Audio Farm:Scary Science

I tend to lean into things when I shouldn't. When I feel sad, I overdo the mopey ballads and let the blues wash over me. When I'm home alone and already feeling tense, I find it the perfect time for a horror movie and start jumping at every creak of the floorboards. It would be smarter to avoid exacerbating these negative feelings, but I can't help myself.

Appropriately, as COVID numbers have been taking off again, I've decided to lean into my anxious hypochondria by listening to a delightfully unnerving podcast, aptly titled This Podcast Will Kill You. Hosted by two disease ecologists and epidemiologists, Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke, each hour-or-so-long episode dissects a specific disease, be it a rare medical mystery or something relatively common like chickenpox. Most of the episodes specifically focus on infectious disease, and they will make you want to never leave your home (or perhaps move into a plastic orb with a really good air filter).

The episodes typically begin with a first-hand account of the illness. In "Episode 68: Coccidioidomycosis: It's never a spider bite" for example, we meet a woman named Tori that, while out for a run one morning in Arizona, suddenly came down with Valley Fever, a fungal infection of the lung which had been caused by breathing in a fungal spore blowing around in a desert dust storm. This tiny little spore cost Tori one of her lungs and nearly her life, and as we learn from Erin and Erin as they nerd out on the disease's biology, treatments, prevalence, and history, it's a lot more common than was once known, possibly even being endemic to Washington State! Eeks!

One of my favorite summer activities used to be going to hot springs in Eastern Oregon. I might rethink that after listening to "Episode 74: Naegleria fowleri: The brain-eating amoeba." Though exceedingly rare, brain-eating amoebas, which are typically found in warm stagnant water, carry with them a nearly 99% mortality rate. Infections typically occur when warm water makes it up the nose, such as when jumping into a freshwater lake on a hot summer day, or using a neti pot with unboiled tap water. From the nose, they make it into your brain and peacefully coexist with your vital nerve cells...I'm just kidding, they eat your brain!

The first-hand accounts are like nature's true crime stories, and the history sections are fascinating (the head of one of the first known victims of Valley Fever, for example, is still preserved in a jar of formalin, and on display in a museum...yikes!). What truly makes this podcast worth your time though is the science. Nature is both beautiful and terrifying, and hearing two Ph.D. experts explain the why's and the how's of mysterious illnesses is more interesting than almost anything on TV (which is blurry and a bit difficult to see anyhow since moving into this plastic bubble).