March 27, 2026

Antibiotic Apocalypse

1 hour 1 minute

Doctor and special correspondent Avir Mitra takes Executive Editor Soren Wheeler, plus a live studio audience, on a journey from the operating room to inside the body to the farm to the sewers and back again—searching for answers to an alarming threat to humanity’s existence as we know it: antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

This live show, performed in New York City and also in Little Rock, Arkansas, is part of a series we’re doing with Avir that we are calling “Viscera.” Each event is a conversation that takes the audience on a journey into a quirk or question or mystery inside of us, and gives them a visceral experience of the viscera within us. The previous installment of the series was called “The Elixir of Life.” (https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-elixir-of-life)

Special thanks to all of Little Rock Public Radio (especially Grace Zafasi and Jonathan Seaborn), Thomas Patterson, The Greene Space staff, CALS Ron Robinson Theater, Tom Philpott, Stephen Roach, Kate Shaw, Alex Wong, Maryn McKenna, and Kerri McClimen.

If you are a patients or a doctor, and you are interested in phage therapy, please contact [email protected]

EPISODE CREDITS:

Reported by - Avir Mitra

Produced by - Jessica Yung

Sound design contributed by - Jeremy Bloom and Jessica Yung

Fact-checking by -Natalie Middleton

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Videos -

Check out the video from the Viscera live show (and a bonus Q&A with Bruce Stewart-Brown and Steffanie Strathdee) on Radiolab’s YouTube (https://zpr.io/3BK9MqJYVKQA).

A deep dive (https://zpr.io/WNQNfgiNvKeZ) on bacteriophages with Avir Mitra and Steffanie Strathdee, also on Radiolab’s Youtube..

Books -

The Perfect Predator (https://theperfectpredator.com/) by Dr. Steffanie Strathdee’s telling of her battle against a killer superbug.

Plucked (https://zpr.io/PudGMEuzgU9X) by Maryn Mckenna a detailed accounting of chicken farming’s practice of using antibiotics.

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