter of a rich family gets sick with a fever. The sickness is passed to six out of eleven people in the family. Nobody knew where the disease, that was typhoid, came from. The root of the disease was traced back to one chef that all the families had employed; one of the chef’s dishes contained fresh peaches. This podcast focuses tracing diseases back to the first person to ever contract it. This chef was the first documented intermittent carrier of the disease; she did not exhibit the symptoms at all. Eventually, the chef was isolated on an island to prevent the spread of the disease any further. The search was on for where these viruses were coming from. Chimps were being tested to determine where the HIV virus comes from. It was determined that one type of chimp in a specific geographic area is the origin of the HIV virus. Those chimps exhibited the closest strand of the HIV virus that affects humans today. One hypothesis of how humans contracted the virus is the cut hunter. The hunter kills a chimp and begins to cut open its flesh, by accident cutting himself. This creates a blood-to-blood contact, and essentially that human is the patient zero of HIV. The cut hunter could have passed HIV to a woman, who gives it to a fisher, who brought it over to the mainland. This sparks when the disease went global because it is much more easily transmittable in an urban area. Questions 1. Is there a way to determine how the chimps got HIV in the first place? 2. Is it ethical in today’s society to isolate patient zero individuals even though it must be done?...