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.
278 episodes transcribedFor the entirety of our species’ history, our approach to cancer has largely been to react, to design new therapies and better combinations of t...
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 c...
For centuries, physicians noticed that cancer sometimes ran in families, but until the 1960s, an answer to this mystery remained out of reach. Only th...
Each of our cells can become cancerous. It’s an uncomfortable, yet unavoidable truth. Nor is it a truth restricted to our species - cancer is a...
Cancer has touched every one of us in some capacity, and learning of a diagnosis inspires many more questions than it answers. In this four-part serie...
What happens if you put a bunch of rats in an enclosure and provision them with unlimited food and water? Researcher John B. Calhoun was committed to...
Poop is an incredibly valuable and massively underutilized resource. However, most of us don’t see it that way because of our evolutionarily ing...
It might be stinky and it might be unpleasant to behold, but we all do it. For many of us, our poop is out of sight, out of mind once we flush it away...
For much of the world, refrigeration is such a commonplace technology that we rarely stop to wonder at the many ways it has transformed our lives. Fro...
Now that we know just how critical sleep is, we’re all making sure we get the amount we need, right? Unfortunately no. One-third to one-half of...
Sleep is a universal experience. It’s not just the lion that sleeps tonight - it’s also the butterfly, the chicken, the jellyfish, the dog...
The widespread use of leaded gasoline in the 20th century led to one of the world’s biggest public health and environmental disasters, the effec...
Ah, the new year. After the last month and a half of indulgent food and drink, disrupted schedules, and laying around the house, who doesn’t fee...
This episode originally aired on January 11th, 2022. Chances are you know someone with endometriosis, or perhaps you’re affected yourself. But d...
This episode originally aired on January 25th, 2022. In light of the recent changes by RFK jr’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (AC...
Did your grandma ever warn you against going out in the cold with wet hair because “you’ll catch your death”? Or have you ever tosse...
[Content warning: self-harm, suicide, violence] In this day and age, we are equipped with an abundance of tools and knowledge to fight the spread of d...
We ended last week’s episode on a bit of a cliffhanger: is salt actually bad for us and if so, why does there still seem to be a debate? This we...
Have you ever thrown a pinch of spilled salt over your left shoulder? Or said to someone “well, take his opinion with a grain of salt”? Or...
In an anatomy and physiology class, you may learn how the different heart valves work to circulate your blood, how the structure of your kidney helps...
