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Global Health Matters
Dialogues: a conversation with Laura Spinney on disease, linguistics and humanity
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Dialogues is a series from the Global Health Matters podcast where we bring you interviews featuring fresh perspectives on global health issues. The goal of each Dialogues episode is to break through the echo chambers that exist in global health through in-depth, thoughtful conversations.
For this episode, we turn to language, memory and the threads that connect pandemics and people across time. Host Garry Aslanyan is joined by Laura Spinney, a science journalist, novelist and author of two books -- "Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World" and "Proto: The Hidden Origins of the World's Languages." Laura's work spans the fields of history, genetics, linguistics and epidemiology to reveal how stories of disease and language shape our collective understanding of humanity. This conversation explores how pandemics alter societies, how words and names influence fear and stigma, and what the world's earliest languages can teach us about connection and change.
Related episode documents, transcripts and other information can be found on our website.
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Welcome to Divos. I'm Gary Astonian. This is a special series of the Global Health Matters podcast. In this series, I'll be blowing open some of the echo chambers that exist in Global Health. To help me in this quest, I've invited thoughtful and inquisitive individuals from different walks of life. Each of them has explored and written about global health issues from different disciplinary perspectives. I hope this dialogue series will give you, the listeners, an opportunity and space to step out of your daily routine and contemplate global health issues through a different lens. So let's get started.
SPEAKER_02The flu resculped human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death. It influenced the course of the First World War and arguably contributed to the second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It ushered in universal health care and alternative medicine, our love of fresh air and our passion for sport, and it was probably responsible, at least in part, for the obsession of 20th-century artists with all the myriad ways in which the human body can fail. Arguably and probably are indispensable qualifiers when discussing the Spanish flu, because in 1918 there was no way of diagnosing influenza, and hence no way of knowing for sure that that was what it was. What isn't arguable is that the 1918 pandemic accelerated the pace of change in the first half of the 20th century and helped shape our modern world.
SPEAKER_01Laura is a science journalist, novelist, an author of two books Hail Rider, The Spanish Flu of 1918, and How It Changed the World, and Proto, The Hidden Origins of the World's Languages. Laura's work traverses history, genetics, linguistics, and epidemiology to reveal how stories of disease and language shape our collective understanding of humanity. In this conversation, we explore how pandemics alter societies, how words and names influence fear and stigma, and we explore what the world's earliest languages can teach us about connection and change. Hi Laura, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Laura, as a journalist, you've been exploring the scientific roots of two very different global phenomena: the Spanish flu and the origins of Indo-European language family. Both of your books have a cross-disciplinary approach, combining insights from multiple fields. In global health, we often struggle with dealing with things in silos. From your perspective, what unique strength does journalism bring in breaking through those silos?
SPEAKER_02I suppose quite simply that I can talk to the people in each. I am resolutely as a journalist talking to the public, but in a way satisfying my own curiosity about what the bigger tableau shows, you know, the cross-disciplinary picture. But when I was beginning to research my book, Proto about the Indo-European languages, I would speak to people in the three main fields that contribute to that story, so linguistics, archaeology, and genetics. And more than once one of them would say to me, you know, we three fields speak different languages. We don't really understand each other. So perhaps in a way I'm also translating them to each other in the way, for example, that the front half of the journal Nature might be the news half to, you know, explaining the other what's happening in the other sciences to those working in a given field. And similarly with Pale Rider, I suppose, I mean my first motivation to write that book was to fill a hole in our collective memory. But when I started reading what existed on that subject in terms of literature, I realized that it was pretty Euro or at least Western-centric. And also there was a kind of, I have to say, disregard of the social sciences by the biological life sciences, a sort of feeling that they didn't matter so much. Whereas I think we've now learned the hard way, but it's also clear from history that uh the social sciences have a lot to tell us about how pandemics unfold.
SPEAKER_01So really bringing different kinds of aspects into one is really what you've been doing through this uh process. And it's so important because we had uh an episode focused on communicating science, and um, for our listeners, if they want to go back and listen to it, some very similar sentiments were shared. And I also would love to hear more about your methodology and the process, how you wrote these books. How do you go about gathering the data and end up having such a comprehensive array of stories?
SPEAKER_02I mean, in both cases, I'd have to say that it was a kind of serendipitous event that put me on to that track. Um it would probably be a bit too long to tell you the story in each case. But for Proto, for example, my most recent book, which just came out, um I had always um that's the book about language, I had always been interested in language, but I suppose more from a sort of psychological or neuroscience point of view, you know, how languages are involved are organized in the brain, that kind of thing. Um, but I was at the Santa Fe Institute in the summer of 2022 uh as a journalism fellow, and that was the most extraordinary interdisciplinary experience. And amongst our group that summer were some linguists, and I sort of through chatting to them became aware that this story, this ability to track prehistoric languages back to their origins, was something that had been completely transformed in the last 10 years, um, mainly by the arrival of the ancient DNA revolution in genetics, but we'll we'll get onto that and why it's significant, I presume. Um, and therefore there was a story to tell there. So that's how I got onto it. And then, you know, the story of the Indo-European languages, that's something that people have been studying and trying to understand for 200 years. So it's not exactly a news story in itself. And there was plenty of reading to do uh when I decided that I wanted to investigate it. But then I kind of took the bull by the horns and I went to my first historical linguistics conference, uh, and uh the historical linguists who were there looked at me uh like I was a sort of alien from out of space and wondered why I was there and why I was interested in their subject. But I got to listen, I got to hear how they were talking about their subject in the light of these other fields, advances in these other fields, what they were taking from those other fields, what they found interesting about them, what they found annoying about them or were dismissing. And I could see obviously from those people around me and the people they were discussing, who were the major players, who were the people I would need to talk to. Then, of course, there was a huge work of reading papers, going to other conferences, following up. It's a very fast-moving field. It certainly was at the time that I was doing the research, and in some ways it still is. And then, of course, it's just, you know, what are the big questions? How are people tackling it? What are the different approaches? Where are the disagreements? And the usual work of a journalist, in a sense. But I have to say, the usual work of a journalist, sort of on steroids, because this was the most challenging intellectual mission, certainly in my life, uh, to try and weave these three fields together to talk about a thing, Proto-Indo-European, that is essentially hypothetical, uh, when those three fields don't speak the same languages, was to say the least challenging.
SPEAKER_01So if we look at Pale Rider, it was an account of Spanish flu and how it shaped nations, communities, cultures across the global north and south. History rarely told so much to that extent in this one kind of story or one disease. Why was it important for you to take such a global perspective looking at this from various kind of aspects of it?
SPEAKER_02So I didn't tell you the story of how I came to be interested in the 1918 flu. I call it the 1918 flu, by the way, not the Spanish flu, even though Spanish flu is in the subtitle of my book because that's how people uh knew of it. It's a misnomer, it's a historical accident. Um, but I was uh as a science journalist asked by um a number of editors to start thinking about how we could mark the centenary of the Great War, the First World War. I'm talking about around about 2013. Now we were trying to think of the ways scientifically that we could mark that centenary. And so I was given all sorts of interesting missions, and one of them was I I was sent off to the Italian Alps, where, as in many parts of the world, the glaciers are melting. And in the Italian Alps in the First World War, they fought what was called the White War, so a war at altitude. It was an absolutely miserable war. More men died of sort of frostbite and avalanche and so on than of actual conflict, and they were basically forgotten by the people below. But it was fascinating in the sense that they developed a whole technology of high-altitude war, uh, you know, carrying things across from one mountaintop to another by uh funicular and things like that. And all of this material, along with all of the corpses uh and the human remains of those battles, sort of sunk into the ice where it was very well preserved until the glaciers started melting. Now the glaciers are melting, all that material is melting out, and there's a race against time amongst archaeologists to collect it and conserve it before it decomposes. So I was up there on the glaciers writing about that effort, and uh I actually ended up assisting, uh, attending a funeral for two young soldiers whose bodies had melted out of the ice and who couldn't be identified in a small church uh in Italy whose graveyard was full of people who felt from that sort of frontier region who felt these could have been our grandfathers. These, you know, we don't know who they are, but they could have been. And they were from both sides of the of the conflict, these families. So uh it was incredibly moving. And I remember going home and saying to my husband, you know, that's possibly the most moving experience of my journalistic career.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02And he said to me, he thought for a moment, and I think he was also quite moved by it, and he said to me, You know, we we talk a lot about the Great War, we don't ever talk about the Spanish flu, he used that name, uh, but I think it killed many more. So I went off and did my first Google search and saw the absolutely mind-blowing numbers of casualties from the Spanish flu, and then I was on the track for that book. So just to explain that my initial motivation for writing that book was to fill that hole in our collective memory. You know, we nobody was asking me to mark the centenary of the 1918 flu, uh, and of course they should have been. Um so that's why I felt the need to write the book. And when I started reading the literature that existed then, I realized, as I I think I mentioned in the in the previous question, that um the books that existed, while excellent, were very Europe-centric and US-centric. They couldn't have been otherwise because at the time that they were written, that was the only data really that had been collected and that was available. Um, but clearly there was a need to broaden out the focus. Uh, I mean, when the centenary of the of the um 1918 flu did finally come around, there, you know, my book had only just come out. There were still countries in the world that had suffered way worse than those in Europe or the or North America that didn't even know they'd suffered. India, for example, who suffered the greatest uh death toll in absolute numbers of any country in the world, 18 million, we estimate, which is roughly the estimated death toll of the entire First World War. So clearly those people needed to understand that chapter in their history.
SPEAKER_01I found it interesting to read about the outbreaks, how they were handled both in like biblical times and then during the Spanish flu, well, we still call it, uh, and how closely uh this were really mirroring the recent experience with COVID in terms of um the approaches. Uh you wrote uh this book obviously before pandemic. Do you think having known this historical perspective might have helped the health community to respond differently, let's say around vaccine hesitancy or any other aspects?
SPEAKER_02On the side of human behavior, it is quite shocking how the parallels resurge again and again in pandemic after pandemic. Uh you know, uh we can all recall during COVID, the acute phase of COVID, you know, the the kind of quack cures, the conspiracy theories, uh, the sort of politicization of the response and of the pandemic itself. Uh, and none of that, that is as old as the hills, it really is. Um, so I I, you know, um the health, the public health community uh knows that, it really does. Or if it doesn't know it, it doesn't really have much excuse. Now, of course, it's often, if not always, uh, politicians who are making the decisions. So, you know, the public health community maybe saying one thing and not being heard. Um, but you know, the idea that we need to start preparing not when the pandemic erupts, but long before, the idea that we need to build up trust in a population before uh it uh appears on the scene. These are things that public health uh professionals know very well. And uh, you know, for for complicated reasons, uh including the politics, you know, the political aspects of the problem, uh that's not often or or not in place as well as we would like it to be, let's say. I mean, but you know, there were some fairly shocking oversights as well on the part of the public health community, I think. I mean, I don't know if you remember, but in 2019 there was the Global Health Security Index was published, um, which kind of measured countries, right?
SPEAKER_01Who is doing well exactly who ended up where after the actual pandemic.
SPEAKER_02I mean, the timing was unfortunate for the people who put that together because it came out just before. But uh, you know, the US and the UK were at the top, uh, China was somewhere 51 or something, the African nations, uh many African nations were right at the bottom, Korea and uh and and New Zealand were fairly well done as well. And of course, those countries that I've just mentioned often did very well and way better than the US or the UK. And I think what that's essentially telling us is that um, you know, we can measure uh intensive care unit uh capacity, you know, epidemiological lab space and equipment and all the rest of it, testing capacity, but those aren't all that count. Uh we also need to, you know, take into account those things which are difficult to measure, like trust in government, trust in authorities or uh community spirit uh and things like that, which, you know, as we saw in our very recent experience, shape uh how a country fares enormously and essentially turn that index inside out in terms of who did well and and who who didn't.
SPEAKER_01How do you think language shaped the world's understanding of the Spanish flu as a disease that affected everyone? In the book, you note examples like Igbo language in Nigeria who didn't even have a word in their lexicon to describe such an illness.
SPEAKER_02Right. I find it so fascinating the way the naming of a pandemic unfolds. I mean, in 1918, you know, it took people a while, and and now that we've lived through it, perhaps we can understand a bit better. Uh, or perhaps not, because that was a time when communications were way slower and way patchier and poorer. But to begin with, people didn't realize that was that they were dealing with a global pandemic. They thought they were dealing with, you know, lots of local outbreaks that weren't necessarily connected to each other. Um, you know, when there is an outbreak of infectious disease somewhere, it has to be named quite quickly because you can't respond to it if you can't talk about it. So everybody is giving it a name in these different places, but it's not the same name. Uh and so they're not talking about a single phenomenon, even though they are dealing with a single phenomenon essentially. Um and then, of course, you have to bring in uh the fact that people understand disease differently, people understand infectious disease differently, people have different ideas about how to treat it. So all of these types of knowledge filtered through language uh um shape the response. Um and it, you know, it's an evolving process, but the name is absolutely critical to the behavior that flows from it, I think. And it's also important to say that, you know, on the scientific side, I mean, virus was a fairly new concept in 1918. Most of the doctors in the world thought they were dealing with a bacterial disease. Um, so even on the scientific side, on the side of the experts, there is a sense in which knowledge has to evolve and is evolving in real time during a pandemic.
SPEAKER_01So you already mentioned that the name of the disease can really have far-reaching implications in a way. And we talked about the naming of Spanish flu and really not being originating from Spain at all. And how do you think language we use around diseases contributes to fear, control, stigma, and all of other aspects that are really linked to how the disease is named?
SPEAKER_02I mean, the classic example of that is HIV, right? Which when it first uh was described was was called uh gay-related immune deficiency, uh, which was a disaster really in many ways, not only for stigmatizing the gay community, uh, but also in making in leading heterosexuals to think that they were somehow not at risk and that it was a you know a minority disease, therefore the resources put into studying it were too little. Um, so you can see how these names right from the start can put people on the wrong track, but it's a difficult dilemma to solve because you do, as I said, need to name it early on in order to mobilize people in and get them discussing how best to respond. Um but how you balance those things, you know, the need to name a disease at the beginning when you don't necessarily know a lot about it, and the need not to stigmatise or to mislead is quite difficult. The WHO in 2015 came up with a set of guidelines for how to um name diseases. Um, and I think that they were quite um, you know, lucid and open-eyed about it. You know, they realized they couldn't get it all exactly right. They just wanted, I think, to prevent the worst naming sins, you know, the sort of most stigmatizing uh names. So, you know, for example, one of the guidelines was don't, you know, don't single out places or species or particular human groups, you know, uh as identified by their sexuality or their religion or their culture uh in the name. Um but even then, which you would think, you know, that might be quite a harmless suggestion, was criticized by some people who said, well, if you if you give diseases very bland names, you know, with lots of complicated Latin names of uh microbes and numbers and so on, uh you're going to uh and Greek letters, you're gonna people are gonna forget about them, they'll be forgettable, they won't um be able to talk about them or remember them. So it's a difficult one to get right, but um we should clearly try to avoid stigmatizing as far as possible.
SPEAKER_01Let's listen to a reading from your book.
SPEAKER_02Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Norse, and English are all descended from a much older language, Proto-Indo-European. From Proto meaning first, and Indo-European, the family to which those languages belong. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European, who might only have numbered a few dozen to begin with, lived between Europe and Asia and the region of the Black Sea, where they too worshipped Father Sky. About five thousand years ago, their language exploded out of its Black Sea cradle, spreading east and west and fragmenting as it went. Within a thousand years, its offspring could be heard from Ireland to India. The Big Bang of the Indo European languages is easily the most important event of the last five millennia in the old world. It took another three and a half thousand years and the invention of the ocean going ship. But after fourteen ninety two, some of those languages implanted themselves in the new world, and from there they expanded again.
SPEAKER_01So in your book Proto, you explore this origins of Indo-Reaparan languages and the family and show how, despite it never really being written down as a written language, new uh archaeological genetic research uh is helping us to trace where it all began. Where did this language originate and how did it become the foundation for the languages spoken by more than three billion people today?
SPEAKER_02First of all, I think it's important to say what we mean by the Indo-European family. And it's this you know, bunch of languages, there are 400 of them, including dialects that are still spoken today, um, that uh are considered to all descend from you know a single common ancestor. And uh they include uh Hindi, Spanish, English, Russian, hundreds of others. So it's pretty diverse. It is the largest language family on earth, whether you measure it by geographical spread or the number of speakers, nearly half of humanity speaks this language. Um the way it came to be defined is by polyglots, people you know who speak a lot of languages, noticing similarities across those languages, right? And the noticing eventually became systematic comparison so that they could start to say when these languages diverged, which ones came first, which ones came after, the relative distance between them, and to sort of then plot them into a family tree, going back to this hypothetical ancestor which we call Proto-Indo-European, from Proto-meaning first and Indo-European, the name of the family. Um and uh just to give a sort of illustration of those similarities, my favorite example and the one I give in the book, is of the most powerful god in the ancient Indian pantheon, whose name was Dyao Pita, which literally means father sky, or actually, if you literally it means sky father, but in English we would say father sky. Um and if you think about the most powerful god in the Roman pantheon, that was uh Yuka Peter, anglicized as Jupiter, or in ancient Greek, Zeus Pater, often shortened to Zeus, or in English Zeus. So across Greek Sanskrit and Latin, there you're already seeing familial resemblances. And over time the linguists push that out to this very large family that we call Indo-European. And besides being able to construct the family tree of this uh language family, they were also able to, with this very systematic painstaking comparison, reconstruct to some extent the ancestral language which we call Proto-Indo-European. Now, that is uh a hypothetical exercise because Proto-Indo-European is a long-dead language that was never written down. Writing was invented, as you know, probably about 5,000 years ago. And many of the early Indo-European languages were not written down. So it was a prehistoric language, that is literally a language with predated history. And all we can do is guess basically what it sounded like and what its vocabulary consisted of. But we can guess with quite a good level of confidence in some cases. And linguists have put together a vocabulary of about 1600 words, uh corresponding to really a skeleton of that language. And from that skeleton, because a language reflects the world that its speakers inhabit, we talk about the things that matter to us, they can say some things about who those people were, how they lived, what they knew in terms of technologies and things. And then they can't go to historians because there are no historical records, but they can go to archaeologists and they can say, archaeologists, we think this language, from the degree that it's diverged to give all the living in Indo-European languages and what we know about evolutionary rates in language, we think it was spoken somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. What can you tell us about people living in the old world, in Eurasia, in that time window, who knew these things, who lived this way, who were located in that sort of rough space?
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02And then they can talk to geneticists and ask, you know, and who was moving around? Who was carrying this language far and wide? Okay, and with the advent of ancient DNA, that is the ability to extract DNA from ancient human remains and analyze it, those prehistoric migrations can now be traced. And it turns out that the most likely speakers of Proto-Indo-European were a bunch of nomadic herders living in the steppes of Eastern Europe, north of the Black and Caspian seas, about 5,000 years ago. They're called Yamnaya, that's the Russian name, it actually refers to their burial right. They buried their dead under these huge burial mines, mounds in the steppe. Um, and they were very mobile and they um radiated east and west. And happily it turns out that their migration routes map on quite well to the diaspora of the early Indo-European languages. So while we can never prove it, the Yamna are looking like the most likely candidate for the for the speakers of Proto-Indo-European.
SPEAKER_01Wow, that was really fascinating. And and you know, one thing really occurred to me that you know that thing when you said the polyglots doing different things, going through different words? Hmm. So one of my mother tongues is Armenian, an ancient, unique Indo-European language, isolate really, because nobody else speaks that language. And I've done this, and because I love learning other languages, I've done these things quite often. Like if you take one word in, let's say heart, and in Armenian it's sirt, and in in let's say um Sanskrit is heard, I hope I say that right. And in Proto-Indo-European, I think it's card or something. And then in Latin it's cardia, and then it in Greek uh no, it's Greek is cardia. In Latin it's kor, and then heart in English and cora sound, and then you see how these things are very similar. So it's really amazing one can really see and recognize this um language kind of these similarities, yeah. Similarity, exactly. And I I always wondered um in health-related words, um, whether or not this multilingualism can enhance our approach to global health, if only we could um kind of unite around those kind of language issues a bit more. Um so that that was just a digression to tell you.
SPEAKER_02No, I think it's a lovely idea, and it gives you, I mean, I don't know about you, but it kind of sends shivers down my spine to think, you know, that these are such sort of, I mean, the heart is obviously something of great importance to all people uh in all places of all times. Another word that I love is is the word for star, chaster, as it's reconstructed in in Proto-Indo-European and Aster in ancient Greek, and Istari and Soggyin, which was the language of the ancient Silk Roads, and uh uh what else is the Astjarnia for in Icelandic. The same word essentially across all of these languages, because we've all for thousands of years looked up at those sparkly things in the sky and wondered what they were, what made the light, and told stories about them. So it's very, very moving. Polygots like you see the connections. I should just say as a sort of sidebar that you know it it is a the reason it's a difficult exercise to pick out these familial resemblances is because languages don't quite work like genes. Uh, you know, words and sounds and grammatical expressions can be borrowed across languages as well as inherited. So part of the historical linguist's job is to make the distinction between those two processes. But they can do that, they have rules for doing that, they know how sounds change over time. Um, and so the example you gave of the word for heart is is an excellent one, of one that's been inherited, you know, down through the ages from Proto-Indo-European. And I think you make a really good point, which is that polyglot is like you see the connections, you see the similarities. When you look across the vast Indo-European language family, you realize that there's both breathtaking diversity and overlap. And that's because we're all human, we are all living in the same basic body plan, we you know confront the same basic dilemmas, and so you see that overlap. And, you know, in a way, it's a similar idea with infectious disease, right? I mean, at the core of my book, Pale Rider, and I explained this in the introduction, is a very simple idea. It's the encounter of a human being and a virus, right? But that encounter, as shaped by different factors, climate, culture, religion, economy, can take a myriad of different forms as it spins out across the globe. And so the rest of the book, having identified the essential in the interaction, the rest of the book is explaining how it did take those different forms in different parts of the world. Um, so I think there's a lot to be um to be learned uh uh in comparing the evolution of language and disease over and above uh you know the pure dimension of communication.
SPEAKER_01And of course, migration always played a major role in that, in shaping language, uh, and people moved. And and and you have examples in your book of that, and you've mentioned um and and what how do you think today's migration, driven by war, climate change, economic pressures, will affect the future of the languages we speak?
SPEAKER_02Throughout history and prehistory, migration has been considered uh a major, if not the main, motor of language change. So uh that hasn't stopped being true. Um, although we are in a sort of relatively uncharted territory as far as language evolution goes and have been for the last few centuries because of literacy, widespread literacy and writing. And having standardized texts and writing systems tends to slow down the evolution of language. It's just one factor, but it's an important one. Um so to answer your question, uh you know, there certainly will be linguistic consequences of the migration to come. That I think nobody would contest. What they will be is harder to say. Um, and that's because there are sort of counteracting forces here and we don't know how they will unfold. What will happen as climate change intensifies is another interesting problem, right? There are those who are predicting a huge wave of immigration to the northern, colder, richer in general parts of the world, as um parts of the global south become uninhabitable. Other people are saying that there won't be such a wave, there will be um perhaps smaller um uh points of tension, points of conflict as climate change triggers wars over water or wars over um land, uh, and these things trigger uh migrations of refugees. That you know, there are there are provisions of different kinds of scenarios as climate change intensifies. Um but whichever form it takes, uh there will be linguistic consequences because when people move, languages tend to change. In fact, languages change anyway. And so uh we're not yet able to predict what those changes will be. Perhaps AI will help us, um, but that they will come is uh is sort of a certainty.
SPEAKER_01So let's listen to a reading from your book.
SPEAKER_02Starting in the 1980s, one imperial language began to nose ahead of the field and then to lap the others. English has been, so far, the sole beneficiary of the new era of globalization, the first truly global language. Some have gone so far as to brand it a killer on the grounds that it has driven many smaller languages to extinction. But that is not a label that sits easily with everyone. Sally Koko Mufweni, a Congo-born linguist at the University of Chicago, points out that English has expanded mainly as a lingua franca. It may have squeezed other lingua francas, such as Swahili in Africa or Malay in Asia, but it hasn't dented the indigenous languages that are spoken day to day in those places. The killer label reflects a very Eurocentric outlook, the Fueni says, because it is Europe that has made a speciality of monolingualism. In much of the rest of the world, stable bilingualism or even multilingualism is still the norm. Besides, English is simultaneously diverging into varieties that may one day be unrecognizable as the same language. So is English killing, or is it dying, or is it somehow doing both at once?
SPEAKER_01One last question. English is really dominating the um global health or the global health area. Um obviously for good reasons in terms of communication, but there's a lot of discourse around need to decolonize global health. How do you think our understanding of health and disease and approaches we take um is influenced by the fact that we're really only using English?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean I uh I come back to the Global Health Security Index again, right? The the countries that were predicted to do well, not the ones that did well, others did well. And the languages in those country, uh in those countries was rarely English, at least the the first language. So if we want to learn from them, uh we may need to adopt a more multilingual at least approach. I mean, we're not talking about either or, right? We're not talking about English or another language. We can have English as a main tool of communication since it is the only truly global language for now, and then you know, have have discussions on documentation in other languages too. I mean, one of the things that one of the lessons of the 1918 flu and also of COVID is uh how valuable it can be to harness the kind of grassroots movement, community support, the tendency and the instinct of communities to look after themselves. And um, that happened in many countries. It perhaps wasn't encouraged as well as it might have been by authorities, by governments. Uh, and if we want to harness it, want to learn the lessons of the past and and you know exploit that instinct of people to look after their own in the future, uh, it means learning from them, and that means speaking their languages, um, which again are not necessarily or even very often English.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you, Laura, for this fascinating discussion. I personally learned so much, and I'm sure our listeners will enjoy this conversation. Good luck with all of your future plans and endeavors.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, and thank you for your great questions.
SPEAKER_01It was my curiosity about diseases and my passion for languages that drew me to have this conversation with Laura. From our discussion, it became clear just how deeply language shapes our world and how we understand health, history, and one another. Laura reminded us that pandemics are never just biological events, they are social, political, and linguistic stories that reveal what and whose perspectives we choose to remember. History can be our teacher for the future. When we name diseases carelessly or tell their stories through narrow lenses, we risk reinforcing stigma, missing vital lessons from those most affected. She also reminded us that it feels like global health, much like language itself, thrive on translation, on building understanding across disciplines, cultures, and communities. I hope that this dialogue inspires you to think about the words you use, the stories you amplify, and the bridges you can help build through them. To learn more about the topic discussed in this episode, visit the episode's webpage where you will find additional readings, show notes, and translations. Don't forget to get in touch with us via social media, email, or by sharing a voice message. And be sure to subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Global Health Matters is produced by TDR, a United Nations co sponsored research program based at the World Health Organization. Thank you for listening.
