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This Podcast Will Kill You – Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

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.

Copyright: 2026 iHeartMedia, Inc. © Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from iHeartMedia

Latest Episodes:

Ep 192 New World Screwworm: Oh-oh here they come Nov 04, 2025

Show notes

It’s the stuff nightmares are made of. A fly lands on an open wound and lays hundreds of eggs, from which hatch countless ravenous maggots. There they writhe, devouring flesh, insatiable and relentless. Every minute they dig deeper and deeper until flesh gives way to bone. Even the species name of these maggots inspires a shiver of fear: Cochliomyia hominivorax - “man eater”. This nightmare of a fly is the horrifying reality for many mammals in South America and some Caribbean islands, particularly cattle. And it seems to be making a comeback in the places it was previously eradicated - Central and North America. What exactly this fly does, why it’s such a problem, and how we came to defeat it (temporarily) all feature in this week’s episode. Sterile flies? Archival footage? Gnarly descriptions? This episode has it all.

Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAu

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Special Episode: Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris and Adrian Teal & Dead Ends! Oct 28, 2025

Show notes

Science doesn’t always get it right the first time (or the second, or the third, or even the ninety-ninth!). And while we may chuckle at the outlandish things people believed or the goofy experiments they tried, we forget two things: 1) those failures helped us get where we are today and 2) a hundred years from now, people will probably be laughing at the “cutting edge” medical knowledge of today! In this week’s book club episode, Erin and I chat with two of our all-time favorite science communicators, Dr. Lindsey Fithzarris and Adrian Teal to discuss their newest book Dead Ends!: Flukes, Flops & Failures That Sparked Medical Marvels. This hilarious and insightful book, geared towards middle-school readers (but enjoyable for all ages!), frolicks through some of the strangest stories in the history of medicine, accompanied by delightfully grotesque illustrations. There’s learning, there’s laughter, but most importantly, there’s a lesson: failure is okay. Not just okay but a necessary part of science. Tune in for all this and more!

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Ep 191 Famine: More than starvation Oct 21, 2025

Show notes

As we learned last week, starvation extends far beyond hunger and what a lack of food does to the human body. Similarly, famine is much more than a food shortage and starvation on a population-level scale. This week, we’re picking up where we left off last episode to explore the definitions, drivers, and many dimensions of famine. We trace famines throughout human history, asking how they have changed either in their incidence, severity, or cause. No two famines are exactly alike, but taking a bird’s eye view of patterns in famine over time gives us insight, especially into the famines of the past 100 years. We conclude the episode with a discussion of the ongoing famine in Gaza and other food insecurity crises in other regions of the world. Tune in for a broad overview of this heavy but incredibly important topic.

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Ep 190 Starvation: More than hunger Oct 14, 2025

Show notes

Deprived of food, our bodies do the best they can to keep us alive and functioning as long as possible. As the days pass, the rhythms of our lives change: our metabolism, our heartbeats, our hormones, even our thoughts shift to adjust to this period of scarcity. This response is evolutionarily engrained, following a variable but fairly prescribed path. In this episode, we trace that path, exploring what happens when our bodies are not given the energy stores they need, how patterns of metabolism alter, leading our bodies to consume themselves, and the profound consequences this has on every part of our physiology and psychology. We also tell the story of how we came to learn about these outcomes, chiefly through a WWII-era study called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. This is the first of two episodes centered around malnutrition, starvation, and famine. Next week, we’ll explore the broad topic of famine, of which starvation is merely one component.

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Special Episode: Antonia Hylton & Madness Oct 07, 2025

Show notes

The United States is in the midst of a monumental mental health crisis, with one in four people predicted to experience mental illness at some point in their lives. Adequate mental health care remains out of reach of so many due to a myriad of factors: unaffordability, stigma, shame, and racism, to name a few, leaving enormous gaps in mental health equity. The roots of these inequities can be traced back decades, to the earliest psychiatric hospitals founded on harmful racist notions of mental illness. In Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum, author and award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton explores the story of Crownsville Hospital, a segregated asylum in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, built in 1911 by its first patients: twelve Black men. Over the course of the 20th century, the shifting perspectives of race and mental illness played out in the overcrowded and understaffed Crownsville Hospital, with powerful implications for understanding our current failing to deliver adequate care to all in need. Madness is a powerful and necessary book that sheds much-needed light on the intersections between race, racism, and mental illness.

Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAu

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ep 189 Newborn screening: The future is here Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

Every year, millions of babies around the world are screened for dozens of treatable conditions within the first day or two of life. What it takes is a few drops of blood on some filter paper, and what it gives is profound: potentially life-saving information. The advent of newborn screening is one of the greatest public achievements of the 20th century; since their earliest implementation, screening programs have diagnosed hundreds of thousands of babies early enough for medical intervention. And the life-saving potential they hold continues to grow with the development of genomic sequencing technology, which will increase the number of screenable conditions by an order of magnitude. In this episode, we explore the serendipitous origins of newborn screening, what the process looks like from a parent’s perspective, and how cutting-edge technology could revolutionize these programs. To help us navigate the exciting future of newborn screening, Dr. Joshua Milner, Professor of Pediatrics and Director of Allergy Immunology and Rheumatology at Columbia University Medical Center joins us to discuss an ambitious research program at NewYork-Presbyterian hospitals titled the GUARDIAN study, or Genomic Uniform-screening Against Rare Disease in All Newborns. Tune in for a truly thrilling episode!
For more on the GUARDIAN study, the groundbreaking research program using genomic sequencing technology to screen newborns at NewYork-Presbyterian hospitals for hundreds of conditions, check out the Advances in Care podcast episode titled “Newborn Gene Sequencing: Expanding Early Detection of Treatable Diseases.”

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Ep 188 Candida yeast: Here, there, and everywhere Sep 23, 2025

Show notes

None of us are ever truly alone. Our bodies are home to untold numbers of microbes, chilling on our skin, in our guts, throughout our respiratory tract, inside our bellybuttons, under our fingernails, and beyond. For the most part, we live in harmony with these critters, never giving them a second thought. But occasionally, they may grow a bit too friendly, taking advantage of our hospitality to grow and spread with abandon. Candida yeasts are especially fond of this tactic, leading to millions of infections around the globe each year, many of which can cause significant illness or even death. In this episode, we explore the characteristics of these yeasts that make them so prone to overgrowth, how severe infections can develop, and why one of medicine’s greatest achievements may have helped usher in this new fungal era.

Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAu

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Special Episode: Mary Roach & Replaceable You Sep 16, 2025

Show notes

When your car breaks down or your fridge goes on the fritz, you can order a replacement part and get things back up and running in no time. The same cannot always be said for another intricate machine: the human body. For centuries, scientists have grappled with making or transplanting suitable replacements for nearly every body part, from hearts to hair and from legs to lungs. We’ve come quite a long way in that quest, so that at times, it feels as though we’re living in a sci-fi novel, where skin cells are printed and we can grow a customized heart. Yet we still have further to go, thanks to our magnificent immune system, who proves to be quite a worthy opponent. Here to tell you all about the weird and wonderful world of regenerative medicine is the one and only Mary Roach, who joins us this week to chat about her latest book Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. As with any Mary Roach production, this is the perfect combination of informative, fascinating, and fun. Tune in today!

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Ep 187 Hypothermia Part 2: How it helps Sep 09, 2025

Show notes

Last week, we took you through all the ways that cold can harm us and the harrowing history of humans perishing at its icy hands. Ending the story there would be skipping over the parts where cold gets to play the hero, rather than the villain. In the second installment of this frosty miniseries, we explore the situations in which we might use cold to protect us and how it actually works. We also delve into the surprisingly long (and unsurprisingly grim) history of therapeutic hypothermia, a journey that wouldn’t be complete without a debate over sea cloaks, a reconsideration of the plot of Titanic, and a brief jaunt into cryonics.

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Ep 186 Hypothermia Part 1: How it hurts Sep 02, 2025

Show notes

For all our wondrous adaptations as a species - our big brains, our capacity for language, our opposable thumbs - we humans are not well-equipped to deal with the cold. Take us out of our insulated dwellings, take away our winter clothes, and things can get dicey fast. From frostbite to hypothermia, the cold can settle into our bones, leading us down a path where injury or death are possible outcomes. In this episode, we explore that path: how our meager cold-survival adaptations are vastly outshone by other animal species, the long and grim history of hypothermia in war, and what exactly is happening inside your body when your temperature drops. Tune in to this unexpectedly strange grab-bag of an episode.

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