It’s On The Syphilis

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From my understanding, Jurassic Park was a big deal upon its initial release. I read that it won three Academy Awards. Yes, it was a huge cultural phenomenon.

 

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You could not go anywhere without there being Jurassic Park on something, because of the logo. And so, you would go out to eat at McDonald’s, there would be the logo. You would go to Walmart, there would just be an aisle full of toys with the logo on it.

 

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And what is amazing is that you would turn on the news and they were talking about Jurassic Park. But they were also talking about science. And this movie really captured the imagination of a lot of people, including myself.

 

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And so there was kind of a phenomenon where you had people interested in DNA. Whether they were going to pursue science or not. So, you go get your hair cut and the person would be talking about DNA and talking about genetic engineering.

 

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And it was incredible. Do you have a favorite Jeff Goldblum quote? From Jurassic Park? Yeah, from Jurassic Park. Life finds a way.

 

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I forgot what he said. I really like the one where after he has been wounded and he says, yeah, but John, if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates do not eat the tourists. I cannot imagine being in searing pain from my leg and then still sassing someone.

 

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My other favorite was, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could. They did not stop to think whether they should. Yeah, yeah, that is a good one.

 

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That is an important quote, I think. When Jurassic Park was first advertised, it was touted as a movie 65 million years in the making. I saw this old article from the early, no, I guess it was mid-80s, that called finding a case of either syphilis or yaws in an ancient Pleistocene bear from over 11,500 years ago.

 

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And the researcher Bruce Rothschild said that the only way to distinguish between the diseases would be to do a medical history. And he is quoted as saying, the bear is not talking. The researcher also said that it is probably yaws disease, because that can be transmitted by flies.

 

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Otherwise, the researcher said, and I quote, you must explain how a bear got syphilis. I am Dr. Dustin Dilophosaurus Edwards. And I am Faith Cox.

 

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Welcome to Germomics, where we go to, be, from, a, in the most roundabout way, a mixture of microbiology and history. In this series, we connect different aspects of modern life and society to microbes through seemingly unconnected natural events, discoveries, and inventions. How else can we connect blockbuster movies to syphilis? Let us find out.

 

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I read a tweet about Jurassic Park being a scientifically accurate movie. Now, it is not like the most scientifically accurate. And there are some problems like the DNA replication and the way the dinosaurs are represented.

 

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But it was a lot for its time. There are more scientifically accurate movies now, though, such as like Interstellar, which did a really good job representing the black holes. Yes, Chris Nolan worked with actual scientists and to create that black hole.

 

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And he changed it a little bit. It was too realistic initially. And then he had a little bit of artistic creativity with it.

 

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Yeah, and it looked pretty like what we were able to visualize now. Thanks to the work of Dr. Katie Baumann and her team. There’s also Contagion, where the director worked with epidemiologists to see what it would look like if there were to be like a global pandemic that occurred, how it would look from an epidemiological standpoint.

 

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That movie had Kate Winslet in it. She played one of the doctors that helps track the virus and does some of the boots on the ground epidemiology. I hear that Kate Winslet keeps her Oscar in the bathroom so guests can do pretend like acceptance speeches in the bathroom mirror without being embarrassed.

 

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Do you think people wash their hands like afterwards? Afterwards? I hope they are washing their hands before they are handling someone else’s award. They should do it like before and after. I hope so.

 

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I cannot imagine. It is probably like a disgusting Oscar otherwise. There is this man, Ignaz Semmelweis, that could be attributed as like the inventor of handwashing.

 

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He was called the savior of mothers. In the 1840s, Dr. Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of childbed fever, which was just any bacterial infection as a result, or after like giving birth or having a miscarriage, that those infections could be dramatically cut by having physicians wash their hands with an antiseptic. Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician and scientist who worked in Wiener, Austria at a maternity institution.

 

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The maternity institution that he worked at was set up as a gratis institution and offered to take care of any infants that were not wanted, such as like illegitimate children. How would you define a gratis institution? A gratis institution is one that is like free. However, in return for these free services, the women would be subject to the training of physicians and midwives.

 

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It was not like entirely free, but… Yeah, it sounded like maybe a bad deal. Maybe. It was a bad deal, but because it was the best that some of them had for like illegitimate children, they went through with it.

 

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What some of them would do is that they would give birth in the streets enroute to the clinics because it still qualified them for like leaving their illegitimate infant to be cared for by the clinic rather than taking it home with them. He noticed that the women who gave birth in the streets were having significantly lower rates of childbed fever, which did not make sense to him because he thought the incidence of childbed fever in birth and street births and clinic births should be at least equal. But then he also noticed that the women who were patients at the other clinic in Vienna, which only employed midwives and not physicians, also had a lower rate of childbed fever.

 

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He began eliminating all differences between the two clinics to see what could possibly be causing the fever. He even removed like religious practices to see if those were playing like a role in it. But he eventually realized that the difference was that the medical students and physicians would perform autopsies on patients who had died, people who had often died of childbed fever, before going to examine patients.

 

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The midwives did not do this because they were not medical students, so they had no reason to like perform autopsies. As he thought about it more, Semmelweis determined that the physicians and students were carrying over particles from the cadavers and then inoculating the patients. So Semmelweis proposed that the physicians and medical students should wash their hands with a chlorinated lime solution until the smell of putrid cadaver flesh was no longer present.

 

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So, this was before germ theory of disease was like established and well accepted. So, he did not have evidence of contaminants being removed, and he only relied on the scent. So, he would just have like the students and the physicians wash their hands until they did not smell anymore.

 

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So, you would have to do like a sniff test? Yeah, yeah. I cannot imagine like how bad that must have smelled if you were like not there yet. But after implementing this at the clinic in mid-May, the mortality rate dropped from 18.3% in April to 2.2% in June, 1.2% in July, and 1.9% in August.

 

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It sounds like he was doing really good work, but in 1849, for political reasons combined with his term at the time, which is kind of like just the length of time that they could have their job, that they were appointed to that position, his term expired. He was not rehired at the clinic. Semmelweis went to work at another hospital in Budapest, where there he was also able to virtually eliminate deaths from childbed fever during his time there.

 

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Like I said, germ theory of disease was not yet established, so his findings did not explain the cause of childbed fever, only that washing with a solution in between autopsies and patients decreased the incidence. After the establishment and acceptance of germ theory of disease, we understand now that it was caused by not washing your hands and that you must wash your hands to remove microbes. But at the time, people still believed in miasma.

 

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So as a result, washing your hands did not make sense to them because microbes were not known to be causes of infectious diseases yet. So how can we define miasma? Oh, miasma was the belief that like bad air was what was getting you sick. And so, like people would like close the windows of the sick because they thought the air would circulate like the neighborhood.

 

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Made things worse, huh? Yeah, it made things worse. You just were like trapping your housemates. So, without more scientific backing, Semmelweis’s findings were largely rejected at the time.

 

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Some physicians even felt like Semmelweis was implying that they were like filthy and unhygienic for not washing hands, which is impossible because they were supposed to be like high class gentlemen. Semmelweis also tended to be quite confrontational and even published a book called Open Letter to All Physicians of Obstetrics in 1862, where he lashed out against the critics of his first book, Tautology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childhood Fever, which was the main literature regarding his like hand washing concept. In the end, Semmelweis’s findings were not very well disseminated by him.

 

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And as he like lashed out against critics, it made a lot of the medical community turn against him and start rejecting his idea. Like I said, it did gain a lot of popularity after germ theory of disease was established, but not during his lifetime, unfortunately. In the 1860s, Semmelweis became increasingly hysterical about physicians not washing their hands between cadavers and patients.

 

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He is like flipping tables. Oh, yeah, he was pissed. He was like very, very mad.

 

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And his wife thought he was like going insane. In his book that he wrote, the Open Letter one, he even went as far as to call all the obstetricians that were not like listening to him, like blatant murderers. So, he was not taken kindly, people were not listening to him.

 

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And they were not taking kindly to the words he was saying because like no one wants to be called a murderer when like you just do not understand the science. But all of that combined with him being eventually checked into an insane asylum against his will. He was tricked there by a colleague to go and examine a patient.

 

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And then as soon as he realized what was going on, he tried to escape where he was beaten by the guards. After that, he got an infected wound. They do not really know if it is specifically by that beating or from something else.

 

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And his wound got infected. And he later died of blood poisoning just 14 days after entering the asylum. That is very ironic.

 

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Yeah, something that like hand washing could have prevented. It is a horrible irony for him. Why he became increasingly hysterical is not known.

 

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It could have been like a type of dementia. It could have been emotional exhaustion. It could have been like the sheer emotional aspect of knowing that you had this knowledge and this understanding of how to like prevent people from dying and no one taking you seriously.

 

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But it also could have been syphilis, which is a common disease of obstetricians who worked at gradus institutions like Semmelweis. So, you would have a lot of like prostitutes that were coming using these services. So, there is a high incidence of the obstetricians later contracting syphilis because of their work at the gradus institutions.

 

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There are about 45 million people worldwide infected with syphilis with about 6 million new cases each year. In the U.S. in 2017, there were about 100,000 new cases. It has been reported that in the 19th century, so the 1800s, about 15% of the world’s population, everybody, had syphilis at some time.

 

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So, as you can imagine, there is a huge list of famous people who either were known to have syphilis or were suspected of having syphilis. Some of these were like Scott Joplin, the famous jazz pianist. He did the ragtime music like The Entertainer or the Maple Leaf Rag.

 

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If you ever had to read War and Peace in School, that was written by Leo Tolstoy, also suspected to have been affected by syphilis. There are also important world leaders such as Vladimir Lenin of the USSR or Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany. Again, they were suspected but not quite proven.

 

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The gangster Al Capone, famous for being in Chicago and going to Alcatraz. Even Vincent Van Gogh, famous for his painting of The Starry Night. The poet and playwright Oscar Wilde.

 

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He wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the painting was getting older but the person did not age. He also wrote The Importance of Being Earnest. There is also the composer Franz Schubert, who is known for his haunting Unfinished Symphony.

 

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That was one of the songs that my grandpa and I used to listen to. Another famous composer that was suspected of having syphilis was Ludwig van Beethoven, famous for the Fifth Symphony, Moonlight Sonata, the Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy. Another world leader that is often included on this list is Napoleon Bonaparte, and that is because he died of arsenic poisoning, which was a popular therapy at the time.

 

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And so, some people consider that maybe he did have syphilis. However, more current research shows that he probably had gastric cancer. Another world leader would be Henry VIII, the person who had six different wives.

 

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And perhaps shocking for most people are Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd. There’s evidence of his wife having syphilis, as well as three of their children. Syphilis is caused by Treponema pallidum.

 

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It is a spirochete, and it looks just like a corkscrew. So, if you ever drink wine and you put in the corkscrew and you twist it, that is very similar to how they are shaped. Their flagella are also positioned in such a way that it kind of moves in a spiral-like motion, which allows it to work its way through the smallest of micro tears in skin.

 

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Syphilis is most often transmitted as a sexually transmitted disease, but it can be transmitted from mother to child during pregnancy or at birth, and they call this congenital syphilis. There is no approved vaccine yet, but it can be treated with the antibiotic benzathine penicillin G, or if the person has an extreme penicillin allergy, you can treat it with doxycycline or tetracycline. Syphilis has four disease stages, and it is often called the great pretender or the great imitator because there are symptoms of syphilis that are like other diseases.

 

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The first stage in primary syphilis, which occurs after about three weeks after infection, a skin lesion or an ulcer appears that is called a chancre. And this is the symptom most people picture or imagine when they think about syphilis. It is circular, about one to three centimeters in diameter, so about the size of a fingernail.

 

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And even though they look like they might hurt, they are painless and not itchy, and they are firm. So, they are these firm, round lesions. And they are going to occur at the place where the infection occurred at.

 

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So, it is going to appear on the penis, the vagina, anus, or on the rectum, on lips, or in the mouth. Secondary syphilis happens after about one to three months. It is a non-itchy rash that is going to appear, and it will appear also on the palms of hands or the soles of feet.

 

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And on the body, it is going to look like raised discs. And I have viewed several photos of this. And if you look at somebody from the back, so on the back torso, it looks like it covers about 80 to 90 percent of the surface.

 

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So many of these raised, like, nodules. During this stage, there is also lots of other symptoms that can be associated with just feeling bad, such as having a fever, a sore throat, weight loss, and headaches. A third stage of the disease is latent syphilis.

 

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So, this is when you are infected, but you do not show any symptoms after having secondary syphilis. In the fourth stage, without treatment, a third of infected people will develop the tertiary disease or tertiary syphilis. This occurs about 10 to 30 years after the initial infection occurred.

 

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And during this stage, syphilis is no longer infectious. However, you are going to start to see multiple organ systems affected, including the brain, nerves, eyes, the heart, blood vessels, liver, bones, and even joints. Symptoms of tertiary syphilis are going to vary depending on which of the organ systems were affected.

 

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So, for example, if it impacted the brain and the nervous system, it is going to be called neurosyphilis, while if it was affecting the eyes, it would be called ocular syphilis. I follow this medical historian on Twitter, and she tweeted about how there was this gentleman in London that had these no-nose clubs where he was, she just, like, went out on the street and he saw everyone who, like, also did not have a nose and he did not have a nose for reasons most likely syphilis. And he invited all the, like, noseless people to his house for dinner.

 

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They just had these, like, clubs of everyone without noses where they just, like, were able to live life and have, like, companions where no one was, like, judging them for not having noses because not having a nose was frowned upon at the time. And so, they just had these, like, parties of people who had, like, the same struggle and they were, like, judging each other for their struggle. The chef of the gentleman even, like, he would roast, like, whole pigs for them and then cut the snouts off the pigs when serving it to them.

 

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For our science and society message, let us talk about public trust in science. So last month, the Pew Research Center conducted a study that showed public confidence in scientists to act in public interest has increased in recent years, where half or more Americans have positive views about science. However, most still turn a skeptical eye to issues of scientific integrity.

 

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There are lots of reasons why there is a negative view towards science. There was the Tuskegee experiment where poor black sharecroppers who had syphilis were told that they were going to receive free health care, but they did not. Instead, they were part of a 40-year study to observe the natural progression of syphilis Yes, and this was occurring in the 1940s onward, so right around World War II.

 

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Yeah, it ended in the 1970s so it was rather recent. Of the original 399 men with latent syphilis, 28 had died of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis. There was also the Guatemala experiment, which was led by a physician that had a role in the Tuskegee experiment.

 

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In this experiment, they infected healthy people with syphilis, either through a direct injection or using known infected prostitutes. They would send the prostitutes to have sex with prisoners. Yes.

 

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Only half of the infected received treatment, and those experiments occurred around World War II in the 1940s, and the effects on our society have lasted more than half a century. In a study from 2013, it appeared that HIV rates had doubled in Washington, D.C. in the five years previous among people who identified as Black, and there was a big question as to whether the rates had doubled, or was it just that public trust was finally improving enough that people were no longer fearing and hiding from authorities in white coats but were getting tested and responding to surveys? To address this, scientists and non-scientists need to continue to work together on this march of progress, and these unethical experiments also highlight the disparity of healthcare between different populations. It is just a fact of life that different groups of people are getting different treatment and it should not be that way.

 

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No, it should not. And we need to address that by knowing that it is a factor that is going on and then trying to compensate for it. Well, I would like to end on a happier note about disparity within healthcare.

 

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That is just not the reality. I would still like to thank you for listening to Episode 5. It is on the syphilis. Show notes, transcripts, citations, and social media links are available on our website at germamix.com. I was thinking back on what we were talking about at the beginning with Jurassic Park and I am just glad that the non-scientist was driving the Jeep.

 

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Why? Because there was this guy I know, we were headed towards a conference and he, no matter what, would stop at three hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, he will drive just three hours and then stop, take a nap.

 

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Yeah, he would stop and take a nap. So, if you had the Tyrannosaurus Rex chasing after you in that Jeep scene, had the chase gone on for two hours and 59 minutes, he would have pulled over. I know, maybe that is a bit dramatic, but I do not think it is because there is one day we went to a conference and it was three hours and 15 minutes away.

 

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So, like three hours and 15 minutes away and he makes it to the three-hour mark. And I had everyone text me when they left because I wanted to make sure they got there and text me when they get there. So, I know everyone should be taking about three hours and 30 minutes for shopping for gas or something.

 

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And after five hours, he is not there. And I am like, where are you? Why are you not here? Are you alive? I do not have your wife’s contact information. And he arrives at the conference and is like, what took you five hours to get here on a three-hour trip? And he is like, oh, I always stop and nap after three hours.

 

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What do you mean? This was a three-hour and 15-minute trip. And he is like, I know. I always stop at three hours.

 

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So rather than pushing through the last 15 minutes of your drive to sleep in a bed, you decided to pull over on the road to nap in your car on the side of a highway for the last 15 minutes. Because that is safer. Because it is safer, right? He was concerned about being drowsy.

 

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So, he thought that was safer. And I do not understand it. And I have asked him about it and it never has a satisfactory answer.

 

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And it just keeps me up at night.

Written and performed by Dr. Dustin Edwards and Faith Cox

Music from
“Lobby Time” by Kevin MacLeod; license CC BY 4.0
“The Entertainer” by Scott Joplin; public domain
“Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin; public domain
“Symphony No. 5” by Ludwig von Beethoven, performed by Fulda Symphonic Orchestra; license EFF: Open Audio License version 1

Images from
Treponema pallidum © David Cox; public domain
Dilophosaurus © Eduard Solà; license CC BY-SA 3.0