In 1942, Cleo Wright was removed from a Sikeston, Missouri, jail and lynched by a mob. Nearly 80 years later, Denzel Taylor was killed by police in the same community. The deaths of these two Black fathers tell a story about the public health consequences of racism and systemic bias. Meet residents determined to live healthier lives after generations of community silence. “Silence in Sikeston” is the podcast about finding the words to say the things that go unsaid. This is an invitation. Perhaps...
Dec 09, 2024•26 min
In 1975, smallpox eradication workers in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, rushed to a village in the south of the country called Kuralia. They were abuzz and the journey was urgent because they thought they just might be going to document the very last case of variola major, a deadly strain of the virus. When they arrived, they met a toddler, Rahima Banu. She did have smallpox, and five years later, in 1980, when the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated, Banu became a symbol o...
Nov 07, 2023•16 min•Season 2Ep. 8
The 1970s was the deadliest decade in the “entire history of Bangladesh,” said environmental historian Iftekhar Iqbal. A deadly cyclone, a bloody liberation war, and famine triggered waves of migration. As people moved throughout the country, smallpox spread with them. In Episode 7 of “Eradicating Smallpox,” Shohrab, a man who was displaced by the 1970 Bhola cyclone, shares his story. After fleeing the storm, he and his family settled in a makeshift community in Dhaka known as the Bhola basti. S...
Oct 24, 2023•19 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Global fears of overpopulation in the ’60s and ’70s helped fuel India’s campaign to slow population growth. Health workers tasked to encourage family planning were dispatched throughout the country and millions of people were sterilized: some voluntarily, some for a monetary reward, and some through force. This violent and coercive campaign — and the distrust it created — was a backdrop for the smallpox eradication campaign happening simultaneously in India. When smallpox eradication worker Chan...
Oct 10, 2023•21 min•Season 2Ep. 6
In spring 1974, over a dozen smallpox outbreaks sprang up throughout the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Determined to find the source of the cases, American smallpox eradication worker Larry Brilliant and a local partner, Zaffar Hussain, launched an investigation. The answer: Each outbreak could be traced back to Tatanagar, a city run by one of India’s largest corporations, the Tata Group. When Brilliant arrived at the Tatanagar Railway Station, he was horrified by what he saw: people with acti...
Sep 26, 2023•24 min•Season 2Ep. 5
At noon ET on Thursday Sept. 14, Epidemic host Céline Gounder and her guests will come together for a live web event. Click here to register for the event. In Conversation With Host Céline Gounder: Helene D. Gayle , a physician and an epidemiologist, is president of Spelman College. She is a board member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and past director of the foundation’s program on HIV, tuberculosis, and reproductive health. She spent two decades with the Centers for Disease Control and...
Sep 12, 2023•48 sec
Shahidul Haq Khan, a Bangladeshi health worker, and Tim Miner, an American with the World Health Organization, worked together on a smallpox eradication team in Bangladesh in the early 1970s. The team was based on a hospital ship and traveled by speedboat to track down cases of smallpox from Barishal to Faridpur to Patuakhali. Every person who agreed to get the smallpox vaccination was a potential outbreak averted, so the team was determined to vaccinate as many people as possible. The duo leane...
Aug 29, 2023•22 min•Season 2Ep. 4
In 1973, Bhakti Dastane arrived in Bihar, India, to join the smallpox eradication campaign. She was a year out of medical school and had never cared for anyone with the virus. She believed she was offering something miraculous, saving people from a deadly disease. But some locals did not see it that way. Episode 3 of “Eradicating Smallpox” explores what happened when public health workers — driven by the motto “zero pox!” — encountered hesitation. These anti-smallpox warriors wanted to achieve 1...
Aug 15, 2023•19 min•Season 2Ep. 3
By the mid-1970s, India’s smallpox eradication campaign had been grinding for over a decade. But the virus was still spreading beyond control. It was time to take a new, more targeted approach. This strategy was called “search and containment.” Teams of eradication workers visited communities across India to track down active cases of smallpox. Whenever they found a case, health workers would isolate the infected person, then vaccinate anyone that individual might have come in contact with. Sear...
Aug 01, 2023•24 min•Season 2Ep. 2
In the mid-’60s, the national campaign to eradicate smallpox in India was underway, but the virus was still widespread throughout the country. At the time, Dinesh Bhadani was a small boy living in Gaya, a city in the state of Bihar. In his community many people believed smallpox was divine, sent by the Hindu goddess Shitala Mata. In Bihar people had misgivings about accepting the vaccine because, Bhadani says, they did not want to interfere with the will of the goddess. Others hesitated because ...
Jul 18, 2023•23 min•Season 2Ep. 1
"Eradicating Smallpox” is a journey to South Asia, the site of the last days of variola major smallpox. Many epidemiologists and global health leaders thought that ending smallpox was impossible. They were wrong. Dedicated public health workers made it happen. “Eradicating Smallpox” is an eight-episode, limited series amplifying their voices. Host Céline Gounder, a physician and epidemiologist, traveled to India and Bangladesh, and her field recordings anchor the season. Each episode mines the s...
Jul 06, 2023•2 min
In the years leading up to the pandemic, Dr. Celine Gounder, the host of the EPIDEMIC and American Diagnosis podcasts, had the opportunity to care for patients part-time at several Indian Health Service facilities around the United States. Working on the “rez,” one theme came up over and over: resilience. In this latest season of American Diagnosis, we’re going to share stories of Indigenous people who are taking action to protect the health and wellbeing of their communities in the face of incr...
Dec 20, 2021•4 min
"It's a really interesting question: how do we get closure in this pandemic? I think a lot of people have hurt and loss that's not been acknowledged. I think acknowledging that loss is very important." - Andy Slavitt In this final episode of season 1 of EPIDEMIC, we look back on the coronavirus pandemic and how we can move forward with one of our first guests, Andy Slavitt, who was President Biden’s Senior Advisor on COVID-19. Then we hear from you, our listeners, about how the vaccine has chang...
Jun 24, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 80
"Pregnant women who have SARS-CoV-2 are more likely to be admitted to the ICU, to need a ventilator and are more likely to die than women of the same age who are not pregnant. Pregnancy definitely makes getting COVID-19 much more dangerous." -Andrea Edlow Some of the most persistent myths about coronavirus and the vaccines developed to fight it have to do with women's health. In this episode, we'll hear about the latest science when it comes to topics like COVID and a woman's fertility, breastfe...
Jun 17, 2021•23 min•Season 1Ep. 79
"The pandemic has given us an opportunity to finally change this and if we don't, the economic impact from the fallout of women in the workforce is going to be devastating." -Erika Moritsugu The pandemic has upended caregiving and what it means to be a working mom. More than 2 million women have left the workforce because of the cost and effort of caring for children and older family members during the pandemic. In this episode of EPIDEMIC, we’ll hear why the United States is the only wealthy na...
Jun 10, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 78
"When you're building a system like a vaccine passport you're potentially excluding millions of people because they don't have this thing that once was optional, but has now become indispensable." -Albert Fox Cahn How do you let people who are fully vaccinated get back to normal life without creating super-spreader events for those who haven’t yet been vaccinated? Some are calling for vaccine certification programs that could hopefully re-open large parts of the economy safely while we still wor...
Jun 03, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 77
"You can't fight scarcity with scarcity. The only way out of the vaccine problem is by making a lot more of it." -James Krellenstein India is the world's largest supplier of vaccines but the government there suspended the export of all COVID-19 vaccines after a devastating outbreak this spring. This is just the latest reason why global health leaders are calling for a new, decentralized approach to vaccine manufacturing around the world. In this week’s episode we’ll look at the challenge facing ...
May 27, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 76
"It's a triumph of science and engineering that we now have multiple effective COVID vaccines. We just need to find the political will to invest a bit more money and deploy them around the world." -Chris Morten President Joe Biden said the United States would be the world's "arsenal of vaccines" but critics say current plans to donate 80 million doses around the world are not enough. Instead, countries like India and South Africa are calling for a waiver on vaccine patents so they can make their...
May 20, 2021•26 min•Season 1Ep. 75
"They benefit from traffic no matter if it's good information or malignant misinformation. " -Imran Ahmed During the pandemic, disinformation campaigns have been targeting people of color with lies like African Americans can't get COVID or denying the pandemic is even real. In this episode, we’re going to hear more about how these disinformation networks are gaming social media algorithms. We'll hear how the United States has become a hub for disinformation exported around the world, and what le...
May 13, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 74
"What we really need to be doing is not belittle people. Don't wag your finger at them. Don't make them feel stupid or small for not having gotten the vaccine yet. Talk to them about why it's safe." - Gov. Chris Christie Conservatives have emerged as the group least likely to say they’ll get vaccinated. Getting more conservative Americans comfortable with the vaccines will be needed to control the pandemic as national vaccination rates have started to slow and new variants spread across the Unit...
May 06, 2021•23 min•Season 1Ep. 73
"Disinformation is a deliberate falsehood put out to mislead an audience. But what we see more of are true bits of information where necessary context has been removed or manipulated in a way that makes it technically true but wildly misleading." -Bret Schafer In this episode of EPIDEMIC, we’re going to look at disinformation during the pandemic. Specifically, we’re going to look at how the Russian government and far-right militias are using vaccine disinformation to push their agendas. We’ll lo...
Apr 29, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 72
"I don't think that herd immunity is a possibility for SARS CoV-2. I think there's going to be a different kind of equilibrium that we reach in the future where humans and SARS-CoV-2 co-exist in a much milder, more benign way." -Jennie Lavine The end of the pandemic might not mean the end of SARS-CoV-2. In fact, many scientists think COVID is here to stay, even with vaccines. In this episode we'll hear why we may never reach herd immunity, how the coronavirus could change over time, and why kids...
Apr 22, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 71
"The messaging that we've done in West Virginia is, look, we are leading the country, and that has really given people a sense that we can dispel a lot of negative stereotypes. We can be a world leader in a positive way." -Chris Martin Rural America's vaccine rollout has bucked expectations. A recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that four in 10 rural Americans reported getting at least their first dose of vaccine. That’s compared to three in 10 in urban and suburban areas. In t...
Apr 15, 2021•23 min•Season 1Ep. 70
"This virus does not discriminate. The vaccine is what is going to help to get us out of this crisis and stop the depth and the harm and the pain, which is what we're suffering two to three times more than our white counterparts." -Sandra Lindsay Reports show that Black Americans are less likely to get vaccinated than the general population but Black healthcare workers are taking on the mission to inform and hopefully convince more people of color to get vaccinated. We’ll hear where this outreac...
Apr 08, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 69
"We have to have a conversation where we take people's fears seriously and try to figure out what is going on there." -Vanessa Gamble Black Americans are twice as likely to die from COVID as white Americans. Despite this, polls show that African-Americans are less interested in receiving the vaccine than other groups. But for people of color who do want the vaccine, inequities in U.S. healthcare are making access to vaccines more difficult. To get a fuller picture of the African American experie...
Apr 01, 2021•25 min•Season 1Ep. 68
"I think a lot of people don't understand how fearful Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans are in this moment" -Toby Chow On March 16, a gunman in Atlanta killed eight people. Six of them were women of Asian descent. During the last 12 months, anti-Asian hate crimes were up 150% in the United States but the coronavirus pandemic is not the first time people of Asian descent have been stigmatized because of a disease. In this episode, we’ll look back at what happened in San Francisco during...
Mar 25, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 67
"This is an invisible war and if we don't use our weapons we are not going to win it." -Ester Sabino In the fall of 2020, the Brazilian city of Manaus had the highest SARS CoV-2 infection rate in the world — possibly as high as 75 percent. Some speculated that with rates of infection this high, there would not be enough people left for the virus to infect. Had the city reached so-called natural herd immunity? For a few months cases started to drop but this winter things got worse than ever. We’l...
Mar 18, 2021•19 min•Season 1Ep. 66
"We easily have never had as high a level of vaccination acceptance as we have now but we've asked a lot more of the public. The resistance that we see today is a response, in part, to that compounded request over time." - Elena Conis The vast majority of Americans accept vaccines but concerns about the effect vaccines could theoretically have on kids have been some of the oldest and most resilient drivers of vaccine mistrust. At this recording, the COVID vaccines authorized for emergency use ha...
Mar 11, 2021•25 min•Season 1Ep. 65
"Every generation has generated its own anti-vaccinationism based on very similar concerns." -Jonathan Berman Vaccines are a safe and critical public health tool. They prevent crippling childhood diseases like polio. They’re responsible for the eradication of one of the deadliest diseases ever — smallpox — and, today, they’re one of the most important measures we have to end the coronavirus pandemic. But despite these achievements people have been worried about vaccines for as long as they’ve ex...
Mar 04, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 64
"When we think about a virus we don't think as much about the immune response to the virus but it is just so, so critical." -David Fajgenbaum Where do treatments come from when there's a new disease like COVID-19? The vast majority of drugs prescribed to treat COVID during the pandemic are actually old drugs. Some of the most effective have been around for as much as 70 years. In this episode of EPIDEMIC, we’re going to hear how David Fajgenbaum's quest for a treatment for his rare disease is he...
Feb 25, 2021•23 min•Season 1Ep. 63
