Petrie Dish

Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, professor and chair of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, has been running two long COVID clinics since early in the pandemic, and she says every case is different.

The antibiotics that only 80 years ago turned TB from a voracious killer of an estimated 1 billion people to a treatable disease just don’t work anymore.

Did you know there is still one tuberculosis hospital in the United States? There is just one: The Texas Center for Infectious Disease in San Antonio. Host Bonnie Petrie takes us there.

COVID cases have been increasing for weeks nationwide, but a COVID expert says not to call it a surge just yet.

'We've seen women who have not gone outside the door in six months,' said Margaret Constantino, executive director of the Center for Refugee Services in San Antonio. 'How does anybody stay healthy in that kind of environment?'

Family members of a woman who changed modern medicine — without her knowledge and certainly without her permission — spoke at a gathering of scientists in San Antonio recently about ethics and equity in science and medicine.

While there are still tests, treatments like paxlovid, and vaccines in the national stockpile, those should remain easily accessible. Once the stockpile is depleted, though, all those things may become more costly to the consumer and more difficult to get.

Medical misinformation is killing people, according to the head of the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Robert Califf blames misinformation and disinformation about public health for the fact that life expectancy in the United States is between three and five years lower than it is in other high-income countries.

Can it turn us into murderous zombies? No, but it has killed between 30 to 60 percent of those it has infected.

Some are calling it the Kim Kardashian weight loss drug. Ozempic related videos have more than 1 billion views on TikTok. The medication is taken to help control blood sugar levels in type two diabetes, and it has taken off for an off-label use — as a treatment for obesity. Now, Ozempic is being studied for yet another potential use — as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

San Antonio researchers are getting the band back together, in a way. They’re reaching out to people who participated in a groundbreaking 1979 study on heart disease and diabetes in the Latino population to see if they’d like to enroll in a new study.

One of humanity's great quests made microscopic in the aging intestines of tiny monkeys.

Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez runs two long COVID clinics in San Antonio, is known for running marathons, and she partners in running a home as a mom to two children. But after recovering from COVID-19, she couldn’t walk around a mall. Host Bonnie Petrie speaks with Dr. Gutierrez about the realities of long COVID for millions of people three years into the pandemic.

The idea that there may be medicines already out there, safe and approved by the FDA and just waiting to be rediscovered is tantalizing for scientists, doctors, and patients.

Kids seem to be catching everything and getting sicker as the pandemic enters its third winter, leaving physicians and researchers to figure out what's going on.

Tens of millions of Americans take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — SSRIs — to treat depression by addressing what was believed to be a chemical imbalance in the brain. While new research debunks this theory, there are a number of factors people should consider before getting off these medications.

Flu. RSV. COVID-19. This three car collision of respiratory viruses as winter approaches is causing some health experts to worry about what they’re calling a "tridemic."

Whole genome sequencing is now becoming cheap enough that doctors will be able to order it for everyone if they want. That could lead to truly personalized medicine. But it could be even bigger than that.

The phrase 'mental health' has been used repeatedly in politics to avoid the gun control debate. But there was a significant lack of access to mental health care in Uvalde prior to the shooting.

The kids are not alright. A CDC analysis released earlier this year found that in 2021— the second year of the pandemic — more than 37% of high school students reported experiencing poor mental health, and 44% reported they felt persistently sad or hopeless throughout the year. Before the pandemic, mental health was already getting worse — according to previous studies from the CDC. Bonnie Petrie...

When Petrie Dish returns in September, we'll continue to bring you the latest on COVID-19 and also explore other topics with in-depth interview and reporting ... like a new study on depression that has people asking their doctors about their SSRI's ... or the idea that sequencing your genome may soon be affordable for almost everyone. Should you do it? And yes, we’ll dive into that other fast spre...

As waves of omicron and its extremely contagious subvariants burn through previously uninfected populations, it has become clear that people with mild or asymptomatic cases aren’t immune from long COVID. Host Bonnie Petrie talked to reporter Pablo De La Rosa about his experience with long COVID over the past two years, along with Dr. Monica Verduzco Gutierrez, professor and distinguished chair of...

COVID-19 testing clinics around the country are closing, and federal funding for free clinical testing is drying up. But wastewater surveillance could step in to play a crucial role in keeping track of where the virus is and just how much is really circulating out there. In this episode, host Bonnie Petrie takes us to a wastewater treatment plant in Converse, Texas and talks to scientists trying t...

Ashley Savidge Hernandez, a Marine Corps spouse and mother of five, delivered a baby while critically ill with COVID-19. How did she and her healthy son Kyzon survive the worst that COVID has to offer?

Dr. Peter Hotez has become one of the faces of the pandemic. The bow-tied Texas scientist has been all over radio and television — and on this podcast, too — explaining viruses generally and COVID-19 specifically. Now Hotez and his partner, PhD scientist Maria Elena Bottazzi, have developed a vaccine that would be cheap and easy to produce.