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Adventist World Radio

LEVEL UP!

Mark Finley

Steve Lee

Lela Lewis

Duane McKey

The Quarantine Dilemma

I'm the medical director of Adventist World Radio and a board certified obstetrician and gynecologist and it is a pleasure to have you with us this evening.

Level up is a follow-up to the very successful medical symposiums that just finished last Sunday.

At your request, the question came in, how are we to deal with many of the concerns that we have globally as related to this COVID-19 crisis?

We want a respectable scientific location where we can trust to get answers.

Well, as a result of that question and request, Level Up came into existence.

We will be meeting every Sunday on an ongoing basis at 8 p.m.

Pacific as we address your concerns and your questions.

Level Up is sponsored or hosted by Adventist World Radio and the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

As Seventh-day Adventists, we believe in holistic health, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing, and none can be separated.

And with that said, I am very happy and excited to invite the president of Adventist World Radio, my good friend, Dr.

Duane McKee, to give us opening prayer and opening remarks as we begin this very exciting program.

It's so exciting to see you here with us and have you with Adventist World Radio.

And I want to welcome you and thank you for being a part of our ministry and also Pathways to Health.

Thrilling to see what God is doing around the world and thank you so much.

I'd like to have prayer with you and we pray that God will richly bless as we learn together how to be healthier and live for Jesus in a better way.

Father in heaven, thank you for your love.

We pray for this program tonight that your name will be uplifted.

And may this be a wonderful experience as we grow closer to you and learn how to be healthier in Jesus name, amen.

Well, as we said, we have some very difficult questions to answer.

The quarantine dilemma, why is it a dilemma?

A historical approach to a current controversy is what we're going to be discovering and investigating tonight.

But why is quarantine, social distancing, isolation, whatever term you wish to call it, why is it a dilemma?

Well, on 1 side, as we know, and as we suspect, as we decrease social distancing, it increases our risk of exposure, clearly because we're coming in closer contact with more people for more exposure, thereby more infection possibility, thereby increased mortality.

But on the other hand, quarantine in and of itself could be causing deleterious effects.

In fact, it is causing, as we'll discover tonight, increases in alcohol consumption, depression, anxiety, and thereby increase in suicide, domestic violence, child abuse.

Of course, the ramifications of financial devastation.

Let's go level up, 1 up, and find out some of the answers to these questions.

Well, in order to discover this quarantine dilemma or investigate it further, we need to ask the question, where did COVID-19 come from?

And how do we know it's a virus at all anyway?

Well, to answer those questions, I am very excited to introduce a good friend of mine and a very intellectual individual, Dr.

Lee is 1 of the best surgeons I've had the opportunity of working with.

Steve Lee is the vice chair of the ear, nose and throat department at Loma Linda University.

He has his doctorate in medicine from Loma Linda University and he also has his PhD in molecular biology and biochemistry.

Lee, can you tell us a little bit about where did COVID-19 come about and how do we know it's a virus and its infectivity to begin with?

What we know is that the virus started when we first encountered it in the city of Wuhan, China, the doctors there started seeing a cluster of patients that had respiratory issues showing up in their hospitals in December of 2019.

Now, they saw more and more of these patients showing up in their hospitals, and they tested all these patients for influenza, RSV, adenovirus, all the other pathogens that we would normally expect to be causing this kind of symptoms and none of them came out positive.

So at this point they were wondering what they were dealing with and what they did is they sent some samples from the lung lavages, bronchioalveolar lavage, and sent it to various labs.

While they were doing that, this is a slide from the Lancet article that was published earlier this year.

And this shows the first 41 patients that they found.

And you see that the first patient they knew about was back in December 1 of 2019.

And the last 1 they saw started having symptoms on January 1st.

And then they tried to see what did these patients have in common.

And a significant portion of these patients were exposed to this wet market, the Hunan seafood market exposure.

So they were thinking maybe it came from that market.

So what they wanted to do next is find out what was causing this.

And what they did is they sent those samples to labs, and the technology has increased to the point now that we can do what's called next generation sequencing, and we can sequence the entire genomes of organisms very quickly.

And they did this sequencing of these samples, and they found out that a sequence matched up with a coronavirus, but no known coronavirus that we knew of before.

And then they wanted to make sure, is this a virus or is it just nucleic acids that are just found in the lungs?

So what they did in this other paper is they took samples and they grew it on respiratory virus, respiratory epithelium in culture, and it created more virus.

So they know now that it's not only just the nucleic acids of a virus, it is an active virus.

And then this work has been duplicated thousands of times now.

Virology labs all over the world have now also isolated the virus and sequenced it.

And now there's 5, 000 different strains of this virus that are out and have been sequenced.

Leone, I just want to ask a quick question.

Coming back to what you just showed, this last slide.

So essentially what you're saying is that the coronavirus is mutating and these are the different strains of how many mutations have taken place since that very beginning event or a case.

Yeah, so the picture you're seeing here is something called the phylogenetic tree and the very bottom left-hand corner right here is the original strain and then these are branches where they mutate and they mutate again and again and again.

Now most of these mutations are inconsequential.

They don't affect how the virus works or how it functions.

That's why, although there's 5, 000 different strains, most of them are very similar or basically identical in terms of function.

Ugonna Woods

Self-Attack: Fight Back!

I'm a board certified obstetrician and gynecologist and the medical director of Adventist World Radio and the host of Level Up.

It is a pleasure to have you join us again this evening.

Tonight's presentation is going to be very exciting.

But before we start that, we wanted to talk a little bit about how we got here.

For those of you who haven't yet had a chance to watch, we ask you to go back to awr.org forward slash health and access the archived videos, the medical symposiums over 6 weeks ago.

We began this process of comparing the 1918 pandemic to the current COVID-19 crisis And we were surprised to find novel lessons, things that were utilized by organizations, specifically the Seventh-day Adventist institutions, or sometimes referred to as sanitariums, some of those things that they were using.

Therapy to unusual things of nutritional principles that we're going to be talking a little bit more about tonight.

But 1 of the most fascinating things that was utilized was this combination, holistic health, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual healing.

In fact, from the origination of the time, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, about 160 years ago, the church and its health care entities have believed that God would have us to combine all.

And with that, I want to introduce my good friend, Dr.

Duane McKee is the president of Adventist World Radio, and he's going to invite God's presence as we enlist spiritual healing on our meeting tonight.

Every Sunday night as we come together, I'm thrilled to learn more.

I just pray that the Lord will bless each 1 of us.

We thank all of our doctors for their participation.

And we thank and welcome all those who are online.

We thank, we pray that you will bless each 1, help us to understand how to live happier, healthier lives.

We thank you for your blessings now in Jesus' name.

You know, we've been hearing a lot about prevention.

We studied it for 6 weeks through the medical symposium.

But tonight we're going to take it 1 level up, if you will.

We're going to be looking at prevention related to self-attack.

Well, for many of us, whether we have children or grandchildren or we're teachers or we just know of children in our community.

There's been a lot of news lately about the effect that COVID-19 is having on the pediatric population.

We thought that they were somewhat protected, but over the last 3 weeks, we've seen an increase in something called multi-system inflammatory syndrome, or previously Kawasaki-like syndrome, a sequelae, if you will, of this COVID situation in children.

Well, we're going to delve into that topic, self-attack or autoimmune, and how you and I can fight back.

Before we do that, before we delve into tonight's topic, I want to invite my good friend and mentor, again, Pastor Mark Finley.

Pastor Mark Finley is a well-written, amazing international speaker.

He's also the special assistant to the president of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

Pastor Mark, last week we looked at prevention of COVID-19, specifically from a historical perspective.

What did we decide or determine based on history, even in some cases before germ theory even existed?

Lela, last week we were talking about quarantine.

We looked back at the biblical book of Leviticus, and there in Leviticus, the Bible talks about leprosy and quarantining or isolating lepers from the community.

Now it's very interesting for some diseases in the Old Testament period, the individual was isolated or quarantined rather for 7 days.

Other times they were quarantined for much longer periods of time.

It's interesting to look at the reason for that.

Largely the reason was to protect the larger community.

So quarantine is an act of self-love, loving others as you love yourself to protect them from the rapid spread of disease.

When you look down through history, 1 of the major plagues that came in the first century was the Antonio Plague, 165.

He looks back at that period of the Antonio Plague where that infected the Roman Empire.

Roman soldiers actually brought it back from the lands they conquered.

And when Rodney Stark looks at that, he says that the Christians had only 50% the death rate of the general Roman population.

1 is the quarantine, but there is another, and that was their attitude of self-sacrificial service.

They were not consumed with warrior fear.

They actually ministered to the sick while at the same time their larger community was quarantined.

When you come down to quarantine in when the last say 500s, a little longer than that now, probably the last 8 to 900 years, You go to the 14th century and that's when the bubonic plague spread through Europe killing some believe close to 30, 40 percent of the population in some areas.

But the Venetians had this sense of the biblical concept of quarantine, they actually kept boats in the harbor and the sailors on those boats for 40 days and noticed that they were being protected from the bubonic plague.

You can come up to a hundred years later where the bubonic plague swept through Europe in a second phase.

And our Jewish friends had a, in Jewish communities, had much less spread of the virus, largely because again of quarantine.

You go to 1918, the Spanish flu in the United States, Spanish flu killed about 50 million people around the world.

And again, you have pockets where they were quarantined.

This is particularly true in Seventh-day Adventists to sanitariums that had much less death rate than the general population.

And when you look at history from the Old Testament days of Leviticus down to our generation, quarantine has been that act of special protection for the larger community.

You know I've been thinking about that all week and I associated that with even what Dr.

Steve talked about to us last week as how Korea approached this as a kind of a community, and we look at it biblically, giving to our neighbors as we would want to be done to ourself.

As we look at tonight's topic, specifically the topic of prevention and Kawasaki-like syndrome, a multi-system inflammatory syndrome of children.

And I am very excited to introduce, I dare say, my best friend, Dr.

She's the assistant director of 1 of the practices here in Phoenix, Arizona.

And she's also the director of medical services of Your Best Pathway to Health, a community organization that provides free medical, dental, eye care, and surgical services to the community at large.

If you're interested in knowing more about Pathway to Health and Dr.

Woods Association, you can go to pathwaytohealth.org and learn more.

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LEVEL UP!

The Quarantine Dilemma

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The Quarantine Dilemma

1h 16m

Self-Attack: Fight Back!

1h 15m

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