Ebola outbreak in the DRC, and Artemis III preparation

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0:34All engine running. Absolute genius. Get this. Welcome. Welcome. This is the show where we bring you science. What that potentially means is... Discovery. Advances. Questions. Research. Technology. Unbelievable. Without further ado, this is The Naked Scientist. Hello, welcome to The Naked Scientist podcast. This is the show that brings you the biggest breakthroughs and talks to the major movers and shakers in the worlds of science, technology and medicine with me, Chris Smith. And coming up, an Ebola outbreak in the DRC. What's behind it and what's the risk? Also, NASA reveals plans for next year's Artemis 3 launch, which is a step closer to setting foot back on the moon.

1:12And a bit later on, how an ice vest helped overweight volunteers to shed a kilo.

1:26The World Health Organisation has declared an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a public health emergency of international concern with more than 100 reported deaths in the east of the country and potentially, according to some studies, over 1 ,000 people infected. the cause is a more recently discovered form of the ebola virus called bundybujio after an incubation period of some 10 days or so the virus causes high fevers an intense inflammatory reaction known as a cytokine storm and because it also attacks blood vessels the virus depresses the ability of blood to clot leading to bleeding all over the body hence the term hemorrhagic fever the mortality rate is between 20 to 50 percent and because all body fluids are infectious, it is relatively easy to transmit in crowded conditions with poor medical facilities and especially where public awareness of the threat is poor.

2:20A highly mobile population, rapid transport routes internationally and porous borders with nearby regions mean that the spread can be fast. Cases are already being reported in neighbouring Uganda. Tom Kysak is the Director of Biocontainment at Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch. The virus is undoubtedly what's called a zoonoses, or a virus that exists in some animal, and the index case catches it somehow from whatever that reservoir is. It's highly suspected that bats are the natural host, and then people who are exposed to the excreta of bats or also bats are used as a food source in some areas of the world.

3:10And then most of the transmission occurs from one person to another. And it's what's known primarily as a bloodborne agent, so that you require very close contact. And furthermore, it's only during the latter stages of the disease when the individual is quite sick when that transmission occurs. And the mechanism of disease? Well, it's what's called a hemorrhagic fever. Part of it is that the immune response gets out of control and also contributes to how serious the disease is. So it's not altogether the virus that's making you sick. The outbreak we're seeing now, what's that? Because they're saying that's not the same as the form that surfaced in 2014 caused that big outbreak.

4:01There have been subsequent to the original 1976 outbreaks, a number of these viruses discovered. This one is called Bundabugio, after a town in western Uganda, where there was an outbreak that was relatively small that occurred in 2007, 2008. And that lends its name towards this virus. The subsequent single outbreak that occurred after that in 2012 over in the DRC was also relatively small. So our experience with this particular virus is not particularly broad. There was a claim that, and the World Health Organization, Professor Gabrielsus has said today, that this may well have been spreading for an extended period of time because it was somewhat flying under the radar because we were looking for one form of Ebola and potentially missing this one.

4:54Yeah, if you go back to the 2014 outbreak, unfortunate circumstances were somewhat similar. In other words, the diagnosis of this as an Ebola and the measures that need to be put in place to keep it as a small outbreak just didn't happen, partially because specimens in the 2014 outbreak weren't presented to a laboratory that could do the diagnosis. And this one, there was some inability to recognize this particular strain in the initial attempts to diagnose it. Some suggestions and some modeling, including numbers published by Imperial College in London this week suggests that in fact the outbreak may be far larger than people had anticipated and therefore it's gathering momentum faster and it could go farther afield.

5:47Why do these things tend to grow and spread like that and what's the end point? How do we get control of this? Primarily through public education and also having medical facilities identify cases early on and take care of them with appropriate personal protective gear. Because again, if you are exposed to the secretions and excretions of somebody who's become seriously ill with that, that's the primary means of transmission. So identifying patients and getting them out of situations where they're family members or medics that don't have the appropriate protective gear taking care of them, that's what needs to be avoided.

6:33And that's how it needs to be brought under control. If there were vaccines, they could practice something called ring vaccination. But in the 2014 outbreak, you may recall that there were vaccines brought to bear, but it was so late in the outbreak, it actually did not have that much to do ultimately with the control and the cessation of that outbreak. Do we have vaccines against this one? Well, there's some potential that the Zaire vaccine might have some effectiveness, but it's not going to be something you want to depend upon to probably bring this outbreak to an end. And the sort of demonstration that it's effective is really not there at the moment.

7:19Are there no drugs that we can use against Ebola viruses? I would say that's really not well known at the moment. Why is this happening at all? Because it feels like we're seeing more of this happening more often to more people. The reservoirs tend to be out in the bush and populations of humans are expanding into some of those areas. And not only that, but means of transportation among different population centers has improved vastly. So let me back up and say it might have in the past occurred and not spread as rapidly as this one appears to be spreading now because ability to move through the areas where the virus initiated the first infections in humans was not what it is today.

8:14The global concern is that you can get on an airplane in Kinshasa or Kampala or Entebbe and be someplace else on the other side of the Earth within a matter of hours. Tom Kysak, who's Director of Biocontainment at Galveston National Laboratory, the University of Texas medical branch. We're up into space now, and following last month's successful Artemis II mission, NASA has started looking at plans to launch Artemis III. earmarked for next year the launch is proposed to be the last planned step before landing humans on the moon richard hollingham took me through it he's from the space boffins artemis 3 is the next stepping stone to the moon originally artemis 3 was going to be the landing on the moon but now it's a test of the landers in low earth orbit now this all sounds great and you sort of assume well they've got the landers to test they haven't got the landers to test so there are two landers being built right now, one by Blue Origin which is Jeff Bezos' company and the other is being developed by SpaceX which is Elon Musk's company so when it comes to landers, it really is a sort of battle of the billionaires here about whether they can get them made in time so this rocket can launch into Earth's orbit, not to the moon, just in Earth's orbit, and dock with these landers, test them out, test out things like spacesuits, operating, docking, all those sorts of things.

9:52Well, hang on a minute. If they're a lander and they've got to land on the moon, haven't you got to go to the moon to test the moon landing? Well, again, this goes back to what they did with the Apollo missions, and it makes a huge amount of sense. Going to the moon is incredibly risky. So during the Apollo missions, you had Apollo 7, which was just a test of the spacecraft in low Earth orbit. You had Apollo 8, the famous mission that orbited the moon, very much like what we've just seen with Artemis 2. And then the mission that's often forgotten, which is Apollo 9. And that was a test of the Apollo spacecraft with the lander for the first time in low Earth orbit.

10:34It was practicing things like docking, like transferring astronauts between the two. And so they could be confident that when they actually took the lander to the moon, it was going to be able to operate perfectly. So it does make a whole lot of sense. This time it's going to be multiple launches. So potentially with Artemis 3, and this has never been done before, they will launch the astronauts into orbit, as we saw with Artemis 2. they will launch separately two different landers on two different rockets in fact you've got three different types of rocket in action here they'll launch the spacex lander and the blue origin lander into low earth orbit and orion will dock with both and potentially astronauts will move between each of the landers the clock is very much ticking on this because they're saying it's going to be in in 2027 so even if it was the end of 2027 you're kind of looking at about 18 months to get this done.

11:32Why is there no lander yet then? What's the delay? This has been held up multiple times, different decisions made about landers and which way to go. Originally, it was going to be just SpaceX. And if you look at a lot of the graphics on the NASA website, that was the original plan. It looked like SpaceX weren't going to do it in time. So they reintroduced Blue Origin, who had been there at the early stages of a competition to develop a lander. I mean, both are very sophisticated, both are new technology, particularly with the SpaceX lander. It's enormous, and it would be a huge step change, whereas the Blue Origin looks not dissimilar to that sort of spidery Apollo lander that we're all kind of familiar with when you see those pictures of the astronauts on the moon.

12:18It is bigger, but it's more traditional sort of lander territory, like a lot of the robotic landers, whereas SpaceX is part of Elon Musk's very ambitious plan to ultimately take people to Mars. So it's all part of his Starship system, which hasn't yet got into orbit. But if it all succeeds, then, you know, it really is in the same way that SpaceX has really changed the economics of space, made it so much cheaper. This would be a real step change in the kinds of technology. And all the while, while this clock is ticking. You've also got the competition which Jared Isaacman, the new head of NASA, has also been talking up over the last few days, the competition between the US and China.

13:05He said in a speech a few days ago that he believed that China would plan next year to send astronauts out around the moon, so very much like Artemis 2. So that would put China only about a year behind the US in returning astronauts to the moon. I mean, there is a political element to this, you know, ramping up the tension, we want money to do this is kind of as kind of the message. But, you know, that's at the back of many minds in NASA as well. If there are now two lander contenders, they're not going to send both, presumably. So does this mean that whichever one performs best in these tests will be selected as that's going to be what goes to the moon?

13:46They're not framing it that way, certainly at the moment. They're just saying, we are doing Artemis 3, we are testing these lander in orbit. But yeah, you'd assume that both can't go to the moon. But maybe one would go on one mission on Artemis 4, another would go on Artemis 5 or something like that. Because they're being launched separately, I mean, potentially you could actually send both to the Moon. None of this has been made clear yet. This really does seem to be, we're kind of witnessing a plan taking shape in real time. This is a very different plan to what was there, you know, five, six years ago when these landers were first commissioned.

14:21I don't know the answer to that question. Let's assume then that Artemis 3 goes to plan, both of these things work, so NASA has a choice. and then the next step will be the lunar surface presumably so Artemis 4 will be the landing. When is that earmarked for if all goes to the current time plan? If all goes to the current time plan and isn't it now an accelerated plan we're looking at Artemis 3 in 2027 and Artemis 4 so the return to the moon so astronauts on the surface of the moon in 2028. Richard Hollingham from the Space Muffins on what NASA has in mind for Artemis 3. Get rewarded just for shopping with Simon+.

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15:57Music in the programme is sponsored by Epidemic Sound, perfect music for audio and video productions. This is the Naked Scientist podcast with me, Chris Smith. Still to come, how ice vests might be one way to lose a bit of weight. But first, the United Arab Emirates has called a drone strike near its only nuclear power station a dangerous escalation and blamed Iran or one of its proxies for the recent attack. The Gulf of Nations infrastructure has been targeted by thousands of drone and missile strikes since the start of the wider conflict in the Middle East a few months ago. It echoes attacks on the Zaporizhia nuclear station by Russia in the early stages of the war in Ukraine.

16:38Malcolm Grimston is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College London. First thing to say is obviously nuclear power stations are extraordinarily robust. They're designed to deal with both internal and external threats. So in other words, something going wrong inside the reactor and protecting the outside environment if that happens. But equivalently, anything outside the environment which is trying to get in. So we've seen, for example, in Ukraine where the Zaporozhye nuclear reactor has been right in the firing line of the war there, but has not been breached. There's been no radioactive emissions from that.

17:16And I thought it's unlikely that the aim was actually to try and produce radioactive emissions because they can go anywhere and whoever's doing it, the danger ends up blowing over their own territory. So at the moment, it's quite difficult to understand quite what's going on here, I think. Although, notwithstanding that latter point, we do know that these facilities do have Achilles heels, because while Fukushima withstood an amazingly powerful earthquake perfectly well, as it was designed to do, it was the tsunami inundating the diesel backup generators that then caused the disaster. Just because the power station's robust, there could be other ancillary infrastructure that isn't so.

17:56Yes, and it's also worth remembering, though, that during the earthquake tsunami in 2010, it was only the oldest plant, Fukushima 1, that wasn't able to withstand the tsunami. All of the other nuclear plants up and down the coast, which were subject to the tsunami, were able to come through without any significant damage and certainly no release of radioactivity. So I think using a 1970s plant, which met the most unbelievable conditions, that it was able to withstand an earthquake actually rather larger than the design was meant for. Of course, one should never be complacent, but it doesn't look to me that if you really wanted to damage a nuclear plant, I don't know how you'd do it.

18:41I think external threats have never been terribly successful, and indeed, it's noticeable how few terrorist attacks have been on nuclear stations, simply because I think people recognise they're so difficult to breach. Is it then that people are just trying to put the wind up people? We know that nuclear scares people, so it's a way of putting the wind up people, getting attention for yourself. Is that really what's behind this kind of thing? Although it's the first nuclear station in the United Arab Emirates, the UAE has said that it intends to develop nuclear energy in part so then it can use its fossil reserves for exports rather than using them at home.

19:19And if you are working in a plant which is subject to a lot of drone attacks, then quite independent of what type of plant it is, it's going to be a threat to the workforce. It's going to disrupt the orderly operations of the nuclear reactor. It could be any sort of plant or facility. So I wonder a bit whether this is just a generalised attempt to undermine the infrastructure. Of course, although the nuclear plant itself may be safe and radioactive releases may be unlikely, you can still damage the wires that take the electricity from the plant to where it's going to be needed. And so you can debilitate, even though you're not actually damaging the radioactive parts.

19:59Why does the UAE think Iran is behind this particular attack? The tensions within the Middle East among the various countries, almost as they seem to be battling for hegemony of the Arab world. It's such we've seen a number of cases where now the Iranians have been blocking UAE's access to the Straits of Hormuz so they can get their fossil exports out. UAE traditionally has been rather more accommodating and positive in its relations with Israel than has been the case with Iran. So it looks as if it's an ongoing part of the very, very complex military situation in the Gulf. Was it that the nuclear station was an accidental hit then?

20:41Were they actually just going for something else and hit that? Or is this just a pattern of disruption, just to cause tension, cause stress and make a point? I don't think there's much evidence that they were aiming for something else and ended up striking it, which in the case of Japirozha in Ukraine, it seemed to me damage that was done, and there was some damage to the ancillary plant at Japirozha, but that was largely collateral damage by the fact that the plant happened to be right in the line of the Russian line of attack into Ukraine. Here, it does seem to be, from what we can tell at the moment, a deliberate attack upon the plant.

21:19Though, as I say, there's a difference between saying it's a deliberate attack on the plant and that it's an attempt to get a radioactive incident because simply if they were successful in taking offline a major electricity generator like this, that of itself would have economic consequences for the UAE. Malcolm Grimston at Imperial College London. Well, move over fat jabs because researchers in the UK and in the Netherlands have found that wearing an ice vest could help people to lose weight. The small proof of concept study asked a group of overweight individuals to don the garment for a couple of hours each morning over a six week period.

21:59The aim was to use the cold stimulus to boost metabolism and burn more calories in heat generating tissue called brown fat. The subjects lost nearly a kilo during the study. Michael Simons is Professor of Developmental Physiology at the University of Nottingham and co-led the study. We were focusing on a particular fat known as brown fat, which is very different to white fat in that it's present in much smaller quantities and it's able to generate rapidly very large amounts of heat, 300 times more heat per unit mass than any other tissue in the body. And although we may only have 100, 200 grams of that fat, because of its potential to produce large amounts of heat rapidly, it could be a target for weight loss.

22:50And we also know that one of the major stimuli of brown fat is cold. For example, it's switched on in the newborn following cold exposure. So we wanted to know whether daily artificial cold exposure could result in a reduction in their body weight. So the aim was to get 50 volunteers, half male, half female, wearing a vest with ice packs in it for two hours a day for a six-week period. What did you actually measure? Did you see a demonstrable effect in body temperature for example or do you expect that the ice packs, the contact with the skin is all that you need to make the body or fool the body into thinking it's much colder than it is and that's what triggers the brown fat?

23:41We didn't see a major change in actual temperature. But I mean, as you summarise there, we were hoping to make the body feel there was a cold challenge and that may therefore stimulate their brown fat metabolism. We did take blood samples to look at glucose metabolism, lipid metabolism and inflammatory markers. And for that we saw no obvious change. We did look to see whether we could see shivering and that didn't seem to be apparent. Was this a sort of beginning and an end body weight? Compare people before the experiment and after the experiment. So we used bioimpedance to look at body weight and the relative amount of fat and muscle in the body at the start and at the end of the study.

24:33And what did you find? So we found that there was a significant 0.9 kilo reduction in white fat mass and there was no change in muscle mass. So it does look like it's a real phenomenon then, they lose weight. That's what the data is suggesting at the moment. And also these were people that were overweight and obese, so they have higher body weight anyway. So in terms of actual percentage fat loss, it's relatively small, but it's encouraging that we saw that to start off with. Indeed, but sustained over a longer period of time, that would translate into quite a reasonable amount of body weight loss, wouldn't it?

25:14Potentially, so that's why we're excited by it. Do you know what drove the mass loss though? was it purely along the lines of your hypothesis you were gearing up the brown fat you were burning off calories and that's why the weight went down or did this have some effect on behavior did it make the people eat less for example because we know when you put people in studies they tend to cooperate with the study and they tend to go along with what the aim of a study is so you tend to find some effect just because they're in a study that's possible we didn't rigorously measure food consumption over the six-week period because if you make too many demands on volunteers, you can have problems getting people being recruited.

25:58And in terms of was brown fat being activated, it's quite difficult to actually measure whether brown fat is being switched on because the gold standard of measuring brown fat is to look at the uptake of radiolabel glucose, which obviously is not ideal so that's ongoing studies that we're waiting to complete. Any difference between the men and the women in the study? We know women do tend to have a different distribution of white fat in the body and a different sensitivity to cold compared to men. Studies in offices have shown that. Did they respond the same though to the cooling treatment here we need to do further analysis but we've got 12 men 12 women so it may actually be underpowered to show a significant difference between sexes and time of day when you did this stimulation because we know that people's metabolism changes considerably across a day as well is there a sweet spot when you do this you probably will get the best driving of your brown fat that will be future steps at the moment this was just a proof of concept to see whether wearing the vest for several weeks could have an effect on body weight do you think and i'm asking you to speculate wildly here do you think what you're getting at with this is why we're seeing a trend in increasing body weight in the population anyway because we now do lead much cushier lives people's houses are centrally heated talk to some people they used to grow up with ice on the insides of the windows they had to scrape off to see out on cold winter mornings no one has that except i think me in my ancient house these days so is it the environment that we're in that's helping and perhaps reversing this effect that you're seeing which helps to explain some aspects of why we're growing larger as a population absolutely you just look to see how our lifestyles you know both our diets unhealthy food that we eat now but we also live in thermally insulated houses with central heating switched on in every room in the house and of course with climate change global temperatures have increased one and a half degrees c and that there's interesting epidemiological data from the united states with the rise in temperatures in various states and an increase in instance of diabetes so i think you know all these factors potentially increase our body weight and lead to the 30 % plus incidence of obesity we're seeing across many countries on the planet.

28:38Michael Simons at the University of Nottingham. Well that's it for today. Do tune in on Tuesday though when we're going to be examining the latest AI developments including an AI scientist which will allegedly help researchers to spot the gaps now knowledge where opportunities might lie to make the next big breakthrough and possibly get a Nobel Prize, who knows before we go thank you to all of you who are continuing to support us with your donations this really does make a difference and i can't emphasize and underpin enough how grateful we are for your help if you appreciate what we do for you every single week here on the naked scientists do please head over to nakedscientist.com forward slash donate and help us out there i'm chris smith thank you for listening if you'd like to write to me in the meantime it's chris at thenakedscientist.com meanwhile thanks for your company and until we're together again goodbye you

29:47get rewarded just for shopping with simon plus don't miss memorial day sales at simon premium outlets and mills. You can get points at scores of stores, access to exclusive offers, and exciting surprises. You've got an extra day off, so make it pay off with the best deals from brands you love all in one place. It's a summer kickoff thing. Join today at simonplus.com. Rewards program terms apply. See simonplus.com for details.