Friday, 27 March 2020

Video exercise. TEDxSMU “Why COVID-19 is hitting us now - and how to prepare for the next outbreak”


Watch the video and answer the questions below. Some are multiple-choice and others are open questions for which you need to write an answer. Do your answers on paper.


Questions


1. Which of the following does the speaker currently do?
A. She is a doctor.
B. She studies contagious diseases on a local level.
C. She is writing a book about global health threats.
D. She studies the effects of epidemics.

2. How do coronaviruses attack cells?


3. What is a zoonotic virus?


4. Which of the following sentences is false?
A. Global warming will encourage viruses and bacteria to spread.
B. Cats are one of animals most prone to infecting people.
C. People living near previously remote animal populations will encourage diseases to spread.
D. There will be be more future epidemics because of how people manage the environment.

5. According to the speaker, what is the main medical reason that people have not contained the outbreak?

6. What is the best way for us to make disease outbreaks less serious?
A. Stop people from travelling as much as possible.
B. Establish a more effective quarantine system.
C. Improve medical care all over the world so these diseases can be stopped at source.
D. All of the above.

7. What is the main disadvantage of “just-in-time-ordering” of health supplies?
A. Not enough stock is built up for use in times of crisis.
B. You have to order it plenty of time in advance because it usually comes from China.
C. They should be domestically produced for strategic questions of national security.

8. Which of the following statements does not accurately reflect the speaker’s advice?
A. Consider stopping yourself from using certain mobile apps when outside your home.
B. Keep your hands and your mobile phone constantly as clean as possible.
C. Face masks are poor for your personal hygiene unless you are infected with coronavirus or work in the health sector.
D. Some drastic options (panic, authoritarianism etc.) can actually be helpful in preparing us for a pandemic because they stem from fear, which has evolved in order to protect us.

Thursday, 26 March 2020

Video exercise. TED-Ed: "How pandemics spread"

Watch the video and answer the questions below. Some are multiple-choice and others are open questions for which you need to write an answer. Do your answers on paper.



Questions

1. What’s the difference between a pandemic and an epidemic?
A. They can be used interchangeably
B. A pandemic is an epidemic that spreads to multiple countries, or even worldwide
C. A pandemic is an epidemic that causes more than a thousand deaths
D. A pandemic affects multiple animal species, not just humans

2. Why are epidemics and pandemics a relatively recent phenomenon in human history?



3. Scientists have extracted from human remains which of the following infectious agents?
A. Tuberculosis bacteria from ancient Egyptian mummies
B. The bacterium responsible for the Black Death in 14th century Europe
C. The strain of smallpox virus that devastated the Aztecs in the 16th century
D. DNA from the earliest known case of Ebola virus in Sudan, 1970
E. Options B, C and D
F. Options A and B

4. How do war zones and natural disaster sites become breeding grounds for infectious diseases?



5. How many Europeans succumbed to the Black Death?
A. More than 30 million
B. 2.5 million
C. Unknown—we’re still discovering the plague burial pits

6. What happens to the influenza virus every 20-40 years, and why? What are the recent
example(s)?



7. What is antigenic shift?



8. Where did the 2003 SARS outbreak originate?
A. Malaysia
B. Hong Kong
C. Hanoi
D. a cruise ship docked in Acapulco

Video exercise. TED-Ed: “How do viruses jump from animals to humans?”

Watch the video and answer the questions below. Some are multiple-choice and others are open questions for which you need to write an answer. Do your answers on paper.


Questions

1. Which species would we expect pathogens to be most likely to jump between?
A. Distantly related species, in the same environment
B. Closely related species, in the same environment
C. Closely related species, in different environments
D. Distantly related species, in different environments

2. Given equal exposure, which species might we expect to be the greatest source of emerging infectious diseases in humans?
A. Chimpanzees
B. Dogs
C. Potatoes
D. Snakes

3. When a virus mutates this:
A. Helps the virus adapt to a new host
B. Can have no effect, be detrimental, or can be beneficial and help the virus adapt to its new host
C. Causes an outbreak

4. What does a virus need to bind to before it can enter host cells?
A. Host receptors
B. Immune cells
C. Host DNA

5. Where are viruses found?
A. Mostly in primates
B. Mostly in humans
C. In almost every form of life

6. What are the three steps are required for a pathogen to infect a novel host species?



7. What factors affect the likelihood of a pathogen successfully jumping to a new host?