GERM
00:00:09.440 – 00:00:12.480
One, two, three, eyes on me. My name is Germ.

WORM
00:00:12.480 – 00:00:13.440
I’m Worm.

GERM
00:00:13.520 – 00:00:27.840
Welcome to episode 123 of the Germ and Worm Travel Health Podcast. Chemtrails, Contrails, RFK Jr. And the Big Con. It’s a big planet. See it in good health. I’m Dr. Paul Pottinger, also called Germ. I’m an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Washington.

WORM
00:00:28.180 – 00:00:33.460
I’m Dr. Chris Sanford, also known as Worm Family Medicine Doc, also at the University of Washington.

GERM
00:00:33.460 – 00:01:27.030
Okay, Chris, here are some of the questions that we’re going to consider today sent to us by listeners across the country and around the world. What are chemtrails and can they hurt us? Apps. More on the travel apps. What are German Worms favorites? The Mystery illness in Grand Canyon. What did that turn out to be? And Bunda Bugeo. An update, please, for Africa and beyond. A reminder to all of our listeners. Thank you for joining us.

Please, please contact us with your own travel health questions, your stories, and your tips for success. Just get us online. GermanWorm.com or send us an email. GermanWormMail.com our medical disclaimer.

This podcast is designed to inform, inspire and entertain. But before you travel, as always, please see a qualified healthcare professional for recommendations specific to you and to your itinerary.

So, Chris, you just got back from two countries that start with a letter B that most people probably have even heard of, much less visited, and they’re never visited in sequence. What? Where have you go and what’d you do?

WORM
00:01:27.110 – 00:01:32.950
Yeah, I just went from Burning man to Bangkok to Bhutan to Brunei.

GERM
00:01:33.190 – 00:01:35.990
Oh, man. So you’re just visiting places that start with B?

WORM
00:01:35.990 – 00:01:37.430
Yeah, that’s my phase of life.

GERM
00:01:37.430 – 00:01:38.870
Currently I’m going to Bergen next, so. Maybe I’ll see you there.

WORM
00:01:38.870 – 00:03:14.140
It was all good. But, yeah, I just spent 12 days in Bhutan. I was faculty for a wilderness medicine course there. Fascinating country.

Tell you a little bit about it. It’s tiny, it’s squished between two giants. In between India and China, it’s Budd. And they really limit the number of tourists who can go there.

So traveled for 12 days up in the mountains with my wife and the people, the attendees of this course. We went to monasteries and fortresses and it was just fascinating.

Talk to the monks, listen to the monks, play music, learned a lot about Buddhism, which was super interesting. Had a lovely time, would like to go back. And then since I was in the neighborhood, I thought, you know, I’ve always wanted to go to Brunei.

I on the island of Borneo, another bee. Most of it is Malaysia or Indonesia, but there’s this itty bitty country, a sultanate way up at the north called Brunei. It’s primarily Islamic.

They speak Malay. It’s rich, they have oil. I spent three days in the capital, Bandar Sere Bhagawan, which is pretty urban and rich and developed.

But then I went to a national park for three days. I stayed at a jungle lodge and got tours every day. Day tours.

Nice thing about that, a lot of Indonesia and Malaysia has been leveled and turned into palm oil plantations. But the park that I went to called the Uli Temburong park is this big national park which is still virgin rainforest.

So it was great just to go hang out near the equator and see all the birds and listen to the crickets and get very hot and sweaty for several days. So an excellent trip again, would like to go back.

GERM
00:03:14.220 – 00:03:19.380
It’s amazing. And. And you stayed healthy the whole time? No illness, diarrheal, respiratory or otherwise?

WORM
00:03:19.380 – 00:03:24.940
A little bit of sunburn. I think I walked into a doorway once or twice and whacked my forehead.

GERM
00:03:25.740 – 00:03:28.920
He must be the tallest guy in all of Brunei. Maybe that’s how that happened.

WORM
00:03:28.920 – 00:03:31.000
But nothing of an infectious nature? No.

GERM
00:03:31.400 – 00:03:34.920
Congrats. Well, okay. That’s super cool. If there are pictures, we should have them posted.

WORM
00:03:35.080 – 00:03:40.760
Yeah, we’ll do. Got some good photos. And speaking of which, you were in exotic Alaska and Canada not so long ago?

GERM
00:03:40.840 – 00:04:59.770
Oh yeah. I just did a Lindblad NatGeo cruise. We flew from Seattle to Sitka, Alaska and then took 12 days to cruise back to Seattle.

And that means we were on the inland waterways. And it was just amazing. This is a repositioning cruise. Usually these cruises take a week and they do the same stuff over and over again, which is also great. This was different. They’re head down to Panama. So that meant that we took longer.

It’s a longer cruise and we went into places that normally people don’t go, certainly not the big cruise ships because they literally can’t get into these areas. The small draft of our ship, the quest was really nice to be, to be able to do. I was on the quest most recently in Costa Rica a few years ago.

And this is a different vibe. So amazing. And we just spent a lot of time with people from first nations in their own territory, their own homes. They were very welcoming to us.

So a lot of cultural contact that it was to me, totally fascinating. And the wildlife and the scenery and the wilderness was unbelievable. Really, really beautiful.

And I live here in Seattle like you, so I’ve been to Vancouver island, at least parts of it, Barkley Sound, Pacific Rim National Park. This was that to the third power. It was quite stunning.

And orcas and whales and river otters and sea otters and sea lions and seals and all the eagles in the world. And it was quite beautiful. And the glaciers were spectacular and nice, nice people.

WORM
00:05:00.190 – 00:05:03.230
Really sounds great. When you were way up north, was it cold?

GERM
00:05:03.310 – 00:06:02.170
It’s funny, it rained almost every day for the first week. In fact, it rained every single day for the first week. And so you would be out in a Zodiac, touring around in the driving rain.

There are more than a few times we were like, what are we doing here? This is just so darn wet. And so you had that mixture of wind and water.

It was fine because your, your floating hotel is a quarter mile away and you just zip back in and have a hot toddy and, and you’re good to go. So no, the cold was like a cold Seattle rain, that kind of thing.

It felt more uncom than Antarctica for sure, just because of that moisture and the dampness. But even with that, it was still a great trip. And if people are curious about Alaska, check out Lynn Blad Najio if you’re interested in that aspect.

I think we had 82 guests on the boat. So small and that’s what I like.

Okay, Chris, here’s our first question comes to you. It’s pretty simple and yet so painful. What are chem trails and can they harm us?

WORM
00:06:02.850 – 00:07:34.540
Well, first let me define what a contrail is, because that’s a real thing, unlike a chemtrail. So a contrail, we’ve all seen them, is basically that little skinny cloud that a jet leaves, no more, no less.

Basically, when a jet goes through a pocket of air with just the right temperature and the right humidity, the water droplets that it expels can form ice on particles and you get a cloud and sometimes the clouds go away soon and sometimes they form into clouds that will stay for a while. They’re not entirely benign because they do contribute a little bit to global warming.

And it’s been estimated that Even up to 2% of global warming is due to contrails.

Now what a chemtrail is, and this is where we bring in the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. A chemtrail is this conspiracy theory that contrails contain chemicals and or vaccines that are going to infect us or do other bad things to us against our will.

They’re put there by bad actors, by the deep state, by corporations, and so a chemtrail is this notion that contrails contain deliberate poisons to toxic, to poisonous or to vaccinate us.

In fact, I got a call not that long ago from a very nice USA newspaper, fact checker, and he said, basically, I know this is nuts, doc, but I have to get it from you. Can you vaccinate somebody through jet exhaust? And I said, you’re right, it is nuts. And no, you cannot.

GERM
00:07:34.780 – 00:07:37.700
I wish you could. It would make our lives so much easier, so much better.

WORM
00:07:37.700 – 00:08:22.680
Yeah, but for a variety of reasons, no. So it’s a shame because he’s sucking up to his base.

I think there’s some MAGA diehards who believe in chemtrails, but it’s not so not even science fiction stuff. And it appalls me because he’s cutting funding at the CDC for very real significant threats like alcohol abuse and tobacco use.

So he cuts that and what’s he going to invest? Investigate chemtrails because it keeps his little polarized base happy. So that’s what a chemtrail is. That’s what a contrail is. Can they do us harm?

Well, we could do better with the contrails and there are a way to minimize those. And that would help a little bit with global warming, but in terms of the whole chemtrail notion, no, it’s just total bs.

GERM
00:08:24.360 – 00:12:32.180
Agree. I have nothing else to add, except let me give you an example of another thing that he’s come up with recently.

We’ve talked a lot about vaccines here. As you recall, hepatitis B is a deadly viral infection, Right? And so we have a wonderful technology that prevents hepatitis B almost perfectly.

And it works if we give it to everybody. So this is part of our routine, has been since the 1990s. Routine.

Childhood immunizations include immunizing newborns in the first day or two of life against hepatitis B. We know this works. It’s reduced hepatitis B infections by 99%, etc. Works very well indeed.

If we do it, it’s important because hepatitis B is a virus made of DNA.

And these DNA viruses, they’re so much tougher than the RNA viruses because they integrate, they’re tenacious, they’re tougher for us to treat, and they can cause liver damage and liver cancer worldwide. This is one of the leading causes of cancer, in fact, is liver cancer from hep B. And it’s totally preventable, as I said.

And yet that’s another example, something that RFK Jr. Is trying to undo. Don’t give it to all kids, only give it to kids if you know that the mother has hep B. Well, this is a terr. We did this for a long time.

It didn’t work. Well, there’s other ways that kids can get hep B, including household exposures.

It’s just difficult in a society that we live in where we do not have a standardized nationalized registry of immunizations and vaccine status and infection status. How do you even know if somebody has Hep B infection? Someone may turn up in a hospital. You don’t have their records or the records are wrong.

So just so much easier to vaccinate the world. And yet he’s trying to undo this.

And as you may recall, what he proposed was to go to a tiny country in Africa, which I have actually not Chris had the pleasure of visiting, called Guinea Bissau.

And in Guinea Bissau, the idea was, well, we’re going to change the vaccine policy to say, not give it to every newborn, but only give it to the newborns whose moms have hep B. And then we’ll see over a period of years how this goes. And this is outrageous, right? Why not do that in the United States if they’re going to do it?

P.S. They can’t do it here because we know that it’s bad. So it’s very racist, it’s very colonialist.

And this made everybody super mad, including thank goodness, the Ministry of Health in Guinea Bissau. So they have said, hell no. We just have news this week. Here we are, mid-10-2026 news from Guinea Bissau that they’re not going to do it.

At least that’s what they are saying currently. And I think that’s right, because why should we relitigate something that we’ve already gone through in our own context?

It’s just, it’s just dumb and it’s harmful and it’s the wrong thing to do. And it reeks of, of Tuskegee, honestly.

Remember in Tuskegee, this was an unethical, really outrageous and criminal so-called scientific study we’ve talked about here on the podcast wherein people were followed for a very debilitating and ultimately fatal disease called neurosyphilis. Syphilis of the central nervous system, in Tuskegee, Alabama.

And as you recall, back in the days before penicillin, there was nothing really to do that worked for, for syphilis. And so these people were enrolled in an observational study to describe the natural history of syphilis. Well, during that study we got a cure.

It’s called penicillin. And it works great.

And the crime, it’s not just the ethical dilemma, it’s the crime that happened was that those doctors did not halt that observational study and treat their patients. They just continued to observe them. And it’s done more damage to our credibility, as it should, I’ll give you that.

With, with people of color and just across the entire national spectrum of belief systems and origin, it just put a lot of mistrust between the general public and doctors. We’ve been trying to heal that rift for more than half a century now. And yet here we are, which I hope we’re doing.

It’s one thing you and I are trying to do it today, right? It’s what we do when we have this voice that we speak to people and try to tell them what we think is true based on great science.

And we certainly wouldn’t do this to people based on their skin color. It’s crazy. And yet that’s exactly, in my opinion, what RFK Jr. Is trying to do in the case of Guinea Bissau. It’s just crazy.

What’s your take on this, Chris?

WORM
00:12:32.340 – 00:13:56.020
Yeah, it’s offensive on every level. It’s immoral on every level.

First, just to go back to the benefit of this vaccine, the benefit has been proven time and time again, and the number of lives it saved in the US Alone is huge. So it’s estimated in the US that half a million childhood infections have been prevented since birth dose Recommendation began in 1991.

And this has prevented more than 90,000 childhood deaths. So the numbers are really large. You can’t call it research if you already know the result of what’s going to happen.

I mean, if I hold a cannonball above your foot, it and I drop it, I cannot justify that by saying, oh, well, you know, gravity, it’s, it’s. We don’t really know the effects of it. I didn’t know which way the cannonball was going to go.

And similarly, we know that if we don’t vaccinate everybody in Guinea-Bissau for hepatitis B, more kids are going to get this, more kids are going to die from this. So I think it’s horrible. I think it’s akin to murder or at least manslaughter.

And I do read, actually both at the same time, that whereas Guinea Bissau has put a pause on this, the Trump administration says it’s going to go forward. And it’s not the first time that we’ve heard claims from them that may turn out not to be true.

But I think RFK Jr and Trump are still trying to get this going, so I don’t think it’s a done deal. I’m worried this may actually happen.

GERM
00:13:56.260 – 00:14:04.220
Are they going to put boots on the ground, make it into the next Venezuela? I don’t understand how that could happen if it’s not permitted by the public health authorities of Guinea-Bissau.

WORM
00:14:04.220 – 00:14:04.720
So. Right.

GERM
00:14:06.150 – 00:15:50.540
It is crazy. And by the way, if you’re an American listener, many of our listeners are American.

You may be curious, do we even still need this in the US Is this a solved problem? So I’m really eager. One of my favorite things of my career is to be involved in ID Week.

I volunteer on behalf of ID Society of America, and every year we spend a week together as a global society of infection. Doctors, epidemiologists, microbiologists, pharmacists, we talk about the latest advances in infectious diseases. And.

And I’m the vice chair of the program.

So I happen to know that there will be unveiled, in a few days from now, a study at ID Week put together by some experts at Kaiser Permanente in Northern California. You don’t know about Kaiser. It’s a wonderful health system.

And they do great research within their own network because they have great data within the record of the people they take care of many, many hundreds of thousands of lives that they protect.

And so what this group has done is to look at people in their own system, Northern California, how kids are being born into households where mom is negative for hep B, but another family member within that household is positive. And based on that, I predict we’re going to see which will be unembargoed soon.

I suspect we’re going to see that this happens all the time, that kids are born where the mom’s serostatus is negative or unknown, but there are uncles, grandparents, siblings who are positive for hep B. Hepatitis B is not the most catchy virus in the world, but it is usually spread through bloodborne exposure, intimate contact.

You can get this as a kid, even if your mom is negative, if someone in the household has that infection. Point being, even here in the good old U.S. of A, we still need to immunize everybody against hepatitis B. Gadzooks.

Let’s not waste any more time on this. And yet here we are talking about it.

WORM
00:15:50.700 – 00:16:25.000
Yeah. One thing that came in the wake of everybody being appalled at Tuskegee, that syphilis study was that a lot of changes were made.

And this is a good thing. There was a formalization of the ethics.

And now, for example, if Paul and I wanted to do a study at the University University of Washington, we would have to go through the Human Subjects Committee. And this is a great organization. We tell them what we’re going to do, they say if it’s ethical or not. And if they say no, then we don’t do it.

There’s no way that a Human Subjects Committee in the United States would approve of this proposed study in Guinea Bissau, which, as Paul says, may be the reason they’re taking it elsewhere.

GERM
00:16:26.200 – 00:16:39.650
Shameful. Let’s. Let’s do better, humanity.

Chris, question to you, German Worm. What are your favorite travel apps? Chris, what do you like to use when you travel?

WORM
00:16:39.650 – 00:17:52.200
You know, I use a bunch. I love my recognition apps. So I recognize music in the cafe with Shazam. I recognize birds with Merlin. I use Picture this.

Or you can use Inaturalist for plants and other animals.

There’s this astronomy stuff that I don’t know much about, but I want to download one where you can point your cell at the sky and it’ll tell you the planets and the stars. A couple options there are Stellarium and Sky Map. There’s one called Map Me where you can download maps.

There’s one that I’m just learning about that looks fun. Called what3words. And it assigns three words to every three meter square on Earth. And it can help you to get around or to find things.

The Google Translate apps are getting better and better. Flighty is one you can use on your iPhone. It’ll tell you about flights. And then one that my wife uses all the time for jet lag is called Timeshifter.

Basically, it’s a jet lag app and you pay a little money and you put in your flight info and it’ll tell you the few days before you leave, when to have caffeine and when not to, and when to get up and when to go to bed. And she says for her it’s really reducing the duration of jet lag. So those are some of my top ones.

GERM
00:17:52.830 – 00:20:47.240
Yeah, I love that so much. And I would. Some of those are my favorites too. So first of all, Flighty F L I G H T Y for those who are frequent flyers. Oh, please check out Flighty.

Now, my family has the paid version of this, but there’s a free version as well. And it’s. It’s hard to imagine how we lived without it before. We’re a family of four people.

We travel a lot, and it’s the only way I can imagine that we actually keep track of the flights. It’s got every detail you could ever imagine and more. And the fun thing is that you can share it within the family.

So if I want to know when someone’s arriving somewhere, I can. And you know, it reads my Apple calendar. It knows what flight somebody’s on. It populates that into the app. It works pretty well.

You can also add these flights manually and you just track people. It also gives you this really fun passport. Chris, at the end of each year, here’s where you went.

And it’s a beautiful stat, including, I’m sorry to say, all the hours of your life you’ve lost waiting for delays of different flights and stuff. So check out flighty, the what3words app. Just to be clear, that’s something everybody should have if they go outside.

So what three words is a way to take your current location and make it super easy to communicate if you’re lost in the woods, but you have a connection to somebody. And we’ll talk about this if you tell them your what three words they know exactly where you are.

So much easier to use than typing in the lat and lawn system or if you’re in Russian, the glasnast system. So what three words I think everybody should have. I love that. A couple others to amplify. I love the I. Naturalist. That’s not.

Not for people who run around naked. Inaturalist means you are a naturalist.

You’re looking at the natural world and you can use your camera to identify most any plant or animal that you see. Likewise, what about those marital spats that come? What is that mountain that I see? What’s that peak over there? So check out Peak Finder.

Peak Finder allows you to use your camera in augmented reality to show it a picture of what you’re looking at these mountains, and it will call them out pretty well. So I like Peak Finder. I use that actually when I’m in the mountains too.

We talked with my son last week and please check this out if you missed it about wildfire safety. And one of the things that he likes is watch duty.

So watch duty is something I think everybody should have if you live in the American west for sure, because it’ll give you alerts about wildfire activity in your area, either at home or where you plan to travel. And then finally, one that I learned about on this most recent cruise in Canada and Alaska, Happy Whale.

If you’re going whale watching or you’re just whale curious, curious, please take a look at Happy Whale, because what Happy Whale does is it allows you to snap a photograph of those Tail flukes, the tail of the whale. You can then upload that and it’ll tell you everything about that whale.

Now, maybe you discovered a new whale, but they have records on many, many thousands of whales. And it can say, here’s your. Here’s this whale based on AI. It’ll instantly tell you what the whale is and where it was most recently seen.

And it’s stunning. This whale was last seen in Maui and now you’re up here in Canada. So it’s super fun. And it’s also a nonprofit profit, so there’s no advertising, etc.

And it’s something that I do recommend people check out Happy Whale.

WORM
00:20:47.480 – 00:21:18.930
I will download some of those. Thank you.

All right, Paul, coming up for you, a few episodes ago we talked about this alarming mystery illness that was occurring in the Grand Canyon where a number of people got fever and achiness and other unpleasant symptoms. At last report, there wasn’t a firm diagnosis. And thank you, Dr. Sheila Macklin, Flagstaff, Arizona for putting this on our radar.

Paul, can you give us a follow up? Was the cause of this ever nailed down?

GERM
00:21:20.210 – 00:24:37.870
No. No, it wasn’t. It’s super discouraging to me. I hate this.

For those who are not familiar with what we’re talking about, please check out episode 111 of Germ and Worm. We’ll tell you about how this unfolded.

But basically a bunch of folks who rafted down the Grand Canyon and many of them got sick with a mystery illness. The mystery is not solved, at least to my knowledge. And in fact, what we know about this comes to us from Dr. Sheila Mackal.

She and her husband who live and spend time in Grand Canyon.

She’s a guest we’ve been fortunate to have here on German Worm and also through the socials rafter outdoors person called Matthew Wapit, who has posted on this in Facebook and has given us, I think, the most detailed, one of the most detailed views of what this was multi system illness.

Patients were very ill, their joints were hurting, their skin was not right, they had terrible GI illness, they had fever and they were tested, we are told, up, down, left and right. And we never got an answer.

So this is one of those situations, as we’ve talked about, that officers of the Epidemics Intelligence Service, junior people at CDC would normally be heavily involved in this and do a whole exhaustive of epidemiologic investigation and put together lab findings, the epidemiology, interviewing people. It’s an example of one of those things that’s not only fascinating, but I think Also really important.

And it’s exactly the kind of program that in my opinion has always been underfunded. Always. And now more than ever is being cut by the powers that be the person whose name we shall not speak again, who’s now running hhs.

So unfortunately a diagnosis was not made here. We’ve talked about the idea that to me it really felt a lot like leptospirosis. Leptospirosis is a bacterial infection.

It comes from the urine of rats. The theory is that what happened here was we had a very dry winter and season and so we had waters running relatively low and high temperatures.

Great time for grass to grow and for rats and mice to thrive down in the canyon where they don’t normally do. But that’s just a theory.

And we’re told by this one particular patient, Matthew Wapa, that he, he says he was tested for lepto and was tested negative.

Now, whether he actually had a convalescent serology, we always do leptospirosis testing twice because it takes time for the body to mount a good response. I don’t know. What I do know is that he was given doxycycline and got better. So was that a coincidence?

Was that the anti inflammatory benefit of the doxy? He actually had a novel virus that’s running around in the canyon. Was it lepto? Was it something else? Was it more than one thing at once?

We don’t know. To me, Chris, my idea is, hey, if you’re a Grand Canyon curious, this is supposed to be one of the great journeys of a lifetime.

I have not rafted the canyon and I would like to. I’m told that actually November is a good time to go because it’s not so incredibly blistering hot.

But this is something that we’ll have to see next year. As the next season rolls up. Will more people get sick this way? We don’t know.

And I think it’s one of those things where we’d say prevent yourself from catching leptospiros. Well, you can’t prevent yourself from getting splashed in the face when you’re in the canyon.

And I would not give everybody doxycycline going down the canyon. Although I suspect some people may choose to do that on a preventative basis. That does prevent lepto in a pretty good proportion of cases.

It also gives you a horrible sunburn and you’re down here in this solar oven. So not clear what this was and not clear what people should do. I do think people should go to the Canyon.

It’s just this is something that remains unsettled as of the fall of 26.

WORM
00:24:37.870 – 00:24:49.420
Well, that’s frustrating because when I watch House, he can feel your pulse and tell you the correct diagnosis in a heartbeat. So not getting the answer is very different than what I’m seeing regularly on.

GERM
00:24:49.420 – 00:24:55.460
A very reliable TV show, House MD, the most realistic medical show out there. Not!

WORM
00:24:55.780 – 00:25:18.890
However, I will say that when I read studies back in the real world, for example, something I’ve written about is when you get a fever abroad and then you come back to the US and it’s worked up as much as 30% of the time, no diagnosis is reached.

So the sad truth of it is, even with all of our diagnostic tests and our bright docs, a lot of the times we say things like, I’m glad it went away and we’ll never know what it was.

GERM
00:25:19.210 – 00:25:55.350
And sometimes the answer comes years later. That’s what happened with Zika virus, right? Somebody caught this, they knew that this person had something.

It took years for that person’s frozen serum, which they kept in their own home freezer for this person to be validated and say, now you have this explosion of things, things in the Caribbean. This is exactly what I had. So we’ll see. Stay tuned to German Worm for this and many other reasons more to follow. Chris from AL in Singapore.

This questioner says, sometimes I try to fix my jet lag with caffeine, meaning I drink coffee. Is there a downside to doing this?

WORM
00:25:55.670 – 00:27:00.430
Well, this is an interesting topic, and there’s been some good research coming out on this recently. As a doctor, I live to take away pleasurable things from people. So if it gives you joy, I love saying you can’t do it.

And it’s been a fundamental frustration to me and to my colleagues that we can’t really find bad things about coffee.

I mean, sure, if you drink 20 cups a day, you can have insomnia or irritate your stomach, but at any reasonable level, at worst, it’s neutral and we’re actually finding favorable things about it.

This recent study came out in jama and they said that moderate caffeine consumption, up to several cups a day, is, is not only safe for most adults, but it’s associ with a lower risk of heart disease, including coronary artery disease and stroke and heart failure. It’s also being tied to a lower rate of dementia. So back to your question. No, go for it. Drink that Joe. Enjoy it.

You know, don’t do it right before you want to be sleepy. But we are failing to find a downside which to me, as a coffee addict is really wonderful news from the universe.

GERM
00:27:00.670 – 00:27:16.060
There, there is a cup of coffee sitting right next to Chris as he says this. So, you know, there’s your, your daily public service announcement coming from the caffeine hunta here in Seattle, Washington.

We are definitely pro coffee, where we know our caffeine. We know our caffeine.

WORM
00:27:24.220 – 00:27:31.180
All right, Paul. Ooh, a more serious topic here. Can you give us a update on the large Ebola outbreak in Africa?

GERM
00:27:32.060 – 00:30:38.740
Yeah, sure. This is serious and this is bad. Ebola virus disease, classically, the Zaire variant is what we’ve thought about in the past.

That’s not what’s happening currently. This is the Bundibugyo variant. I actually think we should start calling it Bundibugyo virus. But anyway, we can call it Ebola.

It’s just that it is different and in some ways worse than what we classically saw. In the classical presentation of Zaire virus, it was highly fatal and that actually helped to prevent the spread. This one’s different.

More people seem to survive for longer and potentially are able to travel farther and potentially spread it to other people. That reproduction number or R-naught seems to be higher with this infection than it was with Zaire.

And that shows itself based on tallies that we have from World Health organization as of 14 October 2026, with 9,300 confirmed cases and many others that are suspected. Not only 9,300 confirmed cases, but more than 4,400 confirmed deaths just in Democratic Republic of Congo alone.

Bundibugyo really is focused in DRC, although as we’ll talk about it, has spilled over in small amounts into other neighboring areas and some distant areas. For example, in Kenya we have two cases, one of whom unfortunately did not survive. Uganda, 20 cases and two confirmed deaths.

There’s even a confirmed case in France, although that person did survive.

But basically this is a disease focused within drc and, and it’s, it’s terrible because although at the moment it’s not spreading substantially beyond its borders, it certainly has the potential to do so. And you know, this is a country that is underserved within its own Ministry of Health, under-resourced.

It’s exactly the place where we as the United States should be and where our colleagues from Europe and elsewhere in more resourced areas should be spending a lot of time, their boots on the ground and making a real difference in the lives of these people.

People giving respite to those who are providing care and helping to advance the control agenda and, and there are indeed some volunteers from our country and I’m proud of that. I’m not proud of the way that our country is handling this in general as we’ve talked about before, Chris, It’s a deadly disease.

It’s an ugly situation. And the fact that we’re not spending money there is, is a real problem.

We talked at the beginning of this show about a different country in Africa called Guinea Bissau where we were going to, to meddle with their public health stuff. How about we take all the money that was earmarked for hepatitis B in Guinea Bissau and pour it into DRC in hopes of making a real difference.

This is a significant problem and we worry about it there. Now I’m not, I’m going to turn this over to you in a second.

I’m not worried at the moment about this causing a huge outbreak here in the United States. It is catchy in theory. That could happen. I think if this comes to our shores.

We have have at the moment still enough of a public health infrastructure that we could handle it. But what a distraction, what a pain in the neck and what a tragedy for the people who are dealing with this. I think we get ahead of this.

I think we spend more time and treasure in DRC so that we don’t have to deal with it here on our shores. What do you think?

WORM
00:30:39.140 – 00:31:32.610
Yeah, I think it would be really stupid to wait until it comes to our shores before we get on the boat with this one. This thing exploded really quickly back in 2018 when there was an outbreak, another outbreak in DRC. It took over 230 days to reach 1,000 cases.

This one, the current one, got to a thousand cases within 40 days. That’s markedly quicker. And I fear that we don’t know the full scale of this. Currently it appears to be growing, but we don’t know how much.

As Paul said, we need to get ahead. We need to have ring vaccination where you vaccinate all the people, people around the active areas to try to curtail this.

But this is a case of where some work now could prevent so much more death and work later down the road.

So I am appalled the US pulled out of the World Health Organization and that by and large we’re not doing as much as we should for this large outbreak.

GERM
00:31:33.330 – 00:33:18.280
For new listeners, if you’re just joining Germ and Worm Nation here, please consider going Back to episode 105. We dropped that on June 16th. It’s an episode dedicated to Bundabujo if you have other questions about this illness, we go into more detail there.

I think at that time I predicted we would hit 3,000 cases within a couple of weeks and the official number actually took a little bit longer to hit that. But unfortunately we’ve now clearly gone well, well beyond that.

Folks, this is one of those situations where we want to deal with it so that people can travel safely and have a great time in Africa. It is still possible to do that even within certain parts of drc. It can be done.

If you have plans for upcoming travel to drc, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know what your travel plans are.

And in particular, please do follow the advice that you’ll find at CDC’s website, because there are certain regions of DRC where we would just recommend strongly against going. It’s not just that you’re at risk of catching the disease that’s bad enough. It’s also that you’re a distraction.

You’re a potential problem for those who are doing the hard work of taking care of their own people. If you’re planning to travel for volunteer reasons, make sure you know what you’re doing doing. Make sure you’re qualified to do that.

We’d love to hear from you about that topic as well. Everyone, thank you so much for joining us here on episode 123 of Germ and Worm. As always, we would welcome your questions on travel, health.

Send them along.

Or if you have other things you want to talk about, suggested corrections, drop us a line germandworm@gmail.com or see us online germandworm.com if you’ve enjoyed this episode, just subscribe. Rate us favorably on your device. Thank you for doing that. And spread the word with friends, family and on the socials.

Those are free ways to support our podcast. I’m Germ.

WORM
00:33:18.360 – 00:33:21.000
I’m Worm. It’s a big planet. See it in good health.

GERM
00:33:21.160 – 00:33:40.990
We’ll see you next time.

This podcast is designed to inform, inspire and entertain, but it does not establish a doctor patient relationship and so it should not replace your conversation with a quality, qualified healthcare professional. Please see one before your next adventure.

The opinions you hear belong to Dr. Sanford and Dr. Pottinger alone and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the University of Washington or UW Medicine.