Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 10 days 3 hours 54 minutes
We’ve covered measles, we’ve taken on rubella, and now we’re finishing up the classic MMR vaccine by exploring the other M: mumps. To some listeners, mumps may be a painful childhood memory while to others it’s just a letter in a vaccine they were too young to remember getting. But by the end of this episode, we promise that you’ll all be much more familiar with this strange little virus...
Are you in the mood to chat chromosomes, specifically the X chromosome? If so, have we got the perfect episode for you! You may have come across the definition of Turner syndrome as a genetic condition resulting from the partial or complete loss of an X chromosome, but what does that actually mean? What is the X chromosome, what does it do, and why is it so important? We attempt to answer these questions with our exploration into the biology of Turner syndrome before setting our sights on the...
Over the years of the podcast, we have often struggled with questions of why: why pathogens act the way they do, why certain people get sick while others don’t, or why we know little about some diseases. This episode is no exception - sepsis certainly inspires many “whys”. But for perhaps the first time on the pod, we find ourselves grappling not only with “why?” but also with “what?”. What, indeed, is sepsis? Ask a dozen doctors and you may get a dozen different answers...
Although today we tend to think about diseases in terms of signs and symptoms, tests and treatments, that hasn’t always been the case. For much of history, diseases carried with them a deeper meaning beyond the pathophysiological processes leading to their development. A diagnosis was as much about the identity and personality of an individual as it was about the disease itself, and this was especially the case for the topic of today’s episode: gout...
Somehow it’s taken us until the penultimate episode to cover this season’s first mosquito-borne virus. But we assure you, this episode is well-worth the wait. Although Chikungunya virus is often lumped in with dengue or Zika, the unique characteristics that distinguish Chikungunya virus from these other arboviruses are just as important to note as the similarities among them...
Ep 110 Influenza, Take 2: Sitting Ducks; Fowl Play Over five years ago, on October 31, 2017, the very first episode of This Podcast Will Kill You premiered, an action-packed (and mildly disorganized) tour of the influenza virus and the 1918 flu pandemic. So much has happened since that episode’s release, both within the podcast and in the world of public health, not the least of which is a respiratory virus pandemic...