Trekidemic XXL

Lovely Intertrekkies, we hope you're doing alright out there as we drag on into the nth month of this pandemic. To help you through it, here is a deep dive into Star Trek's portrayal of widespread, highly virulent, or large-in-the-literal-sense diseases. Mask up, stand far away from each other, and put us in your earballs!  

 

Episodes:  The Next Generation "The Naked Now" (S1E3) Enterprise "Bounty" (S2E25) Voyager "Faces" (S1E14)* DS9 "The Quickening" (S4E24) Voyager "Macrocosm" (S3E12) The Animated Series "The Albatross" (S2E4)  

 

Recommendations!  

The Delta Flyers (podcast) - Garrett Wang (Harry Kim) and Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris) recap every episode of Voyager  

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic** by David Quammen (2012 book) - fascinating tales of zoonotic diseases, aka illnesses that pass from animals to humans (kinda like COVID!)  

Episode 151: Body Diversity and Inclusivity Women at Warp (podcast episode)

Follow @jessicamalatyrivera - Infectious disease expert

Masks Work.  

Face masks: what the data say by Lynne Peeples via Nature  

Scientific Brief: Community Use of Cloth Masks to Control the Spread of SARS-CoV-2 via CDC  

Masks Work. Really. We’ll Show You How by Or Fleisher, Gabriel Gianordoli, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali, Miles Peyton and Bedel Saget via NYT  

Non-consensual use of body parts in history and medicine (a very incomplete list)  

George Washington and Slave Teeth via mountvernon.org  

The Surgeon Who Experimented on Slaves by Sarah Zhang via The Atlantic    

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot  

Nazi Medical Experiments from the Holocaust Encyclopedia via US Holocaust Memorial Museum  

How long does it take to make a vaccine?  

Vaccine Development, Testing, and Regulation via historyofvaccines.org  

5 charts that tell the story of vaccines today by Douglas Broom via World Economic Forum  

Anti-Vaxxers make us 😡😡😡😡  

Vaccine Myths Debunked via publichealth.org 

Why Vaccine Opponents Think They Know More Than Medical Experts by Matthew Motta, University of Pennsylvania; Steven Sylvester, Utah Valley University, and Timothy Callaghan, Texas A&M University via Texas Medical Association  

 

*Correction: We called this episode "The Phage" when we recorded - that is another episode (actually just called "Phage") about the same disease, but the one we recommend you watch is "Faces"!

**Not a link on purpose - buy local!