This Podcast Will Kill You

This Podcast Will Kill You

Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

Episodes 289
Avg. Duration 1h 15m
Activity Highly Active
Apple Rating 4.8 (16,855)
Since Oct 2017
Latest Episode Jun 2026

Publishing Details

Schedule
Weekly
Format
Episodic
Consistency
100%
Hosting
www.omnycontent.com

Contact & Outreach

About This Podcast

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.

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Recent Episodes

S9 Ep 212 Burns Part 1: The first million or so years

Jun 09, 2026 55m Transcript

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’ve been limited in our ability to manage burn wounds…

S9 Special Episode: Alexandra Sifferlin & The Elusive Body

Jun 02, 2026 51m Transcript

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-needed hope. Yet many people around the world wait…

S9 Ep 211 Motion Sickness: It comes in waves

May 26, 2026 1h 16m Transcript

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’re leaning over the side of the boat (or out of the…

S9 Ep 210 Histoplasmosis: Bats, birds, and budding yeast

May 19, 2026 1h 18m Transcript

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 infects hundreds of thousands of people every…

S9 Special Episode: Dr. Olivia Weisser & The Dreaded Pox

May 12, 2026 51m Transcript

In a time when smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and typhus ran rampant through the streets of London, there was another disease that instilled even more fear than these other killers: syphilis. So…

S9 Ep 209 Dietary Guidelines Part 2: Why is there protein in everything?

May 05, 2026 59m Transcript

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 new “inverted pyramid”, beef tallow and butter recommended as…

S9 Ep 208 Dietary Guidelines Part 1: Who’s behind these guidelines?

Apr 28, 2026 57m Transcript

Over the decades, dietary guidelines have taken a diverse array of shapes, from pamphlets to wheels, from plates to pyramids. In many cases, the shapes have changed more than the recommendations they…

S9 Special Episode: Adam Kucharski & Proof

Apr 21, 2026 50m Transcript

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 pondering these questions, you know that the answers are…

S9 Ep 207 Tear Gas: How can a chemical weapon be “humane”?

Apr 14, 2026 1h 15m Transcript

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 questions we investigate in this episode. First, we…

S9 Ep 206 Oropouche Virus: More than a smidge worrisome

Apr 07, 2026 1h 12m Transcript

Though discovered relatively recently, Oropouche virus has been making headlines as an emerging vector-borne infectious disease on the rise. Not transmitted by the usual suspects (like ticks and…

S8 Ep 205 Cancer Part 4: Where do things stand today?

Mar 31, 2026 1h 19m Transcript

For the entirety of our species’ history, our approach to cancer has largely been to react, to design new therapies and better combinations of treatments. This energy has certainly been well-spent,…

S8 Ep 204 Cancer Part 3: How do we treat it?

Mar 24, 2026 1h 32m Transcript

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 contain the number of treatments available, and multiple…

S8 Special Episode: Lawrence Ingrassia & A Fatal Inheritance

Mar 17, 2026 45m Transcript

For centuries, physicians noticed that cancer sometimes ran in families, but until the 1960s, an answer to this mystery remained out of reach. Only then were scientists beginning to unlock the…

S8 Ep 203 Cancer Part 2: Why does it happen?

Mar 10, 2026 1h 18m Transcript

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 consequence of complex life. The features that make a…

S8 Ep 202 Cancer Part 1: What is it?

Mar 03, 2026 1h 36m Transcript

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 series on cancer, we aim to lay a foundation of…

S8 Special Episode: Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden & Rat City

Feb 24, 2026 56m Transcript

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 finding out. Results from Calhoun’s “rat utopia”…

S8 Ep 201 Poop Part 2: Flushed away

Feb 17, 2026 1h 21m Transcript

Poop is an incredibly valuable and massively underutilized resource. However, most of us don’t see it that way because of our evolutionarily ingrained disgust towards poop. Flush toilets and…

S8 Ep 200 Poop Part 1: How the sausage gets made

Feb 10, 2026 1h 11m Transcript

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. But for the next hour and fifteen minutes or…

S8 Special Episode: Nicola Twilley & Frostbite

Feb 03, 2026 1h Transcript

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. From the foods we grow to where we grow them, from…

S8 Ep 199 Sleep Part 2: Predictably unpredictable

Jan 27, 2026 1h 10m Transcript

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 Americans are not getting enough sleep, according to…

Frequently Asked Questions

How many episodes does This Podcast Will Kill You have?

This Podcast Will Kill You has published 289 episodes since October 2017, covering topics in Health & Fitness, Science.

Is This Podcast Will Kill You still active?

This Podcast Will Kill You is currently highly active with new episodes weekly. Average episode length is 1h 15m.

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