This episode explores hand, foot, and mouth disease, including its various viruses, symptoms, outbreaks, and potential vaccines. The hosts share personal experiences and knowledge, discuss enteroviruses and echo viruses, treatment options, the origins and global spread of the disease, and the vast world of viruses. They also explore hypotheses about virus origins and express gratitude to listeners.

This podcast explores the biology and history of asthma, including the different types and origins of the disease. It discusses personal experiences with asthma, the evolution of treatments through history, and the current state of asthma research. The hosts also address conflicts of interest in pharmaceutical studies and emphasize the importance of funding for public health and asthma research.

Our final TPWKY book club selection of the season will test the limits of your imagination by asking you to consider what it might be like to smell the world through the nose of a dog or to see flowers through the ultraviolet vision of a bee. It will make you ponder the tradeoffs inherent in sensory perception and what an animal’s dominant senses can tell us about what is most important to their species. It will have you contemplating what the future holds for sensory research, both in terms of what new senses we might discover as well as the impacts of sensory pollution on an ecosystem. In short, it will change the way you perceive the world. Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong joins us to chat about his incredible book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Yong, whose other book I Contain Multitudes is another TPWKY favorite, leads us on an expedition beyond the boundaries of human senses as we chat about what an octopus tastes, how the line between communication and perception is blurred in electric fish, the evolutionary arms race between bats and moths, and even the long-standing question of why zebras have stripes. Tune in for the riveting and magical conclusion to this season’s miniseries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The CDC’s list of highest priority bioterrorism agents is a short one, with only six pathogens making the cut. Among the more familiar names on the list, such as anthrax, botulism, plague, smallpox, and viral hemorrhagic fevers, is the topic of today’s episode: Francisella tularensis. Unless you’re a hunter or work with small mammals, you may not recognize the name of this pathogen or the disease it causes - tularemia - let alone the characteristics that earned it a place on the CDC’s list. By the end of this episode, though, all that will have changed. Join us as we explore why this pathogen’s brutal biology makes it a force to be reckoned with, how the history of its discovery has surprising origins in the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and what promises future research may hold for protection against this deadly disease. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, to taste the food of the past. Strawberry jam made from farm-fresh strawberries. Milk straight from the cow. Cookies baked with freshly churned butter and brown sugar. Because that’s how it was, right? Everything used to be fresher, more pure, unadulterated by preservatives or additives, right? Our latest TPWKY book club pick shows us just how wrong that notion is. Science journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Deborah Blum joins us this week to chat about her book, The Poison Squad, which tells the story of the fight for food safety regulation in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. In our conversation, Blum rips off those rose-tinted nostalgia glasses and reveals that strawberry jam rarely contained strawberries, milk could include a mix of formaldehyde and pond water, butter had borax, and brown sugar was mostly ground up insects. Until one man, chemist Harvey Wiley, stepped up and spearheaded the campaign for food safety legislation, all of these horrific practices of food adulteration were entirely legal. Tune in to learn what Wiley was up against and some of the tactics used in his struggle, including the wild story of the experiment that gave this book its title. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s safe to assume that the vast majority of you have a bottle or blister pack of acetaminophen/paracetamol/Tylenol/Panadol in your home medicine cabinet, and an even vaster majority of you have taken the medicine at some point in your life. After all, acetaminophen/paracetamol is one of the most, if not the most, widely used medications worldwide. Despite its near ubiquity, many unanswered questions remain. How does it actually work? Should safe dosage guidelines be revisited? Why on earth does it have multiple names? And finally, who was responsible for the Tylenol murders in 1982? In this jam-packed episode, we do our best to make sense of the mysteries surrounding this drug, weaving our way from the pharmaceutical nitty gritty of acetaminophen/paracetamol to the bizarre story of its discovery, from the horrific crimes that shocked a nation and revolutionized consumer safety standards to the ongoing discussions of whether we’re under- or overestimating how safe this medication actually is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Riots over inoculations. Large-scale quarantines and lockdowns. Criticisms of government action (or inaction) during disease outbreaks. The spread of mis- and disinformation about the safety of immunizations. You may be thinking, “this is a COVID episode, isn’t it?”. Not quite. In this latest installment of the TPWKY book club we’ll be discussing another key period in US history that had profound, long-lasting impacts on public health and access to medical care: the American Revolutionary War, when liberty from smallpox was even more important to the American colonists than independence from Great Britain. Our time travel tour guide is Dr. Andrew Wehrman, Associate Professor of History at Central Michigan University, who joins us to discuss his fascinating book The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution, published in December 2022. As our conversation reveals, public demand for inoculation was so great that riots were held to protest unequal access, our current lack of universal healthcare systems has incredibly deep roots, and George Washington’s greatest legacy may in fact be his ability to change his mind when presented with new information. With the Fourth of July just one week ago, what better time to consider this fresh perspective on the American fight for independence and freedom from disease. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In early February and late March of this year, separate outbreaks of Marburg virus were declared in Equatorial Guinea and in the United Republic of Tanzania. For several months, news of these outbreaks and other sporadic cases made headlines globally, as public health officials watched the number of cases and suspected cases climb, calling to mind previous outbreaks of Marburg virus's relative, the deadly Ebola virus. Fortunately, the WHO declared both outbreaks over in early June, but the threat of this hemorrhagic virus remains. In this episode (recorded in April 2023) we explore why the biology Marburg virus makes it such a deadly pathogen, what its evolutionary history and the history of its discovery can tell us about the changing landscape of pathogen spillover, and how the recent outbreaks reveal how much we still don't know about this virus. Tune in for everything you ever wanted to know about Marburg virus and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are viruses the “great equalizers” that some people claim them to be? Are we all similarly susceptible not only to infection from viruses but also to the consequences from infection? The short answer is no. The longer answer can be found in this week’s book club pick, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Dr. Steven Thrasher. Dr. Thrasher, the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair and Assistant Professor of Journalism at Northwestern University, joins us to discuss how racism, classism, sexism, ableism, stigma, and other forms of oppression intersect to create a viral underclass, a group of individuals that are disproportionately susceptible to and impacted by viruses. Our conversation takes us through several of these vectors of the viral underclass as well as personal stories that illustrate how social and political structures punish certain communities for getting sick while others profit. Part memoir, part academic discussion, part journalism, and entirely groundbreaking, The Viral Underclass is an incredibly timely book that demonstrates the ways that viruses amplify and exacerbate existing inequalities while also underlining how we are truly all in this together. Our interconnectedness means that if one of us is vulnerable to infection, then we all are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An entire generation probably first learned the word “mesothelioma” and its link to asbestos from those ubiquitous commercials in the 1990s and 2000s. You know the one: “if you or a loved one has been diagnosed with mesothelioma you may be entitled to financial compensation.” These commercials made it seem like mesothelioma suddenly came out of nowhere. Was this a newly discovered disease? Wasn’t asbestos banned? How did asbestos cause mesothelioma? Heck, what even was asbestos? By seeking to answer all those questions and more, this episode picks up where those commercials left off. We detail how teeny tiny asbestos fibers can wreak immense devastation, untangle the long human history of asbestos products, and assess the current status of this fibrous mineral, which is disappointingly far from banned worldwide. No story of asbestos would be complete without a spotlight on the town of Libby, Montana, where brave crusaders continue to fight against a company whose callous negligence led to injury, death, and widespread environmental contamination. Tune in to find out where salamanders, The Wizard of Oz, Charlemagne, and The River Wild fit into the story of asbestos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices