Good morning. I'm Jeff Davis, the executive director of the alumni association. It's my pleasure to welcome everyone to build on bytes.
Our virtual speaker series, which features faculty, staff, research and alumni here to share their work expertise and impact on a wide range of unique and interesting topics.
We look forward to showcasing some of the extraordinary people and programs within our community and hope that you enjoy this exciting, an interactive virtual speaker series.
So, he's installment a bulldog by past plagues to the present day, pandemic, common, understanding, epidemic infections disease in the past was to understand it in the present.
We're so very pleased to have our featured speaker Dr Molly's document. He's an associate professor in the Department of anthropology in Middle Eastern cultures here, at were also fortunate to have our moderator. Joining Dr. sacrament this morning.
Dr. Anna Oscar holds the system professor in the Department of anthropology and Middle Eastern cultures. We encourage our viewing audience to utilize that. Q and a feature via WebEx and the comment section via Facebook live stream to submit your questions.
And now it's my pleasure turn of our program this morning to Dr and Dr sacrament.
Thank you. Hello and welcome. I'm Anna.
I'm an assistant professor in the Department of anthropology and Middle Eastern cultures and here for about four years I'm a bio archaeologist specializing in how trauma and more Tory practices create identity in the past.
I work primarily in Croatia, and they run two different study abroad programs for students who want to study bio archeology and a great honor for us to be part of the bulldog bites program and we want to thank the alumni association for the invitation today. Today.
I'm happy to introduce my colleague Dr Molly's.
Molly is an associate professor in the Department of anthropology and Middle Eastern cultures here at she grew up in and around Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania BA,
degrees in anthropology and women's studies from Penn State,
and completed a year of post baccalaureates study at this Smithsonian,
national museum of natural history before,
moving to the South M.
A. and pH. D in anthropology from Emory University as well as a graduate certificate and gender studies, she next had a post doctoral fellowship for a year at the University of South Carolina for starting.
Molly is a bio archeologist focused on learning about human health and disease in the past using information recovered from human skeletal material this evidence of human skeletal material is enriched by contextual information from the archaeological sites that the remains are recovered from
it's also enriched by historical information about the original human cultures represented by the remains and archaeological site,
and when it is available,
she also incorporates information from studies of the DNA of bacteria recovered from the remains using this evidence for work focuses on understanding.
How person's social identity such as their gender and socio economic status affects their health.
She also researches how we can use biological material recovered from calcified dental plaque not as calculus to determine what infectious diseases people who were infected within the past, especially those that wouldn't. Otherwise, leave distinctive marks on their skeleton.
She's also interested in understanding how the bacteria, which causes syphilis has changed over time and answering one of the great mystery surrounding syphilis besides whether Columbus was responsible for it.
This other mystery is how the characteristics of humans affected with syphilis impact,
their disease process,
whether they're age other infectious diseases that they have,
and whether they've experienced a lot of stress during their lives,
lead to them,
having a relatively harmless version of the disease or led to them having a disabling devastating disease process also why do some pass this disease to their partner children and others don't.
Molly has just been awarded a large grant from the National Science Foundation to fund work done by herself and undergraduate students at to examine these factors.
Lastly,
she works with other Mississippi researchers,
including myself to better understand the lives and health experiences of those institutionalized at the Mississippi State asylum,
which opened in Jackson,
Mississippi in the late eighteen hundreds in addition to her most recent grant.
She's also been the recipient of three other grants from the she's also edited two volumes and published a multitude of articles.
So today we're going to ask her questions about how scientific knowledge about the past epidemics and infectious disease can be used to better understand present day.
Epidemics and pandemic, helping people to improve their help, lessen the effects of disease and avoid future epidemics. Molly Molly, you're muted.
Sure, that's a great question. So we know that we can recover information about human health and disease from historical documents written documents from the past as well as archaeological evidence.
So information from archaeological sites, but all of this is indirect people recorded it or less traces about it.
And when we want to understand how human biology worked in the past,
and how human health and disease worked in the past direct evidence,
right from the body is very,
very immediately useful skeletons act,
like archives of our lived experiences throughout our lives every time that we grow and develop our skeletons change,
our skeletons are maintained throughout adulthood and then when we're they contain all of the they contain records of all of our past experiences.
And, like, I like to explain to my students skeletons can open themselves up, like, books, containing knowledge about human lives in the past as long as, you know, how to read them.
And that's one of the things that we teach our students here at Mississippi State about how to obtain direct information about human biology, health and disease from skeletal material.
For instance,
as you're growing up,
you record information about your health,
your diet,
whether you're affected by diseases,
etcetera in your teeth,
which after they formed,
don't change they stay in these little libraries archives of information about your childhood.
In addition,
human skeletons from the skull on down can show information about our activities during our lives,
our lifestyle,
our nutrition diet,
our level of health,
whether we experienced a lot of stress during our lives as well,
as the health and disease conditions that we experienced many of these leave distinctive marks on our skeletons.
For instance, tuberculosis and syphilis can leave distinctive marks on our skeletons and other experiences can leave patterns of marks on our skeletons.
Like, osteoarthritis, for instance, which so many of us are affected by, will leave patterns throughout the various joints in the body that they are that this condition effects in addition when it's available.
I like to incorporate knowledge from bio molecules. So, biological molecules that can be recovered from human skull to material.
That includes small traces of the DNA of bacterial pathogens, these infectious disease causing micro organisms that can be captured in the calcified plaque on our teeth. Which if you think about it is a really good reason to go to the dentist regularly. Right?
As well,
as DNA from bacteria,
that can be caught up in the blood because when you're infected with something,
the gen,
is wide spread throughout your blood and that can be captured in bones as well as proteins which pathogens can leave behind.
So, I work with scientists at other institutions, and here at Mississippi State to incorporate that also direct evidence of what people suffered from, in the past their disease conditions.
So that we can get a more complete understanding of what human lives were like,
in the past,
how humans experienced the world,
and how they adapted to their situations and environmental conditions,
and their level of health and disease.
Great. So, why are you interested in learning about syphilis? Why are you interested in learning about the history of syphilis and why? And how the course of disease varies from person to person another good question. So it seems.
In some ways, kind of like an a search interest, right? And I've received a lot of teasing through some components of my graduate and professional career about this. Right? Because it's a highly stigmatized condition like other sexually transmitted diseases.
There are a lot of negative associations with it, but I like to approach it as though it's a disease, like the other. Right?
And also, I'm very interested in it, because, as I'll talk about, in a minute syphilis is a major public health program problem for communities in the United States as well as elsewhere.
No,
I've been interested in learning about syphilis since I was an undergraduate,
and I first learned that syphilis is one of the few known diseases who's symptoms varied in relation to sex so,
whether you're male or female and affected by syphilis,
specifically,
I was told,
by my teacher that it's more severe mails and less severe in females and I wondered why a strange my new research project has its origins in this very question that I asked and my first teaching as an undergraduate student.
One of the biggest mystery is about syphilis and I mentioned is whether it was present in Europe before columbus's voices of discovery, or whether it was brought from the Americas to Europe by columbus's voyage is of discovery.
But I'm most interested in the other big mysterious question about it because this question answering that it's the biggest since for public health and for clinical medicine, and therefore communities all throughout the United States, and the world.
And this question is,
why is syphilis express very,
very differently between different patients a majority of cases of syphilis will resolve,
or get better without medical treatment to medical intervention after the very earliest stage of infection.
But in a substantial majority majority of cases around fifteen to forty percent of people who are infected with syphilis, the infection keeps going, it persists.
And there is debilitating, devastating damage to the body. It damages the cardiovascular system for instance, causing deadly aortic aneurysms. It causes painful.
And debilitating damage to the neurological system, resulting in paralysis, dementia and other manifestations, and it can cause destructive tumors and sometimes death and individuals, which is really terrible.
Importantly, these cases also, typically had really, really mild, early symptoms to the point where people sometimes didn't even notice they, they were infected. They weren't correctly diagnosed with syphilis.
They didn't even know to go to the doctor and so they continue to have the disease and later go on to manifest terrible symptoms in addition to the impacts on their own lives.
Because they weren't treated people with untreated syphilis, can keep transmitting the infection to their partners, or they can give it to their unborn children causing what is known as congenital syphilis, which continues as one of our great tragedies within modern medicine and public health.
Cases of congenital syphilis, which can cause miscarriage stillbirth, early death and lifelong neurological problems has spiked recently in the rising almost four folds. Just in the past seven years.
This is mostly because cases of syphilis in pregnant women but we're not six. This is mostly because of cases of syphilis and pregnant women that were not six.
Treated despite hundreds of years of research on the subject, starting way back and the seventeen hundreds scientists still don't know why some patients are able to recover.
Their immune systems are able to recover from syphilis after an initial infection. Well, others have very mild, early infection, and then progress to those serious, even deadly symptoms and later stage infection.
The ones that I just described the number of reported cases of syphilis has increased two and a half fold in the past decade in Canada, the United States.
And Western Europe, and it even higher rates and other countries a lot of this is because of inadequate testing tools. So when my project, which I'm very excited to be doing with several undergraduate students and graduate students, that Mississippi State.
We will study more than three hundred skeletons from collections in the United States of nineteen th, to early twentieth century skeletons representing individuals who were diagnosed with prior to death, and lived in the Pre antibiotic error.
We will examine how chronic stress so experiences of a lot of stress over the course of your lives been constantly stressed advanced age,
health conditions,
like,
being infected with more than one disease at a time or having one chronic disease at a time like a cardiovascular disease or diabetes,
or obesity,
and their immune status relates to them either recovering from infection in the early stages,
or developing that terrible destructive,
late stage disease and does having passed the condition to their partners.
And their children.
The part of this project that most excites me is that this research can be translated into clinical tools that will make diagnosing and modern individuals more effective and accurate specifically the project will result in better understanding of which patients
are more likely to have mild,
early stage.
Infection and therefore not be likely to get diagnosed and treated and instead progress to that severe, late stage infection. This should lead to improve clinical guidelines for medical professionals for.
Identifying testing and diagnosing these patients ultimately helping to mitigate or stop the spread of syphilis. And I should note that there's another part of the project that I'm really excited about.
So,
in the last year of the project,
I'll be working with faculty in the in architecture and interior design here at Mississippi State as well as undergraduates students and anthropology and undergraduate students and architecture and interior design,
and courtesy of funding from the National Science Foundation as part of this larger project,
we'll be erecting several museum exhibits for public outreach and education that will be in the archaeology museum of the cob Institute of archaeology right here on campus that members of the public as well as K through twelve school groups can come.
And tour, and they'll provide information that's all about what we're talking about today.
How we can use knowledge about health and disease in the past to enrich our understanding of the same processes and conditions in the present and to better protect ourselves from infectious disease.
In addition to those wonderful museum exhibits,
which will be able to change out every few months,
there will also be addictive for kids so that they can learn all about how we can recover information from the archaeological record and use it to better understand the lives of people in the past as well as the lives of people in the present.
That sounds great. I'm really excited. Yeah. How can knowledge of infectious diseases that affect the past populations help us to understand present infectious diseases and novel diseases. That's a great question.
So some of the most useful information,
when it comes to generating knowledge from past infectious diseases and apply to present day ones is about what's called host pathogen Co,
evolution and here,
humans are the hosts right?
And the pathogens that infectious disease causing micro organisms host pathogen.
Co,
evolution is when the human host alongs with evolves along with the pathogen now,
pathogens evolved much faster than humans do,
because they can reproduce so incredibly quickly whereas humans take about two and a half decades on average to reproduce,
but give it as an evolutionary arms race none,
the less with the pathogens often,
having a kind of leg up on top of the humans studies of the entire or genome pathogens.
That have been recovered from ancient skeleton material can tell us when they first started infecting humans.
They can also tell us about how harmful these pathogens were when they first started infecting humans sometimes as many as tens of thousands of years ago and other times with syphilis just within the past few hundred years.
But this is really important, because pathogens that have just started to affect humans, having spilled over from another source like a non human animal are typically much more harmful or the technical term is variant.
Then, pathogens that have evolved alongside humans for a long period of time. Those that have been evolving alongside humans for a long time have come to a kind of the top.
A period of peace, right there. Coexisting where the humans can survive with the disease and the humans can survive are the, and the disease can survive with the humans ones that are brand new to humans are typically much more harmful.
This is the case, for instance, with our current pandemic caused by SARS POV, two, for instance, which is brand new to human populations, having been resident, Justin nonhuman animals, such as bats. Previously.
Now,
syphilis is famous for likely having been very,
very harmful to humans soon after it emerged in the fourteen hundreds contemporary writers wrote that it caused suffers genitals to rot and fall off,
caused amputation of noses and limbs and terrible smelling using soars and regularly killed people.
You might be thinking, I don't remember learning about stuff like that and sex, Ed or health class. I feel like I would remember that. You're right. Syphilis does not cause the symptoms anymore.
It likely became less harmful within a few decades of its emergence. At least this is what historical records indicate.
No,
since within this evolutionary arms race between pathogens and humans that have caused pathogens to evolve to become less harmful in the past,
such as with syphilis can be extremely useful for practitioners in clinical medicine and public health.
This is because they can show us how we can manipulate or artificially change conditions under with, under which modern pathogens are spread, like, SARS.
Coby to to potentially cause it to evolve to be less harmful as well.
Another thing I'd like to note is that also the health and disease.
Past population that we construct from the mark on skeletons can also be viewed as providing us with experiments from the past.
It is not ethical to experiment on living humans in many different scenarios, but it can be invaluable to understand how human health and disease is shaped by many different environmental conditions.
And this is especially true over the life span of a human over a long period of time. We have questions that we'd like to know the answers to such as how to humans adopt to challenging situations how far can we be pushed?
And how much can we adapt before we reach a breaking point?
And our health collapses into disease when we look at the human pass through skeletal remains,
we can learn about the limits of human adaptation and exactly how human bodies respond to challenging environmental conditions from war to famine to pandemic to climate change.
And we can then take these lessons about human resilience and apply them to modern populations and be able to identify the limits of resilience and threat and populations before they reach that.
And before they passed that boundary and collapse into experiences of disease.
Alright, what are the cost specifically when we're thinking about pandemic our studies of past pandemic helping us to understand the current source Cosy to pandemic.
That's a great question. So, what's really, really interesting is if you look back at the literature from the past several decades, researchers, in many different scientific domains, have been warning us that a pandemic is coming soon.
And in particular, they've very been very concerned about a viral pandemic and the one that might spill over or jump from nonhuman animals into animals, the reason for this.
Because you might look at this now and think well, they had a crystal ball. They knew that this was coming is not because they had a magical ability to predict what would occur in the future.
But because these researchers, we're using lessons from the human past about where pandemic come from how often they occur and how they spread through human populations.
And so a lot of researchers have for quite a long time that we would likely be faced as human societies with an experience like the corona fires pandemic. Very soon.
In particular researchers have turned to pandemic in the past to get a really firm understanding of how pandemic affected human societies and why,
and from this glean specific information that might be useful for present societies and also future societies and planning for unfortunately,
the next pandemic a lot of researchers have print to the nineteen eighteen influence a pandemic also called the nineteen eighteen Spanish flu,
which was concurrent with World War one and use that as a template for predictive studies about future pandemic for several decades.
Now, this was also caused by a virus, and this also spilled over from nonhuman animals. And then in large part, courtesy of World War one was able to spread around the globe.
So,
scientists have looked at the conditions that facilitated the spread of this disease,
which was also a respiratory virus and have made predictions about how future pandemic splits spread their patterns of transmission,
which communities they were likely to hit the hardest and other informative messages.
For instance, past endemics show us that groups who.
Of social and quality,
those who are impoverished those who are people of color and members of communities of color those who are socially marginalized,
such as people of diverse sexual orientations and religious minorities are also more likely to be hit hard by infectious disease pandemic in the past in large parts,
because they are likely to have preexisting health conditions and a lower level of overall health,
courtesy of their lifelong marginalization and inadequate access to resources.
They're also less likely to be able to protect themselves from the current pandemic.
For instance,
they're more likely to be what we call now essential workers people who really are required to go in and perform physical tasks work and are not able to work from home the same as true when we look at the current source Coby two pandemic where
we see very high rate of sickness and death and marginalized communities,
communities of color and economically disadvantage activities,
such as indigenous groups on reservations and African American communities and lot next communities throughout the country.
We can go even deeper into history than that and look at lessons. From the Black death, which is given historians, a lot of rich material about how infectious diseases operating in the past recent studies that have recovered all of the DNA.
So, the entire DNA sequence from the pathogen that cause the Black death.
Have shown that it caused just as much harm to human bodies in the past, when, as much as thirty to fifty percent of the population of Europe and Asia die during the Black death as it does now. Right?
So the harm caused to the host in modern strains of the plague is the same as the harm,
cause to the host and past strains of the plague,
the costs the Black death and this leads researchers to understand that it's not that the pathogen caused the Black death was terribly harmful,
but instead that social and economic conditions of many members of those past populations during the medieval period,
much more exposed and much more vulnerable.
Resulting and such high rates of death, we can take these messages into the future to better protect future communities from pandemic.
And we can also use them in the present to try to step in the way of the harm caused by the current virus and buffer. Our disadvantage communities through public health interventions and measures. What are the questions?
Do we have questions from our our participants? I'd like to ask you about comorbidities and Co infections. Okay. We need to finish up relatively soon.
We know that from the current virus pandemic that being sick with more than one condition at a time,
something known as a comorbidity or Co,
infection involves more than one infectious disease,
such as diabetes,
or obesity can result in a higher likelihood of infection and severe sickness.
Does evidence from history show the same patterns and you were talking about this but I'm wondering if, if you could just go into just a tiny bit of detail about the idea about coinfection and comobidity.
Yeah, sure it absolutely does.
So some of our preliminary research on has already shown that if you are infected with another infectious disease,
even the ones that cause something that we see as relatively harmless such as gum disease,
periodontal disease or ginginitis,
you're much more likely to have a severe disease.
We can go back in history to the Black Death people who were who died of the Black death were more likely than people who survived the Black death and didn't enter the archaeological record. Right? During the Black death.
There were far more likely to have evidence that they were suffering from other disease conditions, or had very poor health and nutrition during the childhood, making their more vulnerable to a new severe outbreak of infectious disease.
That's a great question.
Alright, well, it looks like we're running out of time first. Thank you Molly for speaking on both sides today. I'd also like to thank everyone who joined us online via WebEx and Facebook live.
We'd also like to thank the alumni association again for their invitation, and please visit their website for more Webinars and more information you can also visit the website for the Department of anthropology and Middle Eastern cultures at a m. E. C.
dot to learn more about the department and our faculty, including a lot about Molly's work context for information for all the faculty listed on the website and please join us next time for bulldog bites. Thank you so much.
Been a real pleasure take care. Alright. Bye.
