Special Episode: Deborah Cohen & Bad Influence
Episode Date: August 11, 2026If you have a medical question, where do you turn? How often is google or social media your first stop? As you sift through the AI overview and countl...
This podcast might not actually kill you, but Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke cover so many things that can. In each episode, they tackle a different topic, teaching listeners about the biology, history, and epidemiology of a different disease or medical mystery. They do the scientific research, so you don’t have to. Since 2017, Erin and Erin have explored chronic and infectious diseases, medications, poisons, viruses, bacteria and scientific discoveries. They’ve researched public health subjects including plague, Zika, COVID-19, lupus, asbestos, endometriosis and more. Each episode is accompanied by a creative quarantini cocktail recipe and a non-alcoholic placeborita. Erin Welsh, Ph.D. is a co-host of the This Podcast Will Kill You. She is a disease ecologist and epidemiologist and works full-time as a science communicator through her work on the podcast. Erin Allmann Updyke, MD, Ph.D. is a co-host of This Podcast Will Kill You. She’s an epidemiologist and disease ecologist currently in the final stretch of her family medicine residency program. This Podcast Will Kill You is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including science, true crime, comedic interviews, news, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, Buried Bones, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast and more.
297 episodes transcribedIf you have a medical question, where do you turn? How often is google or social media your first stop? As you sift through the AI overview and countl...
Last week, we set the stage by breaking down the science behind cholesterol: how it moves through our body, why it causes disease, and when we discove...
So your latest blood test results have come in, and you see a couple of numbers for cholesterol. What do those numbers mean, and why do we care about...
You’ve seen the headlines: a food-borne parasite is infecting people across the US, leaving them chained to the toilet sometimes for weeks on en...
Social media ads for egg freezing. A craigslist-like site for breast milk. Fertility fairs featuring IVF clinics alongside shamanic nutritionists. Sur...
In keeping with last week’s theme of “bodily excretions that are kinda gross that you don’t really think about but are actually real...
Hard and crusty. Green and gloopy. Clear and watery. Boogers come in a veritable rainbow of colors and a full spectrum of textures from liquid to soli...
Stories of unethical medical experimentation often center around the individuals who spearheaded such atrocities or highlight how patient protection l...
At the turn of the 20th century, a severe burn was often a death sentence. Today, that is no longer the case. Over the past eighty years, burn care ha...
Burns have been a part of the human experience since our hominin relatives began controlling fire 1.5 million years ago. Until very recently, we&rsquo...
An accurate diagnosis can give us so much. It can give us a path forward. It can give us answers to long-standing questions. And it can give us much-n...
It comes on sneakily. You become aware of your stomach. You break out in a cold sweat. Your mouth fills with saliva. And before you know it, you&rsquo...
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...
In a time when smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and typhus ran rampant through the streets of London, there was another disease that instilled even mo...
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...
Over the decades, dietary guidelines have taken a diverse array of shapes, from pamphlets to wheels, from plates to pyramids. In many cases, the shape...
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 ponder...
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...
Though discovered relatively recently, Oropouche virus has been making headlines as an emerging vector-borne infectious disease on the rise. Not trans...
For the entirety of our species’ history, our approach to cancer has largely been to react, to design new therapies and better combinations of t...