I listened recently to a podcast conversation between physicians David Katz and Zubin Damania on the ZDoggMD podcast and a few things caught my attention. First, and relevant to this blog, Katz referred to the evolutionary biology of disease a few times during the podcast. Here is Katz on obesity: […]
This week the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Medicine biannual conference is taking place online. This wildly multidisciplinary conference uses a zombie lens to explore topics in medicine, social science, art and popular culture. I am Dr. Zed this week, broadcasting the apocalypse every day on a variety of streaming platforms. Check […]
Athena Aktipis and I wrote a piece about this in TheConversation.com: Here is an excerpt: Viruses walk a fine line between severity and transmissibility. If they are too virulent, they kill or incapacitate their hosts; this limits their ability to infect new hosts. Conversely, viruses that cause little harm may […]
I often feel that I am writing this blog for myself, but I have a platform here. The evolution medicine blog and podcast has a modest number of subscribers. With the recent murder of George Floyd, I am moved to speak. I have been inspired by the peaceful protests that […]
Researchers and opinion leaders cannot seem to make up their minds about what kills us in a variety of serious viral illnesses. Do we die because of too much, or too little, immune activation? Consider this about Ebola virus from an 2014 NPR feature: “But when you look at the […]
The billionaire hedge fund manager Ricky Sandler says we should disregard public health professionals and encourage people to get infected with COVID-19 so that the population can have “so called” herd immunity. He and others argue we should throw caution – and our face masks – to the wind and […]
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many have written about the immune system turning against us. Ali Daneshkhah, a researcher who published a recent article about Vitamin D and COVID stated: “what seems to kill a majority of COVID-19 patients (is) not the destruction of the lungs by the virus itself. It […]
Hypertension, obesity, and diabetes have been identified as risk factors for severe COVID-19. Intriguingly, these are diseases that are linked with the microbiome. The microbiota is the collection of microbes that inhabit our bodies. The microbiome is the collection of all of the genes of the microbiota. The vast majority […]
So called ‘murder hornets’ have been in the news lately, after being discovered in Washington State. These Asian giant hornets are native to Asia, as one might expect. Besides their ability to deliver a painful, sometimes lethal sting to humans, they also pose a risk to honeybees. Murder hornets can […]
Athena Aktipis interviewed David Quammen, the author of Spillover, for a recent episode on zoonotic epidemic events for her podcast “Zombified.” This was recorded before the pandemic, but is absolutely relevant to our current situation. Did you know, “eight percent of the human genome is DNA that was inserted by […]
