Doesn’t everyone infected carry the same disease if it has spread?
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It really isn’t, that’s just a movie thing. It dates back to a news reporter that referred to the first case of a particular disease as patient O (for outsider or out of Towner) because they believed that a particular local outbreak came to town with this one tourist. It became a sensationalized news story, and soon Hollywood was using the hunt for patient 0 as a plot device.
It can be useful for infectious disease specialists to talk to the original patient in a local outbreak, because they can get a list of potentially infected people or find out where the patient got the disease from. It’s not really mission critical though, just a good opportunity for some more info
Because it’ll tell you where it began. It will help scientist and researchers to better treat and control the spread of the disease. The more information they can get the better.
Patient zero just doesn’t help understand the disease, but how fast it could spread. Patient zero helps with tracking other people who may have come in contact and who they have come in contact.. etc to help contain the situation. Also, when it comes to viruses, they mutate, so if you find the original strain quicker, it’s better to work with that one before it mutates from the spread.
There are multiple factors that go into this, so here are the top three that I think are the most important:
– It helps understanding how the disease went from non-issue, to issue. Thinking of COVID, for instance: How the eff did it go from an animal disease, to a human disease, while there didn’t seem to be a possible transmission until then? What is the factor that changed? This alone, could help prevent dire situations of the like in the future.
– It helps understanding how the disease mutated from its origin to now, leading us to a better predictive pattern on how it’ll mutate in the future. Think of it a bit like using dinosaur fossils, and tracing them to modern day birds, giving us a hint as to how evolution works.
– With Patient Zero, they might have the ability to find the original pool of infection, which actually allows to generate the base vaccine/cure, then all you need to do, is follow the strains and strands that came down from it. This is really important, because a vaccine or cure that works against the base infection should at least have a limited efficiency against its variants and strains. A vaccine/cure that works against a specific variant or strain, however, might not work on the base one, because it could be missing large swathes of what the immune system recognize.
>Doesn’t everyone infected carry the same disease if it has spread?
Not exactly. The way diseases spread is by multiplying in the host and then being dispersed into the environment by the host (my sneezing, coughing, pooping, etc.).
Every time an organism makes a copy of itself (bacteria) or is copied by the host cell (viruses) there’s a chance of mutations that change how virulent (how sick it makes the host) and infectious (how easily it is transmitted) it is. It’s random, but those changes affect how quickly it spreads, so mutations will start to dominate if, for example, they make the bug more infectious.
Finding “patient zero” means understanding how the disease became an outbreak/epidemic and gives information about how it spreads. For example, in South Africa a cluster of early covid infections were traced to a Dutch tourist who visited a bunch of wine farms. And for the most recent outbreak of Ebola, they found that “patient zero” had carried a latent infection from the previous outbreak that suddenly transitioned to an active one.
Understanding where these diseases come from helps us to make better plans to do something about them.
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