This Podcast Will Kill You

Once thought to be a rare, always fatal disease, histoplasmosis is now recognized as one of the most prevalent fungal infections in North America. It infects hundreds of thousands of people every year...

In a time when smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and typhus ran rampant through the streets of London, there was another disease that instilled even more fear than these other killers: syphilis. So fea...

If you’ve come across the latest dietary guidelines, a few things may have caught your attention: a big ol’ steak front and center in the new “inverted pyramid”, beef tallow and butter recommended as ...

Over the decades, dietary guidelines have taken a diverse array of shapes, from pamphlets to wheels, from plates to pyramids. In many cases, the shapes have changed more than the recommendations they ...

Why do we believe what we believe? Is what we believe the truth? How can we convince others of our beliefs? If you’ve ever found yourself pondering these questions, you know that the answers are rarel...

Tear gas is an expected, normalized part of protests today. But its use in international war is banned. How can that be? That’s just one of the questions we investigate in this episode. First, we take...

Though discovered relatively recently, Oropouche virus has been making headlines as an emerging vector-borne infectious disease on the rise. Not transmitted by the usual suspects (like ticks and mosqu...

For the entirety of our species’ history, our approach to cancer has largely been to react, to design new therapies and better combinations of treatments. This energy has certainly been well-spent, bu...

A century and a half ago, the list of effective cancer treatments was essentially a single entry: surgery. Today, in 2026, you’d need pages to contain the number of treatments available, and multiple ...

For centuries, physicians noticed that cancer sometimes ran in families, but until the 1960s, an answer to this mystery remained out of reach. Only then were scientists beginning to unlock the cellula...