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00:00Boxer novels, the mysteries of the ten plagues of Egypt.
00:04Dom, blood.
00:34Every year at Passover, Jewish families recall their ancestors' deliverance from a series
00:49of disasters visited by God thousands of years ago upon the Jews' earliest oppressors, the
00:56ancient Egyptians. For centuries, the string of calamities that rocked the Egyptian people
01:09nearly 4,000 years ago has remained a puzzle. Were these disasters real, or just the language
01:21of religious mythology? Two American scientists feel that at last they've come close to resolving
01:30one of the oldest mysteries, the ten plagues of Egypt.
02:00To Dr. John S. Ma, for many years Chief Epidemiologist for the New York City Department of Health,
02:07the story of the ten plagues of Egypt was a classic epidemiological puzzle.
02:15Ma's job was to explain health and disease in contemporary human populations. He was sure
02:21that his methods would work just as well with a challenge from the past.
02:28The ten plagues of Egypt was really the first written record of what might be called an emerging
02:33infection. And as an epidemiologist involved with tracking down diseases, be it HIV or Ebola,
02:40I was intrigued with the possibility that all of the ten plagues would involve viruses, bacteria,
02:46parasites, arthropods, insects, and they each had to have a rational explanation.
03:01During biblical times, according to the book of Exodus, Egypt was struck by a series of disasters.
03:07The water of the Nile turns to blood. Frogs overrun the land. Lice torment both man and beasts. Flies blacken the air.
03:22Animals die mysteriously. Humans and animals suffer festering boils. Hail destroys the crops.
03:32Swarms of locusts descend on what vegetation remains. Darkness blots out the sun.
03:40Finally, the first born of every family, both human and animal, lie down and die.
03:51But did the ten plagues really happen?
03:54There's very little historical evidence that the plagues ever took place.
04:01The principal surviving Egyptian artifacts held in museums in Egypt and around the world make no mention of them.
04:09However, Ma had learned about a recently translated document held in a museum in Europe.
04:15It's called the Ipawar papyrus and it's in a museum in Holland.
04:20And on that papyrus there was a series of events described by an Egyptian which uncannily paralleled the ten plagues of Egypt.
04:29And even though it was written a thousand years after when the ten plagues occurred, it was an authentic Egyptian document.
04:36For some the debate about the veracity of the Bible story is academic.
04:42Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of New York has studied the book of Exodus in depth.
04:49There's no doubt in my mind that the story of the ten plagues in the book of Exodus is a story that occurred.
04:54And it's a valid presentation of history in the hand of God.
04:59But more important than the history as it's developed in the book of Exodus is what is the purpose?
05:04Why did it occur?
05:06For Ma it was much more involved than just unraveling a biblical enigma.
05:12In a world facing new plagues, today's scientists are hungry for information to help them understand how diseases arise and spread.
05:20Scientists had tried before to account for individual plagues.
05:27But no one had ever tried analysing the plagues as an integrated whole, an approach central to Ma's work in public health.
05:36He realised that to uncover the vital connections, he would need to use the latest research from a variety of disciplines.
05:44But he knew just the person to help him.
05:47When John first pitched this idea to me, I was intimidated. You have many disciplines. You have marine biology, entomology, which is the study of insects, herpetology, the study of frogs, infectious diseases among humans, animal diseases, the Judeo-Christian tradition.
06:10It was absolutely intimidating, but irresistible.
06:13With an outstanding degree in medical research from Columbia University and a taste for the offbeat, Curtis Malloy was the perfect partner for Mars Project.
06:27The first piece of the puzzle had to be the time and place of the plagues.
06:34The date most scholars agreed upon was about 1260 BC, a thousand years after the building of the pyramids.
06:41As for the place, the ancient Egyptian civilization, a hierarchical society based on agriculture and heavily dependent on the river Nile, was centred around Memphis, just south of the present day Cairo.
06:56The Israelites, enslaved by Pharaoh Ramses II to build new cities, were living 50 to 80 miles northeast of the main Egyptian settlements on the Nile Delta.
07:12At the time of the plagues, the Israelites, after years of slavery, had begun to demand their freedom.
07:19Their leader, Moses, threatened the Egyptian Pharaoh with a show of strength from his God.
07:25It was to be the first plague.
07:28And Moses lifted up the rod and smoked the waters that were in the river, and all the waters that were in the river turned to blood, and the fish that were in the river died, and the river stank.
07:43The Egyptians could not drink of the water, and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt.
07:49Experiencing Egypt first hand brought home to Mark just how devastating the first plague would have been to this agricultural society 3,000 years ago.
08:10The Nile is a major force in this country.
08:13It brings silt and potable water to the people, to the animals, to the crops.
08:20And if something were to befoul it, something were to happen to make it unsafe to drink or bathe in, it would have dire ecological effects.
08:31There were two sides to the problem of the first plague.
08:35Why did the water tear red?
08:38And what killed the fish?
08:39It had to be something specific to the river, as the Bible description tells us that the ground water and wells were unaffected.
08:51Others had looked at this first plague.
08:52One person felt it might be silt in the water that caused it to turn red.
08:56Others mentioned red tide or algal bloom.
08:59But up until now, we had found no reference that mentioned red algae occurring in fresh water.
09:03Malloy knew that algal blooms were common in seawater, some being extremely toxic and harmful to fish.
09:13These blooms can contain red pigment, so a sudden multiplication of these tiny organisms could account for the red water.
09:22But none would have survived in the fresh water of the Nile.
09:25Then in the spring of 1997, a new environmental disaster hit the headlines in the United States.
09:36Something was going seriously wrong in the waterways of the southeastern USA.
09:42The fish were dying in their millions.
09:50The horror made worse by the fact that their flesh was eroded by deep sores.
09:56Visions of an uncontrollable flesh-eating superbug stalked the media.
10:01All eyes turned to a marine biologist, Dr. Joanne Burkholder.
10:10She had identified the responsible organism as an algae called Fisteria.
10:16Fisteria is a dinoflagellate, a tiny plant that propels itself through the water by whipping its thread-like tail.
10:25Dr. Joanne Burkholder and her team had discovered that the substance secreted by Fisteria in bloom was a neurotoxin which stuns the fish and dissolves their still living flesh.
10:47Fisteria is a very unusual little animal for lots of reasons.
10:51Among the toxic dinoflagellates, the red tide kinds of dinoflagellates, there aren't any that deliberately attack fish, but Fisteria does that.
11:04We right now have identified five water-soluble and lipid-soluble or fatty tissue-soluble toxins, a suite of toxins in other words, that Fisteria makes and sends out into the water to narcotise and kill fish.
11:17To date, Fisteria has killed more than a billion fish in the waterways of North Carolina, and Burkholder's team believes that the toxins can create health problems for the human population as well.
11:30Dr. Joanne Burkholder We realized that it was possible that people might be being hurt from airborne toxins from this little creature when it was killing fish out in our estuaries.
11:40Dr. Joanne Burkholder There are many effects that Fisteria caused for the laboratory workers, kidney problems, liver trouble, abnormally high enzyme functioning in the liver, suggesting that the body is trying to rid itself of toxins, a lot of joint aching and severe muscle aching, extremely severe headaches, a lot of lingering problems like that.
12:01Dr. Joanne Burkholder If Fisteria had bloomed in the waterways of ancient Egypt, the leaking blood from the dying fish, with the red pigment that occurs in some strains of the algae, would account for the red color of the Nile.
12:16And the water like that in North Carolina would have been so toxic as to be undrinkable.
12:21But where did this deadly bloom come from?
12:24Dr. Joanne Burkholder It was a very warm year, a strong El Nino event that preceded these serious toxic outbreaks and the toxic outbreaks of other harmful algae worldwide.
12:34Dr. Joanne Burkholder 1987 seemed to be a pretty banner year for harmful algal blooms.
12:38Dr. Joanne Burkholder If changes in weather conditions triggered the massive bloom in North Carolina, the same could have happened in ancient Egypt.
12:47Dr. Joanne Burkholder A delicate balance shifts and disaster follows, whether it's in the USA today or Egypt in biblical times.
12:58Dr. Joanne Burkholder As far as Ma and Malloy were concerned, Fisteria fitted plague number one like a glove.
13:04Dr. Joanne Burkholder They were ready to move on to the second plague.
13:07Dr. Joanne Burkholder And the river shall swarm with frogs which shall go up and come into thy house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneading troughs.
13:24Dr. Joanne Burkholder But foremost in their minds was the idea that if they were to succeed in their task, they must see the plagues as a pattern, a related whole.
13:36Dr. Joanne Burkholder They were searching for the crucial link between the first two plagues.
13:42Dr. Joanne Burkholder Did Fisteria in some way create the conditions necessary to bring about plague number two?
13:49Dr. Joanne Burkholder The link here seemed simple.
13:52Dr. Joanne Burkholder With no fish to feed on the spawn, huge numbers of frogs would have hatched, then abandoned the toxic river for the land.
14:01Dr. Joanne Burkholder But could there have been that many frogs eggs?
14:05Dr. Joanne Burkholder And could frogs have created the sort of nuisance described?
14:09Dr. Joanne Burkholder Do more surfaces?
14:10Dr. Joanne Burkholder Have you done any surfaces?
14:12Dr. Joanne Burkholder Not yet?
14:13Dr. Joanne Burkholder Not yet, but we can.
14:14Dr. Joanne Burkholder Why?
14:16Dr. Joanne Burkholder Marr and Malloy's quest was becoming known in scientific circles,
14:21mainly due to the grain debate on the Internet.
14:25Dr. Joanne Burkholder Frogs Could be frogs?
14:26At the University of Halifax in Nova Scotia, one of the world's leading authorities on
14:32amphibians, Professor Richard Wasasug, had developed his own ideas about plague number
14:38two.
14:39In the Bible, there's one word for frogs or frogs and toads, cephadeia, and just like
14:45in English, we use the word frog to mean specifically the sort of green frog of the ponds around
14:51the world.
14:52We also use the word frog to mean everything that's like a frog, frogs, toads, tree frogs,
14:56aquatic frogs, and so forth, and there's no reason why the word cephadeia couldn't in
14:59that sense be translated to mean frogs in the general sense, or specifically toads.
15:04Interestingly, if you look at the behavior as listed in the Bible for the plague of frogs,
15:10the behavior specifically very nicely fits that of toads.
15:14Toads of the genus Bufo are common around the world, and they have large clutches of eggs.
15:18That is, one individual can have hundreds or thousands of eggs, depending on the species.
15:24Their numbers can go up from being relatively rare and just a small, casual animal of low
15:30density in the background, then go to being millions.
15:34And furthermore, their behavior of coming up on land, and as it's described in the Bible,
15:38getting into the bread and going near the ovens, that's exactly the behavior of toads
15:42today.
15:43They are attracted to warm and light sources, primarily because insects are attracted to
15:46those sources.
15:47Insects sometimes die from heat or light of a fire or a flame, and they will fall down
15:53to the ground and the toads will eat them.
15:55So the behavior fits that of the modern toad.
16:01Ma and Malloy were satisfied that the semi-tame Bufo toads fitted the biblical description.
16:10Unlike the more modest egg clutches of frogs, the uneaten eggs of the toads would have numbered
16:15millions, and hatched into a nightmare.
16:20The frogs died in the houses, and in the courtyards, and in the fields.
16:26They were piled into heaps, and the land reaped of them.
16:30What would all this mean for the next plague?
16:34Someone once said an epidemic is a series of very unlikely events being strung together.
16:40And here we had a series of plagues that appeared to be interconnected.
16:45The fish were dying from a toxic environment.
16:48The frogs or toads were escaping from the water.
16:51They all died.
16:53And they were the major check on the insects.
16:55And there seemed to be an interconnectivity between all of these things, building towards
16:59something that was truly catastrophic.
17:03The stage had been set for play number three.
17:07Aeron stretched out his hand with his rod and smote the dust of the earth, and there were
17:12lice upon man and upon beast.
17:16All the dust of the earth became lice throughout the land of Egypt.
17:21Now insects were not Mar and Molloy's speciality.
17:25So it was time to journey deep into the heartland of America, to find the one man that could
17:31help, the Mothman.
17:34Aeron stretched out his hand with his rod and there were lice upon man and upon beast throughout
17:52the land of Egypt.
17:53The land of Egypt.
18:22Richard L. Brown is curator of the Mississippi Entomological Museum and an international
18:34expert on insects.
18:36His friends know him simply as the Mothman.
18:40The other flies that are aquatic or semi-aquatic.
18:46You have to have the conditions where there's not only food, but moisture available.
18:54Perhaps the best land for grazing a cattle in the field was near the water.
18:58Certainly the Egyptians would have had the best land.
19:00Sure.
19:01I was intrigued when I heard about the plague project because I had learned about the plagues
19:06as a child and even being an entomologist I had accepted the account as being the factual
19:13account.
19:15But their question as to whether or not the lice, or actually lice as we know them today,
19:21made me re-read the scripture and then I saw, as they pointed out, they were attacking man
19:28and other beasts.
19:29All of the lice we know about attacking humans do not attack other animals.
19:35And so at first, that discounted lice.
19:40The conditions were not right.
19:43These were dry, arid conditions and lice developed in more northern latitudes where you get tremendous
19:48outbreaks in the northern climates.
19:53And then, as I pointed out to them, the classification of insects did not come along until Aristotle, a thousand years later, in which flies, beetles,
20:02and other things were separated.
20:06Before his time, there were insects known, but there was not a means of communicating and
20:11classifying and providing the taxonomy.
20:16Brown told Ma and Malloy that there would have been about a hundred species of insects alive
20:21at the time that could have been translated as lice.
20:26Although the list could be whittled down, there wasn't a lot more to go on.
20:30Ma and Malloy, convinced that the plagues had to be connected, decided to put the lice problem
20:36on one side and carried on with the fourth plague.
20:44Like the third, it had to have a link with the death of the frogs, whose absence allowed
20:49an explosion in the insect population.
20:53There came a grievous swarm of flies into the house of the pharaoh and into his servants'
20:59houses and into all the land of Egypt.
21:04The land was corrupted by reason of the swarm of flies.
21:07There are no contradictions in the account of the fourth plague, which tallies with our modern
21:14experience of swarming flies.
21:17The only problem is, what kind were they?
21:21Identifying them was a vital step in tying plague four in with the subsequent plagues.
21:26So we knew the swarm had to be a fly, a type of fly.
21:31We immediately eliminated a number of them, the sand fly, the screw worm fly, the bot fly.
21:37But we had five viable candidates.
21:40The horse fly, the house fly, the black fly, the tsetse fly, and the staple fly.
21:45Now Kurt and I are entomologists, but then I remembered my old professor at Harvard, Andy
21:50Spielman.
21:51I gave my call, told him what we were doing, he said, come on up, let's talk about it.
21:57They would be defecating on the ground.
22:01Spielman's approach was to begin by eliminating flies that didn't fit.
22:06A real possibility, so who knows?
22:11A tsetse fly population in Africa is usually associated with the margins of rivers, but almost
22:19always in very tropical areas, areas where there's a lot of rainfall.
22:29Of course, a black fly population would be a very different thing.
22:36You wouldn't expect to have a swarm appear.
22:40They would be stable in numbers, a gradual increase or a gradual decrease.
22:47Horse flies are sometimes extremely abundant, and they're extremely painful when they bite.
22:55One wouldn't think of their numbers as increasing in an extraordinary way.
23:01If we had the use of manure as fertilizer and the addition of unusual amounts of water in
23:11the soil, then you might have an unexpected, absolutely massive house fly population, but
23:19they wouldn't bite.
23:21Eventually, there was just one candidate left.
23:28Stable fly population can indeed explode enormously in the event that there were animals as horses
23:36or cattle introduced into the area and held there and their feces accumulating in the soil.
23:45You might very well have an explosion of stable flies, and stable flies bite.
23:59Stable flies would hurt and would offer the people of the region a new and rather horrifying experience.
24:10Laying up to 500 eggs at a time, many more than any other fly, the stable fly was an ideal
24:25contender for the swarm of flies.
24:28Next came the fifth plague, the moraine on animals, an epidemic of sickness among livestock.
24:35Behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle which are in the field, upon the horses, upon
24:41the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep.
24:47There shall be a very grievous moraine.
24:50Plague five, the moraine of animals.
24:53In the past, some had mentioned anthrax, others hoof and mouth disease.
24:58Don't even mention sura, which is an obscure tripanosomal disease of horses.
25:05John pulled a few strings.
25:06Suddenly we found our way onto Plum Island.
25:08Plum Island is a facility which houses very, very dangerous diseases.
25:13The director, Dr. Roger Breeze, is one of the top animal virologists in the world.
25:19Most of the highly dangerous diseases of man and animals actually originated in Africa.
25:26They originated there and they still come out of there today.
25:29And so we're very interested in the control of these African diseases.
25:34But you don't go to Plum Island lightly.
25:37It used to be the storage facility for some of the deadliest viruses on the planet.
25:42And it used to be run by the U.S. Army.
25:50Today Plum Island off the Connecticut coast is a facility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture
25:56and is called the USDA Animal Research Center.
25:59When we get in the lab we'll be seeing animals with foot and mouth disease, African horse sickness,
26:07African swine fever.
26:08This is one of the labs where we're working with African horse sickness virus.
26:15How old is the virus?
26:17Breeze began by eliminating the diseases he thought it couldn't be.
26:22First to go was anthrax.
26:25It affects humans and this plague was just livestock.
26:29Now you do see lots of animals infected with anthrax at one time.
26:34And there have been examples of that in Russia and in other places.
26:38But it's not the kind of disease that you would associate with the majority of animals
26:43in a wide area of a country suddenly having this disease at the same time.
26:48And of course it also infects people.
26:50So if we had such a heavy infestation in the animal population, surely the humans would have been infected
26:57by breathing in the bacteria and would have died of anthrax too.
27:00But that's not recorded in the Bible.
27:04Foot and mouth disease was the next to go, although Breeze had more time for this idea.
27:09Well, if you were looking for a candidate for a plague of animals, foot and mouth would be the first suspect.
27:16It's the most highly infectious virus disease known.
27:19It's spread on the wind.
27:21It affects very large numbers of animals at one time over large geographical areas.
27:25And what you see in infected animals is they froth at the mouth as if they were chewing on soap suds.
27:31The hoof that covers the toes of the animal will fall off so the animals become lame.
27:37And it's a disease that affects cattle, sheep, swine, goats.
27:41And so it's a very likely candidate.
27:43The narratives don't describe any frothing at the mouth or any lameness, which is very, very dramatic signs.
27:49And also there were no records that pigs were affected, although there were pigs in that area at that time as there are today.
27:56So it just seems to me that foot and mouth disease is unlikely, based on the descriptions, to have been the cause of this plague.
28:05Surra, a disease spread by the sexy fly and similar to sleeping sickness, was also discounted.
28:12Breeze, like Andy Spielman before him, pointed out that the sexy fly would not have thrived in such arid conditions.
28:20So if none of these candidates fitted the bill, where was the answer to the fifth plague?
28:26What we were looking for was a disease that affected a large number of species.
28:31And there aren't many of those that do that in an epizootic fashion.
28:35But when we began to think of what the cause might be, we were doing some very interesting work at Plum Island at the time on African horse sickness.
28:41Now African horse sickness is a virus disease that affects horses, mules, asses.
28:46It doesn't affect these ruminant animals.
28:48The virus grows in the cells that line the blood vessels throughout the body.
28:53And these deteriorate very quickly, and the fluid that's present in the blood gets into the lungs,
28:58and the animals actually sort of drown in their own body fluids.
29:02And this can happen very, very quickly.
29:04I've seen animals that were perfectly normal at 11 o'clock in the morning,
29:08and two hours later they were dead of African horse sickness.
29:11But it doesn't affect the ruminant animals.
29:14There is another closely related virus in the same family called Bluton, which affects cattle, sheep and goats.
29:21And so it seemed very likely to me that African horse sickness and Bluton occurring at the same time could be the explanation for this plague.
29:29But if the fifth plague was really two viruses, why did they spread together over the same area and so soon after the other plagues?
29:39Both of these viruses are spread by the same insect.
29:43It's called culicoides, midge or gnat.
29:46Or in North America we call it a nauseam because it's so small you can't see them.
29:50But the virus is growing these insects as they go and bite one animal after another.
29:55They spread these viruses.
29:57Things were beginning to fall into place.
30:02Dr. Breeze gave us two answers for the price of one.
30:06When he suggested African horse sickness and blue tongue, he told us that they're transmitted by culicoides, the midge.
30:13Culicoides or the punky or nosium or midge would be a perfect candidate for the third plague, the so-called lice.
30:21They're very, very small.
30:22You can't see them.
30:23And when they do bite you, you itch tremendously, very much like when you're infested with lice.
30:29Satisfyingly, culicoides also explained how the Israelites escaped this plague.
30:37The midge is a weak flyer, rarely managing more than 50 yards and could not have reached their livestock.
30:44So the connection seemed to be between the so-called lice of the third plague and the animal sickness of the fifth.
30:52Did the mothman agree that culicoides was our elusive louse?
30:57When I heard the explanation of the plague perhaps being due to gnats or midges, biting midges, culicoides,
31:09I thought, of course, that makes sense.
31:11It's very logical because here is an insect that bites both man and beast rather than lice.
31:19And here is an insect that transmits a disease to the beast but not to man.
31:25They like stagnant water conditions where there is decaying vegetation, decaying organic material, plants, animals.
31:37The larvae that would feed on these would then produce tremendous populations of adults.
31:43That would be a true plague because if you've ever been exposed to biting midges, they get in your hair, they get all over you.
31:51You get spots and itchy spots from them.
31:53It would be a terrible thing to be exposed to thousands of these that could develop from the conditions that would be prevalent under the pre-existing plagues.
32:03Satisfied with their progress, Maher and Malloy decided to go on to the sixth plague, the boils and blains, or ulcers.
32:19Take to you handfuls of ashes from the furnace and let Moses sprinkle it towards the heaven in the sight of the Pharaoh.
32:29And it shall become small dust in all the land of Egypt and shall be a boil breaking forth with blames upon man and upon beast throughout all the land of Egypt.
32:41Some people have postulated bubonic plague, other smallpox, even herpes are the best.
32:47But it had to affect both animals and humans.
32:50This sent me back to the libraries.
32:53Malloy ruled out most possibilities when they weren't close enough to the biblical descriptions.
32:59He wanted an exact fit.
33:01Then he found a description of an obscure bacterial infection.
33:06I searched and I found a reference to Glanders.
33:09It's perfect.
33:10It infects both animals and humans, causes these boils and blains, and it could potentially be carried by the stable fly.
33:17When Kurt suggested Glanders, it was a logical choice.
33:22It's known as the forgotten disease.
33:25But it was described by ancient Greek and Roman historians.
33:31It's a disease that actually was used as a biological warfare agent in World War I.
33:36This disease affects animals and humans.
33:39It causes their lymph nodes to swell and separate, hence the name Glanders.
33:45It affects horses, camels, oxen, sheep, pigs, and humans.
33:52And it causes a chronic progressive disease that often leads to death.
33:57Now the stable fly, the link between flies and boils, was finally fitted into the puzzle.
34:06The Israelites, well outside the fly's one-mile range, were once again spared.
34:13But the Egyptians must by now have been in great difficulties.
34:18The death of cattle and other livestock would have further reduced their protein supplies, already undermined by the fish kill.
34:27Sick and suffering, their survival now hinged on the success of the cereal crop.
34:33Stretch forth thine hand toward heaven, and there will be hail in all the land of Egypt, upon man, upon beast, and upon every herb of the field, throughout the land of Egypt.
34:49Hail storms do occur in the Mediterranean.
34:53For example, in mid-October 1997, there was a hail storm in both Israel and Jordan.
34:58Sixty people were injured in Jordan. The hail was four feet deep.
35:08Hail can occur in Egypt and Israel, in Jordan, in the Mediterranean. We had no problem with that.
35:14The seventh plague seemed fairly straightforward, not unusual, but devastatingly timed.
35:24The localized storm did not reach the Israelites, but for the Egyptians with their devastated crops, things could hardly get worse.
35:34When it was morning, the east wind brought locusts, and locusts went up all over the lands of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt.
35:47Very grievous were they.
35:51Locusts, they're this big. There wasn't a question about the identity of the locusts. They were well known.
35:57They were described. People knew about them. And they knew the results of a locust plague, when these migratory grasshoppers would come in, strip the land bare.
36:07Every so often, they would have these plagues of locusts. It just happened that this one came at the wrong time.
36:14After the eighth plague, Egypt would have been staring disaster in the face.
36:20Weakened from sickness, the people faced severe food shortages, even starvation.
36:27They must have felt as if their whole world was collapsing around them.
36:32The ninth plague would have confirmed that worst fear.
36:37Moses stretched forth his hand toward heaven, and there was a thick darkness in the land of Egypt.
36:44They saw not one another, neither rose from any of his place three days.
36:50But all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.
36:55There had been a number of explanations of what the ninth plague was, three days of darkness.
36:59Some people had suggested ash from a volcano. Other people had suggested an eclipse.
37:04But this thing lasted for three days. And it's described in the Bible, people couldn't get out of their houses.
37:10They couldn't see each other within a room of their house.
37:13It had to be something like a sandstorm.
37:16And there are certain sandstorms called Kashin, which come out of the desert and literally bury and take over, and bury monuments.
37:24And again, very much like hail, sandstorms continue to occur.
37:29In addition to their other woes, the Egyptians would now have had a layer of sand on top of all their tillable land.
37:38Battered and demoralized, they could hardly have been more vulnerable.
37:43Then came the tenth plague, the one that was going to secure the release of the Israelites.
37:49The death of the firstborn, the most shocking of all the plagues, was the biggest mystery of them all.
37:58About midnight, I will go out into the midst of Egypt, and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt will die.
38:16From the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill, and all the firstborn of the beasts.
38:29The previous attempts at explaining this last plague had failed to satisfy the conditions described in Exodus.
38:36Nothing seemed to fit.
38:43But Malloy was convinced that the tenth plague was the culmination of a domino effect.
38:49If they had been right about the first nine plagues, they should be able to get the answer now.
38:55But with everything else neatly resolved, the last piece of the puzzle remained stubbornly elusive.
39:04For Mar and Malloy, the frustration mounted.
39:08Malloy tried to think laterally.
39:13Juggling seemed to help him open his mind, and let things happen that wouldn't normally occur.
39:20This is what Malloy had to work with.
39:23The first plague destroys the fish and pollutes the water of the Upper Nile.
39:30Then toad corpses add to the pollution, while their death releases the insect population from its usual constraints.
39:43With the diseases spread by midges and flies, animal protein from cattle, sheep and goats become scarce,
39:52and tainted.
39:54Working animals, such as horses, donkeys and oxen, are afflicted, as are humans, with severe viral and bacterial infections.
40:03As a result, the crops are largely unharvested.
40:07Then the hail hits, causing tremendous crop damage.
40:12What isn't destroyed by hail is eaten by locusts, including the young shoots and seeds that would otherwise have offered hope.
40:22Any remaining crops are picked hastily while still damp and put into stores, built in small pits under the desert sand.
40:31Then a sandstorm covers all remaining food supplies, and provides a blanket that bakes the stored foodstuffs,
40:39and accelerates rotting, while the Egyptians are still confined to their houses.
40:46At this point, after ten months of catastrophic misfortune, an estimated 2.5 million Egyptians are weakened, debilitated,
40:58and in the face of famine, rationing their meagre stores.
41:04What, other than a supernatural act, could account for what happens next?
41:17It was the locust droppings, the feces. That's what we had overlooked.
41:21Kurt's idea was brilliant. We knew that the Egyptians were starving.
41:26But what we had overlooked is the fact that the locust feces would have contaminated the remaining stands of grains.
41:33What organisms could the locusts have introduced that would thrive in the damp, fetid conditions of the storehouses?
41:42Then they heard about mycotoxins.
41:51Yvette Roker's eight-week-old son, Rashaun, is the latest Cleveland baby to be diagnosed with pulmonary hemosiderosis,
42:02a rare lung disease diagnosed in 33 Cleveland-area babies over the past four years.
42:09Pulmonary hemosiderosis is believed to be caused by a toxic black mold or fungus found in water-saturated wood and paper materials.
42:18Eduardo Montaña, based at the Atlanta Center for Disease Control, had been called in by Cleveland doctors
42:28trying to explain the mysterious deaths of several local children.
42:33We arrived in Cleveland and immediately went to the homes where these infants were identified
42:38and performed a home survey that took us down into the basements and throughout the entire homes.
42:45We found that in almost every case there was significant water damage in the basement.
42:52And later we found, of course, this black slimy mold associated with the water damage.
43:01It wasn't the mold itself that was the culprit.
43:04But molds growing on organic substances under certain conditions produce mycotoxins.
43:11These powerful chemicals carried on the fungal spores can be inhaled into the lungs with lethal results.
43:19The hypothesis is that mycotoxin enters the bloodstream in the lung spaces and causes a breakdown in blood capillaries
43:26and actually causes capillary bleeding in the lung tissue.
43:29This, when it becomes a significant amount, actually causes coughing and hemorrhage of blood out of the mouth.
43:36Stachybotrys Atra, the mycotoxin released by the black mold, was known to cause disease in animals.
43:45But it had never been known to affect humans before.
43:49Dr. Montagna's work has tremendous public health implications.
43:53It also was applicable to the cause, possible cause, of the tenth plague.
43:58Since Montagna made this connection in Cleveland, S. Atra has been implicated in a number of other mystery illnesses.
44:06Mycotoxins of all descriptions are now considered a serious public health issue.
44:11The fungi that produce them are widespread.
44:14But the mycotoxin only reaches significant levels when the conditions are exactly right,
44:20as in decaying buildings in urban ghettos and neglected city areas.
44:25In ancient Egypt, the damp, contaminated granaries would have been perfect.
44:31Stachybotrys Atra grows on cellulose.
44:35Grains and cereals are loaded with cellulose.
44:37Once we found this out, we realized that we had the explanation for the tenth plague of Egypt.
44:42For us, it's fungal growths in damp, poorly ventilated basements.
44:50For the Egyptians, it was fungus on damp grain in unventilated storehouses.
44:59The grain was stored underground.
45:01It had been damaged by the hail.
45:03It had been contaminated and infected by the locust feces.
45:07And if it had Stachybotrys Atra growing on it, it would have been lethal.
45:14And who would the Egyptians send to retrieve the grain from the granaries?
45:20The oldest son, the eldest son.
45:23And what animals would have been first to have been fed?
45:26The oldest, the most dominant animals.
45:29And if and when it was either inhaled or eaten, Stachybotrys Atra contaminated grain can kill within hours.
45:37And it causes internal hemorrhaging into the lungs, into the gastrointestinal tract.
45:43There would be no visible external cause.
45:46And for those who survived, those who saw people dying all around them and the animals dying,
45:51they must have thought it was an act of God.
46:01Under famine conditions, the eldest, who according to the Bible customarily received double portions,
46:07would have been the only ones to have ingested significant, in this case lethal, quantities of the contaminated food.
46:16And once the granaries had been aired and the surface layers of grain removed,
46:26the danger from mycotoxins receded.
46:29The peculiar combination of circumstances which encouraged it, were short-lived.
46:35This close brush with a lethal mycotoxin may have made a stronger impression on the Israelites than we imagine.
46:50Recently, 50 years after its discovery, one of the most puzzling of the Dead Sea scrolls,
46:57undeciphered, cryptic B, was finally decoded.
47:02This fragment contained an instruction, written in the second century BC,
47:08and apparently passed down from Moses' teaching,
47:12for Jews to destroy any dwelling in which mildew was found.
47:18Could this extraordinarily cautious attitude be coincidental?
47:24There can be no final proof that all this happened in the way Mara Malloy have proposed.
47:32But it is the most advanced and coherent explanation so far.
47:37Perhaps most important for us now is the way they have arrived at their explanation.
47:43Through a collaboration of disciplines and a deep awareness of how health and disease are embedded in the fragile ecology of human environments.
47:57Well, when I look at the explanation which is put forward for these ten plagues,
48:08what strikes me is it's not just a series of unrelated events,
48:12but it's a related series of environmental plant and animal catastrophes
48:18that culminate in a very, very serious human health problem that affects society as a whole.
48:24Now, of course, people like myself that work in USDA and other government organizations,
48:30we're well aware that these diseases are still with us today
48:33and how fragile the system is to control them and be aware of them globally.
48:39But we need to be eternally vigilant to make sure that we protect our societies against these epidemics
48:47because, again, the systems that are in place around the world
48:52to provide disease surveillance and control are very, very fragile
48:56and they're under incredible pressure from old threats and new problems.
49:01It only takes one small alteration.
49:04A virus mutates and we have a deadly influenza.
49:08Animal feeding practices change and we have BSE.
49:13Damp, unventilated basements grow mold and children die.
49:18The first Passover is celebrated by Jews with a commemorative meal of lamb, herbs and unleavened bread.
49:26All foods that, safe from contamination, may have played a part in their ancestors' survival.
49:33For them, the ten plagues were directed by the hand of God.
49:38But now we can begin to see how it moved.
49:42The Egyptian plagues began with an algal bloom
49:45and ended with the death of an estimated 10% of the population and the crippling of food resources.
49:52For us, the consequences of the falling dominoes could be just as grave.
50:01Every organism and process involved in the ten plagues is still with us today.
50:07Equinox next Tuesday at nine looks at how scientists are preparing for the next sun storm,
50:26which may have major implications for planet Earth.
50:39The science and history behind the ten plagues of Egypt are explained in a beautifully illustrated Channel 4 booklet.
51:02For a copy, please...
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