One World, One Health

Send us Fan Mail The best thing about good science is that it never fails to surprise you. And the best problem solvers are always willing to be surprised. In 100 episodes of One World, One Health, we've been surprised over and over again by what people have learned as they have set out to solve some of the biggest problems facing the planet – and by how often what everyone thought was going...

Send us Fan Mail Sometimes the best medicine is just listening.  We’ve found this over and over again in this podcast – doctors, public health workers, ecologists and other people working in the One Health field struggle to solve some seemingly complicated problem, and then find it’s pretty straightforward when they stop and really listen to the people they’re trying to help.  Whether it’s parents...

Send us Fan Mail It’s a rare piece of good news. A single-dose dengue vaccine developed in Brazil as part of an international collaboration protected people against at least two strains of the virus for five years or longer, and did so safely.  The vaccine was already being tested across Brazil and the findings helped boost confidence in its use.  “This is a big deal,” says Dr. Andre Siqueira, Hea...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine a life form identical to your own, only backwards. At first, it would look normal. But just like when you try to use a mirror to read text on a page, it doesn’t quite translate.  For some reason, all of the DNA of life on Earth is right-handed. The double helix of DNA that codes for all life on the planet spirals to the right – a quality called chirality. But, in theory, s...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine this scene: A family’s house was destroyed when it was bombed during a war. They got out with the clothes on their backs – nothing more. When they were fleeing, the mother was hit with fragments from another bomb. It tore off part of her leg. Dirt got in the wound. They made it to a refugee camp, but the wound got infected. With nothing available to treat the injury, the i...

Send us Fan Mail Having a baby should be safe. Yet it’s far too often a death sentence for both the mother and the baby. An estimated 260,000 women died in 2023 during and right after giving birth, and those numbers will have risen with the loss of United States global aid dollars. There are ways to improve this – better prenatal care is an obvious one. According to the World Health Organization,...

Send us Fan Mail Fighting climate change can feel like a hopeless battle. Who can take on the giant fossil fuel companies when governments are not even bothering? How can countries act when every day temperatures rise, superstorms flood coastal areas, droughts devastate crops, and weather patterns bring insects and new diseases to areas previously spared? But there is something powerful and import...

Send us Fan Mail A new report on health and climate change paints the grimmest picture yet about what’s going on – not just that 2024 was the hottest year on record, but evidence that many governments have stopped even pretending to try to do anything about it. The 2025 Lancet  Countdown on Health and Climate Change finds that more than half a million people die every year from heat-related causes...

Send us Fan Mail Of course, saving forests is good for the animals that live there and the environment. But saving forests where indigenous people live can have another surprising benefit. It can be good for the health of all of the people who live throughout the region, researchers have found. That benefit seems to come not just because forests are healthier ecosystems in general, but because ind...

Send us Fan Mail Bats can carry several viruses that can kills humans. Some well understood – rabies , the deadliest virus of all, is transmitted directly from bats to people from bat bites. Other viruses, such as Hendra virus , are a little more mysterious and indirect in how they spread. And researchers are still unsure how viruses such as Ebola, Marburg and the coronavirus that caused Covid-19...

Send us Fan Mail Drug-resistant germs are hidden killers in more than one way. Not only are the microbes invisible to the human eye, in many places, they’re invisible because people simply are not looking for them systematically. Doctors often do not know what infections their patients have and treat them based on best guesses, which allows for ineffective treatments and exacerbates drug resistanc...

Send us Fan Mail It’s a common scenario for a cancer patient. They’re undergoing treatment and get what’s known as a peripherally inserted central catheter or PICC (pronounced “pick”) line to make it more convenient to administer drugs. They are in and out of the hospital or just the clinic frequently to see various providers. The treatment they receive may run down their immune system a little bi...

Send us Fan Mail It’s a really bad year for measles . Cases are spiking in countries where children should have been fully vaccinated, such as the United States, Canada, and Mexico. More than 1,000 cases have been reported in the United S tates just in the first half of 2025, with at least 3 deaths. The death of a child in Texas early in 2025 was the first time a child had died from the infection...

Send us Fan Mail Zombie movies may score at the box office and shows about dangerous contagions including “The Last of Us” may be a hit on streaming services, but preparedness for disasters is no winner for American politicians.  Every recent U.S. presidential administration has dismantled the pandemic plan put together by the previous one, notes Dr. Asha M. George, Executive Director of the Bipar...

Send us Fan Mail The scene on the beach was horrific. Thousands of mothers and baby elephant seals lay in the sand, taken out by a deadly virus. Dr. Marcela Uhart and her colleagues were shocked by what they found after the H5N1 avian influenza virus swept through a colony of elephant seals on the coast of Argentina’s far south Patagonia region. More than 17,000 of the animals had died, their bodi...

Send us Fan Mail Plastic is everywhere . So are drug-resistant microbes . What happens when the two team up? A raft of new studies show that bacteria can grow well on plastics, especially on microplastics. Other studies show just how widespread microplastics are – they are found in every ocean and sea tested so far. The most startling studies show these tiny bits of plastics can also build up in t...

Send us Fan Mail It’s been a dire year for global health. Almost as soon as he took office as president of the United States, Donald Trump said he would withdraw the country from membership in the World Health Organization (WHO), he fired almost everyone at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and slashed staffing and budgets at U.S. health agencies such as the National Institute...

Send us Fan Mail Air pollution is a big killer. Air pollution of all kinds helped kill 4.2 million people globally in 2019, according to the World Health Organization. It can damage nearly every organ in the body, worsening asthma and leading to cancer and heart disease. It especially affects pregnant women and can damage a growing fetus. Air pollution also has more insidious effects. Dr. Álvaro H...

Send us Fan Mail It’s hard to overstate how popular writer John Green is. His most famous book,  The Fault in Our Stars – a novel about teenagers with cancer, young love, and fate – has sold tens of millions of copies. The film based on the book brought in more than $300 million and it’s still popular to this day. Green has become a YouTube star and leader of online communities of fans including N...

Send us Fan Mail People have always doubted science. In the 17th century, Galileo was sentenced to house arrest by the Catholic Church for reporting his observations that the sun is at the center of the solar system and that the other planets, including Earth, orbit it. In 1925, the U.S. state of Tennessee banned the teaching of evolution and when a high school teacher named John Scopes agreed to...

Send us Fan Mail Measles is an extremely infectious virus that can both kill and cripple children. Luckily, there are highly effective vaccines to prevent the disease. The World Health Organization recommends that 95 percent of the population be fully vaccinated against measles because it’s so contagious. This helps to ensure that vulnerable children and infants who cannot be vaccinated are protec...

Send us Fan Mail Governments and corporations are “undermining our future” by supporting fossil fuels in the face of overwhelming evidence that using coal, oil, and gas is killing people, a startling new report finds. The report, from the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, finds that in 2023 alone , more than double the number of people over 65 died from excessive heat compared to the...

Send us Fan Mail Children under five years old are fragile. They’re more vulnerable than adults to malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, and other infections. A growing number of these infections that sicken and kill children are resistant to the drugs developed to treat them – a phenomenon known as antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. AMR is a big killer. Nearly five million deaths are caused in part by dru...

Send us Fan Mail Smallpox may be gone but it’s got a cousin called mpox , and that virus is now spreading fast across parts of Africa. As of October 2024, this mpox outbreak had infected more than 40,000 people, mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 1,000 people have died from the infection. The World Health Organi...

Send us Fan Mail Farmers need land to grow their crops, and in many parts of the world, that means clearing forests. That’s especially true in the Amazon region in South America. Crops just won’t grow under the thick forest canopy, so a new banana plantation means clearing trees. This has all sorts of effects on the ecosystem and researchers are seeing a new one. A virus called Oropouche was ident...