Mike Osterholm

And I think this has been to me the whole driving force behind this book.

I basically often say this was really a love letter to my kids and grandkids.

What can I do to help make the world a better place so that what they don't have to go through is what this book was written all about?

Well, you know, first of all, I have been very, very fortunate to be tutored by several people who are really expert in this area, at least Lisa Brousseau from CIDRAP, who has done a lot of the pioneering work in this area.

But I also brought to the table my work as an infectious disease epidemiologist and state epidemiologist in Minnesota working up outbreaks where, in fact, airborne transmission was very important.

Let me give you a classic example of that.

A number of years ago, we had the Special Olympics that were held in Minnesota.

And the opening night's session was held in the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome.

And this is the large, large baseball diamond there.

And what happened was all the individual team members marched in a door that was out in right field, came down to home plate, kind of went around to center field, left field, and they collected there.

Well, the team from Argentina, the A's, were right at home plate.

And it turned out that that night we had a young boy from Argentina that was just breaking with measles.

His case was confirmed two days later.

And we had an outbreak that occurred among the team members and the coaches.

But that opening night session where there were over 60,000 people in the actual venue, and we had an outbreak among individuals who went to that opening night session.

They did not know each other.

They had no idea.

But when we placed them by seats, they were all seated in the same small section up in the far right field bleacher area, 420 feet away, where Mark McGuire couldn't get a home run on steroids.

And they all came down with it.

Well, when we actually looked at this carefully, it turned out that the air patterns coming off of home plate, from behind home plate, actually deposited up in that upper air corner up there, where in fact, because the air was moving with this individual, that virus infected those people up there that far away and skipped over everybody in between.