Original subtitles

A fatal plague that ravaged the Byzantine Empire.

A bizarre affliction of biblical proportions.

And a disturbing disorder where people dance themselves to death.

Plague.

Smallpox.

Tuberculosis. And influenza.

These are only a few of the contagious diseases that have killed billions of

people. over the course of human history. Just saying their names

misery and pain.

And the impact of these deadly infections has changed the world more

times.

How do lethal maladies begin and then start to silently spread?

What happens when a medical epidemic turns into mental hysteria? And while

antibiotics

And vaccines can help keep diseases like smallpox and plague under control.

How close are we to catching the next unstoppable

outbreak?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

January 2020.

News reports surfaced that a new, highly contagious disease first discovered in

Wuhan, China, is spreading like wildfire.

In a matter of weeks, the lethal virus, known as coronavirus, or COVID -19,

sweeps the globe.

On March 11th, as the number of infections and deaths continue to climb,

The World Health Organization declares that the outbreak has become a worldwide

pandemic.

What separates clinically coronavirus from other common viruses, such as

influenza, is that it knows how to hide itself.

It has what we call a period where you can be asymptomatic. That means without

symptoms. That's a chance to pass that virus to other people.

keeping the disease going on and spreading.

Most of the time, when you wait for these symptoms, you've already missed

According to experts, the origins of many viruses remain shrouded in mystery.

It's so difficult to determine the origin of viruses because when you want

study that virus, you have to separate what is the natural history of that

So one of the important things that epidemiologists are looking at right now

what did we learn from the past?

What should we be looking at? Where should we be looking?

Some of the earliest records of plagues are found in ancient India,

China, the Middle East, and they talk about plagues occurring before the very

first civilization.

around 3200 BC.

Throughout human history, there have been accounts of devastating afflictions

that defied understanding at the time they happened.

But perhaps a closer examination of these plagues will provide some lessons

about infectious diseases and how they begin.

The Byzantine Empire, 541 AD.

Emperor Justinian sits atop a powerful throne.

But lurking in the shadows is a hidden enemy about to consume his kingdom.

A plague.

Started by a bacteria. Comes out of the east.

And infects. This simple bacteria ended up killing.

almost one half the population of the entire old empire.

With that type of death toll, the economic and social

ramifications were catastrophic.

Everything that Justinian had tried was now collapsing.

His military collapsed, his economy collapsed, and everything that he tried

do was of no avail.

Justinian plague is caused by a bacterium, Yersinia pestis. It can

humans directly from saliva or coffee.

It usually manifests itself in terms of swelling of the nymph nodes. The skin

turns black and basically dies.

And then there's a progression of fever and chills and eventual death.

As Justinian's empire was collapsing and breaking, and his military strength was

waning because...

Science of medicine in those days was far more primitive than we have today.

People cry out, why?

Why is this happening?

The Plague of Justinian, as it became known, ultimately killed an estimated 50

million people.

The vast Byzantine Empire was crippled, not by an invading army, but by an enemy

they could not see and did not understand.

At the time since the existence of bacteria and viruses had not yet been

discovered, many believed that the invisible force that caused the plague

God himself.

It was a belief that was widely accepted because people would read in the Bible

about how precedents from the past had been created by the hand of God.

Whenever humanity

is infected by something greater and beyond human understanding.

It has always been psychologically understood to be an

expression of the wrath of God.

We have in the book of Exodus the famous ten plagues of Egypt.

Moses had come back after seeing God on the mountain to free the Hebrews from

slavery. He went before the Pharaoh and asked to let his people go.

Of course, the Pharaoh said no.

Therefore, the Hebrew God sent a number of plagues through Egypt.

The Bible stories are clear.

The order of the plagues are well documented in the Bible.

We know, of course, that there was the turning of the Nile into blood. There

were the frogs, the lice, the pestilence, and, of course, the great

the three days of darkness and, of course, the death of the firstborn.

The biblical writer who is writing what happens and is inspired by God does say

that the plague stopped after the Hebrews were finally free.

Perhaps there was some divine intervention from God.

But we'll never know because miracles are very difficult to prove.

Can ancient plagues be attributed to a higher power at work?

Well, it's a fascinating theory.

And perhaps divine intervention could be the source of a strange affliction

where a person mysteriously bleeds as if they'd been crucified.

Every spring, billions of Christians all over the world gather to observe a

solemn day of reverence called Good Friday.

According to Christian tradition, Good Friday commemorates the crucifixion and

death of Jesus Christ.

This sacred practice has been performed for nearly 2 ,000 years and involves

attending Mass, the veneration of the cross,

and elaborate processions.

While Good Friday is a somber occasion, the crucifixion is a pivotal event

that is at the heart of Christianity.

When you look at the spirituality of the Christian faith, the crucifixion of

Jesus is not only a tragedy of death, it's a sign of the sufferings of Jesus.

When we think of the crucifixion today, we think of Jesus' wounds when he was

crucified, which includes the holes in the hands, in the feet, in the side.

We think of the crown of thorns.

The crucifixion is clearly a profound cornerstone of the Christian faith.

But curiously, for centuries people have suffered from a rare and disturbing

condition that is connected to the death of Jesus Christ.

This bizarre affliction is known as stigmata.

Stigmata occurs when an individual is marked in a physical way that represents

the wounds that Christ suffered on the cross.

Most commonly, stigmata happens in what is referred to as the five wounds of

Christ, which is two in the hands, two in the feet, and one on the side.

since the Middle Ages.

There have been untold thousands of cases.

In the strictest terms, stigmata, although they do involve physical

suffering, are considered a blessing, a privilege. It's almost as if the

stricken individual is bearing a holy or divine burden.

How can wounds that mirror those of Jesus Christ

inexplicably appear on ordinary people. It seems to defy all logic.

But perhaps clues about this phenomenon can be found by examining the first

documented instance of stigmata.

The first recorded case of stigmata occurred with St. Francis of Assisi in

St. Francis went to the mountains of La Verna to meditate and to pray.

And then suddenly, Francis had a vision of a seraphim. A seraphim is a

particular kind of angel, a fiery angel with six wings.

And the seraphim held in his possession the crucifix.

His wings were wrapped around Jesus on the cross.

And from this crucifix, this image of Jesus, came forth these rays.

And these rays penetrated Francis in the form of stigmata.

Francis' stigmata was incredibly intense. Nothing like this had ever

before. And not only did he have wounds that were openly bleeding on his hands,

Francis was quite ill after he received the stigmata, and he died two years

later.

Every day of those two years, he did, in fact, suffer with stigmata.

Accounts of stigmata are both fascinating and deeply unsettling.

For many Christians, They are proof of divine forces at work in our world.

But many experts are skeptical and insist that stigmata must have a

explanation.

In terms of stigmata -like symptoms, there are some medical conditions that

been attributed to spontaneous bleeding, but it's still very much misunderstood.

One of them would be hematidrosis.

It's known as bloody sweat because when the body is under extreme stress, the

sweat glands tend to become more fragile and can bleed spontaneously.

It typically manifests as droplets of blood on the skin, most commonly in the

forehead, the arms, and the legs, without any apparent physical cause.

It can't be said that they are the exact cause of stigmata.

When a proposed stigmata occurs,

The Vatican typically will do everything possible to account for the healing

within standard medical protocol.

The Vatican disputes, ignores, or disproves vastly greater numbers

of miraculous claims than it actually validates. And so if the Vatican

is able to verify stigmata, they are considered miraculous.

Is it possible that a genuine case of stigmata is an actual miracle, as the

Vatican claims?

Many believe that the best evidence lies in the story of the most famous case in

modern history, the stigmata of Padre Pio.

Padre Pio was a Capuchin friar who, in 1918, celebrated mass.

And immediately afterwards started bleeding from the hands and feet.

But there were certain peculiarities about it.

It never scabbed over.

And it gave off a very sweet perfume, which is known as the odour of sanctity.

When Padre Pio was suffering from his stigmata, he said that the pain was so

extreme that he thought he might die.

He was embarrassed by the blood and embarrassed to be showing these marks on

regular basis.

And he was always trying to cover them with the sleeves of his robe so that

people wouldn't see the blood.

The Vatican's response to great mystics in the church has often been to

persecute them, at least initially. They did that with Padre Pio.

They were skeptical.

At one point, they thought they were self -inflicted.

And so they silenced him.

They basically shut him away in the monastery.

But thousands of people would go to attend his mass and line up for

for days.

It was not until long after Padre Pio's death in 1968 that the

Vatican had relented and saw him as a genuine stigmatist.

He was finally canonised and beautified by Pope John Paul II.

This was at the beginning of the 21st century.

Now thousands of pilgrims come from all over Italy and beyond to

venerate at his tomb every month.

And so his memory is something that is celebrated by Catholics in

every part of the world.

For the moment, stigmata remains a controversial and captivating affliction

offers no easy answers.

But in 16th century France, another condition emerged that was no less

It was a disturbing phenomenon which led hundreds of people to dance themselves

to death.

Strasbourg, France.

This historic city built along the Rhine River is known for its stunning network

of canals, remarkable medieval architecture, and the famous

clock of Strasbourg Cathedral.

But over 500 years ago in July of 1518, this town was the site of one of the

strangest maladies in human history.

It's known as the Dancing Plague.

And it started when a townswoman named Frau Trophia spontaneously burst into

dance.

Frau Trophia is said to have stepped outside of her house in the city of

Strasbourg and then begun to dance.

And she danced for hours and hours and hours. And apparently at first,

eyewitnesses... thought that she may have been trying to irritate her husband

that this was some kind of joke but then the dance stretched into the evening

and then into the night she collapsed she got up the

next day and began again and at that point people realized that a very

strange phenomenon was unfolding here

Frau Trophia went on hopping around and dancing in the heat of the summer, but

she wasn't enjoying it. She was unfocused, glassy -eyed, dissociated,

jerking around and dancing, and she actually couldn't stop.

Frau Trophia reportedly danced for a week straight.

The constant exertion took a toll on her health, and she was sent to a remote

monastery to recuperate.

But strangely, after Frau left Strasbourg...

The dancing didn't stop.

Within about two or three weeks, dozens more people had been consumed by this

same urge to dance and dance for hours and days in an altered state of

consciousness.

By the end of August, perhaps 400 people were all dancing,

in some cases on and off for weeks.

Their toenails fell off, their feet were lacerated, their shoes were full of

blood.

And then some of them dropped dead.

It was estimated 15 a day dropped dead, maybe 400 in all over the course of the

two months.

It was a terrifying and terrible thing.

What's so remarkable about these events of 1518 is that we have copies of

the memos sent among the members of the governing party. circle of the city.

There are intense debates within the city as to what is causing this outbreak

dancing.

And they make quite clear these people do not want to be dancing.

They are absolutely involuntary.

What could have possibly triggered such a bizarre and deadly affliction?

At the time, the people of Strasbourg began to suspect that the dancing plague

was the work.

Of the devil.

This was something that was seen as a form of possession.

So they started to look at possible supernatural explanations.

And the first thing that they thought of was this possibly being instigated by

the devil himself.

And so they tried to purge every kind of sin from the city.

It didn't work.

When banning sin failed, the townspeople wondered if the dancing plague was not

the work of the devil, but rather a Catholic saint by the name of Vitus.

Saint Vitus is an important saint in the late medieval European church.

There was a very strong belief that there were a number of saints who could

cure you of a particular disease, and if you were a sinner, then they would

punish you by inflicting that disease.

Saint Vitus was believed to cause movement disorders, including compulsive

dancing. So it made complete sense to people at the time that if anybody was

dancing wildly, it's because they'd somehow offended Saint Vitus.

So what they then do is that they bundle people into wagons and take them to a

shrine dedicated to saint fighters, located about 30 miles north of

Interestingly, they put red shoes on them. They cover the red shoes in holy

and holy water, and they lead them round the shrine in a circle.

And then we are told most of the people recovered their sanity.

So it seems that they cured it by appealing to the supernatural beliefs of

people who had been afflicted.

Was the dancing plague both caused and cured by a higher power?

Well, it made sense to people in medieval Europe.

In modern times, experts have proposed a more scientific theory.

They claim that this ghoulish dancing frenzy was the result of mass

illness. Or as it's more commonly known, mass hysteria.

Mass hysteria is when a group of people are experiencing the same physical

symptoms without a definitive physical cause of those symptoms. For example, if

you're in a social setting whereby someone is experiencing a symptom, you

then believe that that's also happening to you.

Today, the most popular theory for the 1518...

dancing plague is that this is an example of mass hysteria but it's not

the case that unusual behavior is mass psychogenic illness we're talking about

several hundred people dancing for days or weeks some of them dying could mass

hysteria really be what started the spread of the dancing plague or was it

work of the devil whether it was psychological or spiritual in nature the

dancing plague is certainly a lesson in human behavior, as is the case of a 3

,000 -year -old virus that spread around the world and became one of the

deadliest diseases on Earth.

The Valley of Mexico, November 8th, 1519.

Spanish conquistadors led by Hernan Cortes arrive at Tenochtitlan, the

of the Aztec Empire, bearing dreams of conquest and an insatiable desire for

gold. But they also brought with them a lethal, infectious disease.

Smallpox is introduced into the Americas very dramatically at a specific point

in time and alongside the European invasion.

So this is a tremendous sort of clash of civilizations, the likes of which the

world had never seen before and will never see again.

The single most deciding factor as to why Native American civilizations fell

rapidly was the introduction of smallpox.

So smallpox is a virus.

It causes these sort of irregular spaced pustule -y skin lesions.

and had a devastating effect on Native Americans in the New World.

In Europe, most people had experienced smallpox.

They had the scars, or they had it as children.

But there was no immunity in the New World. There was no immunity among kids.

There was no immunity among adults. And so when this new disease came, everybody

was vulnerable.

And so it spread like wildfire.

Although the exact numbers will never be known, many experts estimate that a

staggering 95 % of the indigenous population would eventually die from

But what's even more chilling is the fact that smallpox ran rampant for

thousands of years.

I am astounded by how far back smallpox goes.

For most of human recorded history, we believe it's the same strain that was

infecting one person after another, this human chain of infection.

The Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses V, had scarring on his face that's

consistent with smallpox.

It is estimated that smallpox has killed between 300 and 500 million people.

In its more than 10 ,000 year existence.

Which begs the question, how did we finally beat it?

Well, it just so happens that the cure for smallpox was discovered in a small

English village in the 1790s.

In the late 1700s, doctors were noticing that milkmaids did not seem to be

affected by smallpox.

and their complexions remained unscarred.

And people were starting to make that connection that there might be immunity

from catching a different kind of pox virus, cowpox.

So milkmaids were exposed to the cowpox virus, probably got infected, and were

then immune to smallpox.

Edward Jenner was an English physician and decided to test this observation and

took a piece of an ulcer from a cow that was infected by cowpox and gave it

to an eight -year -old boy and then, a little bit later, gave this little boy

a dose of smallpox.

Fortunately, the eight -year -old boy did not develop smallpox and was

protected.

Because it wasn't like a direct viral intake, right, you would get a slightly

lesser version of the disease. But because you had been exposed to it, you

would, of course, then have immunity.

So it was probably a first instance of a crude version of vaccination.

As it turns out, Edward Jenner's revolutionary experiment is remembered

for its inspiration, its sheer audacity.

And because it provided a new defense against infectious disease, which we now

refer to as the vaccine.

The word vaccine comes from the virus name vaccinia, which was the virus that

was the cowpox -derived virus that left people immune to smallpox.

Vaccines prevent disease, and some vaccines can last for decades, and some

vaccines need to be given every year.

For smallpox, people had to get vaccinated every 10 years.

Vaccines are humanity's single greatest weapon against plagues.

Rooted in science and not superstition, they provide a powerful way to fight

outbreaks.

The last naturally occurring case of smallpox was identified in 1979, and in

1980, the World Health Organization declared that smallpox was eradicated,

longer spreading from person to person.

Eradicating smallpox was the biggest public health victory in the history of

human race.

The eradication of smallpox is the most famous use of a highly effective

vaccine.

But there are some diseases that are harder to cure.

There are viruses for which we have no vaccines at all because they mutate too

rapidly.

And so because viruses mutate, there's a certain limitation to what you can do

with a vaccine.

The minute you get too confident and you think that we defeated Mother Nature,

somehow it always finds a way to come back.

It appears that even with our technological and medical advancements,

ability to isolate, contain, and even eradicate certain diseases will remain

ongoing endeavor.

And in some cases, discovering the source of the affliction can be

Like in the case of a deadly disorder caused by a gruesome

tribal ritual.

Papua New Guinea.

This group of tropical islands located in the southwest Pacific Ocean is one of

the most remote places on earth.

During the 1970s, it was discovered that a local tribe known as the Foray was

afflicted by a strange and deadly illness.

The Foray people lived up in the mountains of this island.

There were probably about 36 ,000 of them that were spread out across the

mountain valleys in northern New Guinea.

They lived in 170 different hamlets with people who spoke six different

languages.

When the Westerners started to interact with the foray, missionaries and

anthropologists found an alarming number of them were dying of a strange disease

that nobody had really seen before.

One of the symptoms of this disease is something that is known as pathological

laughter.

You know, inappropriate laughter, giggling.

Major magazines and newspapers called it laughing death.

At the time, experts estimated that the laughing death killed 200 Foray people

every year.

The Foray called the illness Kuru, which translates to...

trembling in their dialect.

The disease was puzzling to scientists who could not determine its cause.

And in 1981, Dr. Robert Klitzman traveled to Papua New Guinea to try and

the mystery.

When I went there for the first time, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I

learned many things.

Initially, it was called the laughing death, which is sort of a misnomer.

People did engage in what seemed like laughter, but it really was sort of

uncontrollable expressions and movements that they had.

Kuru causes a number of symptoms.

It is a neurological disease somewhat similar to Parkinson's disease or

Alzheimer's.

The symptoms are loss of muscle control over one's body, shaking, inability to

walk, and it has mental symptoms as well.

So people may not be able to control their emotions or what they say.

The disease was terrifying in many ways.

The symptoms usually from start to the person's death take about a year.

It's invariably fatal.

The Foray people believe that the disease was caused by sorcery.

So they believe that a sorcerer would take something that belonged to you and

wrap it around a stone and bury it and cast a spell on it.

And that may sound ridiculous to some of us, but they'd say, that's just magic.

The world in which they live was this kind of a world.

Was Kuru the result of supernatural forces as locals believed?

It's an intriguing notion.

But doctors eventually suspected that the real culprit was that the foray

participated in the gruesome practice of consuming human flesh.

When Western anthropologists began to study some of the communities of Papua

Guinea in the 1930s, they discovered practice of a

ritualistic, religious -based funerary cannibalism.

The Papua New Guineans who engaged in cannibalism saw the consumption of the

brain as a way of imbibing that person's life force.

It was a devotional practice.

When they practiced cannibalism, at one feast I calculated that there were 56

people present, 53 of whom then died of the disease.

So it was pretty devastating.

Now, every time someone died, they would consume the brain.

I met people, for instance, who would say, well, I ate a foot, or I ate a

and they were still alive.

And so the concentration of the Kuru was highest when they would consume the

brain.

Perhaps it's not surprising that eating human brains is not good for your

health. But how did this practice lead to the bizarre laughing symptoms of

Kuru is caused by something called the prion, an infectious protein that is in

all of our brains.

And in roughly one out of every million people or so, it flips the wrong way.

And when it's flipped, it could lead to other proteins flipping in our

brain and forming clumps that could kill brain cells.

Cool probably happened because someone in the 4A group had such a protein flip

the wrong way, and that person was then consumed by other people.

And that led to proteins in their brains flipping.

And when they died, they were eaten, and the rest is history. It continued to

spread.

The story of Kuru is as fascinating as it is disturbing.

But what's even more unsettling is that this type of disease has harmed people,

not just in Papua New Guinea, but all over the world.

Except we call it mad cow disease.

In the 1980s, British cattle became stricken with mad cow disease because

farmers feed them supplements.

And these supplements are made up of dead cows infected with prion disease.

And then people would consume that.

Eventually, over the course of 15, 16 years, 178 people in the UK died

from what became known as mad cow disease.

Mad cow disease or neurodegenerative diseases such as Kuru can manifest

of 70 years after the ingestion of some contaminated food or livestock.

And so it's very unclear as to whether or not it can happen in the future.

The study of Kuru was important for many reasons. One is, of course, the fact

that the symptoms in humans from eating an infected cow are basically the same

symptoms that we saw with Kuru.

So they provided this unique glimpse on what can cause a disease that's

different than what anyone had thought before.

Could our understanding of the laughing death disorder help us to better

identify and avoid strange outbreaks in the modern world?

Perhaps. And now more than ever, people are going to great lengths to dodge

diseases and even death itself.

Their secret is to remain frozen for centuries.

Scottsdale, Arizona.

In a sprawling industrial park on the north side of the city stands the

headquarters of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Like most cutting -edge medical facilities, the doctors and scientists

day and night to provide care for their patients.

Except in the case of Alcor, the patients are all deceased.

In our view, people who are declared legally dead today are potentially

revivable.

Alcor's mission is to take a patient who cannot be helped by today's medicine

into the future, where hopefully more advanced technology can repair and

them.

We're here in Alcor's patient care bay.

In this room, we have all 184 of our human patients in these dewers, these

cryogenic dewers, essentially very large, expensive vacuum flasks.

So in each one of these containers, there are four whole -body patients.

On this side, you can see that I can put my hand on here without any problem,

but just a few inches further in is minus 320 Fahrenheit. It's extremely

People say that we freeze people colloquially, but that's not strictly

if we do it right.

Our patients are essentially in something like a long -term coma, except

is no metabolic activity whatsoever.

To date, 184 deceased patients lie in deep freeze within Alcor's facility in

hope that one day they'll be resurrected.

This bizarre form of potential immortality is known as cryonics.

Cryonics is the process of freezing the human body, perhaps just the human head.

in order to stop the biological process of decay.

So the hope is, if you could freeze somebody alive, even with an incurable

disease, perhaps you can thaw them out at some point in the future when science

has found a cure for that disease.

In that sense, perhaps you can defeat cancer, defeat all the ravages of old

perhaps even become immortal.

Professor Robert Ettinger, physicist.

Started the cryonics movement in the 1960s, where he proposed to store people

ultra -cold temperatures where there's potential that future technology could

repair and revive them.

Right now, there are many companies that do this. There are hundreds of frozen

individuals right now across the United States.

Worldwide, it is estimated that at least 500 people have been placed in cryonics

suspension.

Most notably, baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams.

There are even those who claim that Walt Disney's body is preserved in a

cryonics facility.

But is there any reason to believe that this strange process could actually

work?

If you live in the countryside, you know that come wintertime, the lakes freeze

over.

But if you ever look right on top of the lakes, you'll see frozen organisms,

fish and frogs.

And then come springtime,

some of them spring back to life again, when you thought they were frozen solid.

What's the trick?

The trick is that Mother Nature has created an antifreeze to lower the

point for these animals, such that even though it appears as if they're frozen

solid, the bodily fluids inside these animals still flows, and these animals

still alive, even though their metabolism rate is very close to zero.

So in some sense, we're trying to copy nature. And it turns out that some forms

of tissue can in fact be frozen almost indefinitely.

If cryonics is able to deliver on its promise of immortality as many hope,

it eventually mean that death itself will one day come to an end?

Cryonics really is about giving people choice over how long they live.

We think that in the future, we should be able to revive cryonics patients and

rejuvenate them and let them go about their lives again.

What we want really is indefinite lifespan.

If in the future someone can show that you could be revived after being frozen

solid, then the whole question of immortality is on the table.

We're not there yet, but there's no law of science that says you can't do it.

Perhaps the future for treating a deadly virus would be to simply put a patient

on ice until a cure can be found.

In the meantime, it's reassuring to know that modern medicine, along with an

understanding of how outbreaks begin and spread, has made great strides in

controlling the escalation of contagious diseases.

But will killers like smallpox still be around for another 3 ,000 years?

Or can a new plague emerge that's impervious to antibiotics?

While we can attempt to protect ourselves from deadly pandemics, just

next unstoppable outbreak will occur, remain

unexplained.

Repair and Synchronization by Easy Subtitles Synchronizer 1.0.0.0