full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Daniel Streicker: What vaccinating vampire bats can teach us about pandemics

Unscramble the Blue Letters

We'd been tnilkag about shifting from a strategy of damage control to one based on prevention. So, how do we begin to do that? Well, the first thing we needed to understand was how this virus actually wokrs in its natural host — in the bats. And that is a tall order for any intfeuoics disease, particularly one in a reclusive species like bats, but we had to start somewhere. So the way we started was looking at some historical data. When and where had these okbaterus happened in the past? And it became clear that rabies was a virus that just had to be on the move. It couldn't sit still. The virus might calrctuie in one area for a year, maybe two, but unless it found a new group of bats to infect somewhere else, it was prttey much bound to go extinct. So with that, we sloevd one key part of the rabies tniossiamrsn challenge. We knew we were dealing with a virus on the move, but we still couldn't say where it was going.

Open Cloze

We'd been _______ about shifting from a strategy of damage control to one based on prevention. So, how do we begin to do that? Well, the first thing we needed to understand was how this virus actually _____ in its natural host — in the bats. And that is a tall order for any __________ disease, particularly one in a reclusive species like bats, but we had to start somewhere. So the way we started was looking at some historical data. When and where had these _________ happened in the past? And it became clear that rabies was a virus that just had to be on the move. It couldn't sit still. The virus might _________ in one area for a year, maybe two, but unless it found a new group of bats to infect somewhere else, it was ______ much bound to go extinct. So with that, we ______ one key part of the rabies ____________ challenge. We knew we were dealing with a virus on the move, but we still couldn't say where it was going.

Solution

  1. infectious
  2. solved
  3. outbreaks
  4. circulate
  5. pretty
  6. works
  7. talking
  8. transmission

Original Text

We'd been talking about shifting from a strategy of damage control to one based on prevention. So, how do we begin to do that? Well, the first thing we needed to understand was how this virus actually works in its natural host — in the bats. And that is a tall order for any infectious disease, particularly one in a reclusive species like bats, but we had to start somewhere. So the way we started was looking at some historical data. When and where had these outbreaks happened in the past? And it became clear that rabies was a virus that just had to be on the move. It couldn't sit still. The virus might circulate in one area for a year, maybe two, but unless it found a new group of bats to infect somewhere else, it was pretty much bound to go extinct. So with that, we solved one key part of the rabies transmission challenge. We knew we were dealing with a virus on the move, but we still couldn't say where it was going.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
ebola outbreak 2
deadly viruses 2
single year 2
vampire bats 2
rabies outbreaks 2
damage control 2
key part 2
incredibly encouraging 2

Important Words

  1. area
  2. based
  3. bats
  4. bound
  5. challenge
  6. circulate
  7. clear
  8. control
  9. damage
  10. data
  11. dealing
  12. disease
  13. extinct
  14. group
  15. happened
  16. historical
  17. host
  18. infect
  19. infectious
  20. key
  21. knew
  22. move
  23. natural
  24. needed
  25. order
  26. outbreaks
  27. part
  28. pretty
  29. prevention
  30. rabies
  31. reclusive
  32. shifting
  33. sit
  34. solved
  35. species
  36. start
  37. started
  38. strategy
  39. talking
  40. tall
  41. transmission
  42. understand
  43. virus
  44. works
  45. year