Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Los Angeles Times - September 17 2001
Shari Roan, Times Staff Writer
Produced for the Discovery Health Channel by Natural History New Zealand Ltd.
Sept. 23, 4-8 p.m. (Repeats 8 p.m.-midnight.) You may think differently about the start of cold and flu season after watching this fascinating, but disturbing, four-part series on medical discoveries.
The lead episode, "Infection," explores how communicable diseases have ravaged societies throughout history--and how serious the threat of disease still is. Using historical records and accounts as well as interviews with infectious disease specialists, the program shows how easily germs are spread. The plague, for example, was transmitted when people obtained, and wore, secondhand clothing. So hysterical were societies stricken by such scourges that myths and cruel customs arose to separate the afflicted from the healthy, including a practice of digging the graves of leprosy patients while they were still alive.
The program also explores the spread of smallpox, flu, tuberculosis and malaria, and notes how various epidemics have shaped world events. The 1919 flu epidemic that killed 20 million crippled efforts of soldiers fighting a world war.
The devastation of those early diseases, which wiped out entire villages, is hard to fathom in the era of modern medicine. Indeed, the program details how the discovery of vaccines has made possible the eradication of several former killers.
But "Kill or Cure" points out that infection remains a frightening reality. The series explores the spread of HIV and includes some poignant interviews with HIV patients who tell of living with a modern-day plague. Moreover, in just the past three decades, 30 new infectious illnesses have been identified. The growing resistance to antibiotics makes the threat of an incurable infection a possibility. And two recent medical reports suggest that a new flu strain could evolve and trigger a pandemic.
The program is a bit frightening and too intense for children. The subsequent episodes--"Surgery," "Blood" and "Madness"--trace diseases that have transformed society and discoveries that rescued humanity.
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