Episode description

How do we take a huge chronic disease burden like Lyme disease or long COVID or even long flu and make it so personal that we simply can't ignore it anymore?

That's today's big question and my guest is Dr. Mikki Tal, an immunoengineer and a principal scientist at MIT.

Dr. Tal leads the Tal Research Group within the Department of Biological Engineering, and also serves as the Associate Scientific Director of the Center for Gynepathology Research. Mikki is working to identify the connections between infections and chronic diseases.

I've written a bit recently about the lessons we finally need to learn about post viral and bacterial health issues, the societal and medicinal and health and economic issues and improving our baseline of wellness and community health, so that we don't suffer from those quite as much.

These things are very real, we've known about them for a very long time and the compounding effects of chronic diseases are just going to continue add up the longer we ignore them, and we gaslight people.

There has never really been a better time for Mikki's work, or for this wonderfully inspiring and personal conversation.

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INI Book Club:

• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Participate in the MAESTRO Study
• Explore more of Dr. Tal's research (including recent papers here and here)
• Keep up with Dr. Tal's work on X and Linkedin
• Read more about Dr. Tal's work here and here

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