The New York Times

Inside an Orphanage at the Center of an Ebola Outbreak

It could have been a recipe of disaster. It's a very classic situation where Ebola can very fastly devastate the community. They are playing together and they are spending the whole day together, so it's spreading from one person to the next. And for zero time you'll see the entire community being infected.

Freakonomics Radio

This Is Your Brain on Pollution (Update)

As the Trump administration rolls back environmental regulations, we revisit a 2022 episode that explored the hidden cost of an invisible threat: air pollution.

The New York Times

How the Ebola Outbreak Is Spreading Mistrust in Congo

People who die from Ebola remain highly infectious. That's why burial teams are trained to handle them in protective gear, to disinfect the body and keep families from touching the dead. But those rules are breaking down.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, people were infected with intestinal worms as a matter of course. It's only in the past century, in wealthy countries, that mass deworming campaigns and improved sanitation removed them from virtually the entire population. Now some researchers think that eliminating these ancient passengers may have contributed to a sharp rise in autoimmune and allergic diseases.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, people were infected with helminths — parasitic worms — as a matter of course. It's only in the past century or so, in wealthy industrialized nations, that we've largely eliminated them. And it's in those same places that allergies, asthma, and autoimmune diseases have skyrocketed.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, hookworms and other parasitic worms were ubiquitous companions to our species. It was only in the twentieth century that sanitation campaigns, shoes, and antiparasitic drugs largely eliminated them from wealthy countries — and it was shortly after that elimination that rates of allergies, autoimmune diseases, and inflammatory bowel conditions began their dramatic rise.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, hookworms and other parasitic worms were ubiquitous companions to our species, and our immune systems evolved in their presence. The idea, known as the hygiene hypothesis or 'old friends' hypothesis, is that the absence of these organisms in the modern developed world has left our immune systems without the regulatory signals they evolved to expect — potentially contributing to the rise of allergies, autoimmune diseases, and inflammatory conditions.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, intestinal worms were ubiquitous companions. Only in the twentieth century did sanitation campaigns and deworming programs scrub them from the bodies of people in wealthy nations. But some researchers now suspect that in eliminating these parasites, we may have also dismantled part of our immune system's essential operating instructions.

Code Switch

Why so many Americans never learned to swim

In the US, about eight out of 10 children from households with incomes below $50,000 a year have few to no swimming skills. That's according to the American Red Cross. About 64% of black children have few to no swimming skills. For Latino children, it's 45%. For white kids, it's about 40%. And you know, not to get all heavy, but these disparities around swimming line up with drowning deaths in the US, which are most likely to affect poor kids and kids of color.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Karnal - The Trillion-Dollar Health Revolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467]

most of the diseases that will claim most of our lives are already addressable with medicines that exist today

Radiolab

Antibiotic Apocalypse

searching for answers to an alarming threat to humanity's existence as we know it: antibiotic resistance in bacteria