Infectious Dose

The museum is closed. The exhibits aren't finished changing.

In the first episode of Month of the Macabre 2026, a routine after-hours visit to a museum of infectious disease history takes an unexpected turn. Past the familiar scenes of Broad Street, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and SARS in Toronto, a new gallery has appeared: a modern train station displaying an outbreak that hasn't happened yet.

And changes again

The Collection is an immersive Infectious Dose audio story about infectious disease history, transmission, outbreak investigation, and what happens when knowing the future doesn't necessarily mean you can control it.

🎬 This week's #SickFlicks to accompany the episode: Annihilation (2018) and The Endless (2017)—two stories in which reality begins behaving according to unfamiliar rules, leaving the people inside to figure out what those rules mean.

Check out the companion blog post for citations and transcript. 

It’s horror movie night, but Heather can’t stop seeing infectious disease in the monsters.

Heather is joined by her friend Valerie to explore the real biology behind some of horror’s most enduring fears: tuberculosis and vampire lore, rabies and werewolves, zombies as outbreak epidemiology, neurological disease and possession, and the strange biology behind The Last of Us, The Thing, and Alien.

Plus, Valerie plays the hilarious Horror Movie or Medical Literature? and discovers that when it comes to horror, evolution has had a considerable head start.

So grab a drink, pick a movie, and remember the most important public-health lesson horror has apparently failed to teach us: stop hiding bites.

Annotated citations and episode recipes available in the companion blog post. 

How do eight people get falciparum malaria in Germany when none of them traveled somewhere malaria is circulating? The answer may be that they didn't have to travel. The mosquito did.

This episode follows the investigation into a cluster of malaria cases linked geographically or occupationally to Frankfurt Airport, including three deaths. We'll look at how an infected mosquito can carry malaria across continents, why airport malaria can be difficult to diagnose, what previous cases tell us about this rare phenomenon, and what investigators still don't know about the current outbreak.

Find annotated citations and transcript in the companion blog post on the Infectious Dose website.

This week on Outbreak Watch, we’re tracking signs that Ebola transmission may be stopping in some parts of the DRC while continuing elsewhere; what still hasn’t happened with New World screwworm in the U.S.; Florida’s growing locally acquired dengue outbreak; an unusual increase in rabies exposures and preventive treatment; Pennsylvania’s four measles-associated deaths and request for CDC assistance; anthrax moving from wildlife into humans in Zambia; and a strange cluster of falciparum malaria cases near Frankfurt Airport.

Plus: what should we actually watch for next to know when each of these situations has changed?

Full citations, transcript, and other resources can be found in the companion blog post at the Infectious Dose website.

In this episode of Infectious Dose, we follow the dengue transmission chain from traveler to mosquito to locally acquired infection. How does dengue become infectious inside a mosquito? Why do most imported infections go nowhere while some seed outbreaks? What can mosquito traps and viral genomes tell investigators? Why can a jump in reported cases give a misleading picture of when infections actually occurred? And at what point would local transmission become something more persistent?

Using Florida's current dengue outbreak as a case study, we'll explore the space between introduction, local transmission and establishment and why a growing outbreak does not automatically mean dengue has become endemic.

Full annotated citations and additional resources are available in the companion blog post at InfectiousDose.com. You can also sign up there for Field Notes, the Infectious Dose newsletter, for outbreak updates, new episodes and other infectious-disease stories.

This week on Infectious Dose, we're exploring the strange emergence of Candida auris, now taxonomically known as Candidozyma auris. We trace the organism from its description in Japan to the discovery of genetically distinct lineages emerging in different parts of the world, and ask a question scientists still haven't completely answered: why did this fungus seemingly become a human pathogen in several places within such a short period of time?

Along the way, we'll explore why C. auris is so well-suited to healthcare environments, how people can carry it without becoming sick, why it can persist on surfaces and resist ordinary infection-control measures, and what happens when it also becomes resistant to the limited antifungal drugs available to treat invasive infections. And ahead of Fungal Disease Awareness Week, we'll look at the larger lesson of the C. auris story: fungi deserve a much bigger place in how we think about emerging infectious disease.

Full annotated citations and additional resources for this episode are available in the companion blog post at InfectiousDose.com.

Put on a coat. Dry your hair. Don’t sit on that toilet seat. Green snot means antibiotics. And if food hits the floor, you have five seconds.

But how much of the infectious-disease wisdom we inherited from our parents is actually true?

In this episode of Infectious Dose, we put some of the classics under the microscope: whether being cold can really make you sick, what green mucus actually tells us, why fever isn’t a good measure of how sick someone is, whether public toilet seats deserve their reputation, what the five-second rule gets wrong, and why a case of head lice does not require decontaminating your entire house.

It turns out many of these myths started with perfectly reasonable observations. The problem came when generations of parental anxiety tried to explain the biology.

Mom wasn’t necessarily wrong about what she saw. She was just wrong about the rhinovirus waiting for you on the porch.

Want to dig into the science behind this episode? You’ll find the full companion blog post, including annotated citations and links to the research, at InfectiousDose.com. While you’re there, you can also sign up for Field Notes, the free Infectious Dose newsletter, for more infectious-disease stories, outbreak updates, and curiosities between episodes.

In this Outbreak Watch, we return to the outbreaks and signals we’ve been tracking...and several have changed. 

New genomic evidence is revealing the hidden early months of the DRC’s Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak, while Uganda has successfully ended transmission across the border. New World screwworm is worsening in Sonora as cattle imports into Arizona resume, and COVID-19 is climbing again across the South amid changes to how CDC categorizes and displays wastewater activity. We also check in on measles, Cyclospora, H5 avian influenza, Vibrio vulnificus, mpox, Oropouche, and other signals on the board—and close the loop on the quarantined riverboat near Kinshasa.

Full citations in companion blog post at Infectious Dose.

Subscribe to Field Notes to continue the conversation around episodes and weekly outbreak updates. 

Somebody's roommate's cousin definitely knows the person this happened to.

This month on Outbreak After Dark, pull up a chair for an evening of infectious-disease urban legends. Heather investigates the infamous “Welcome to the World of AIDS” story and infected-needle scares, whether you can really get crabs from a toilet seat, and the long-running warning about fatal leptospirosis from rat urine on soda cans.

Each story gets a Campfire Verdict as we separate genuine biology from folklore and ask what happens when something that could happen gets transformed into a story people swear happened.

Then Heather and her unusually quiet cardboard cohost, CK, play Construct a Contagion, building an infectious-disease urban legend from scratch and testing their creation against real microbiology.

Because possible, plausible, and proven are three very different things.

Citations and resources can be found in the companion blog post at Infectious Dose.

What changes when the sun goes down?

In the final episode of From Sunrise to Starlight, we're heading down a summer trail as dusk gives way to darkness, following the microbes—and the vectors and hosts that carry them—into the night.

We'll explore why different mosquitoes keep different schedules, how ticks find hosts, what wildlife encounters actually mean for zoonotic disease risk, and how artificial light can alter nighttime ecology. Then we'll emerge from the woods beside a dark lake, turn off the flashlight, and look up.

Because infectious-disease risk isn't simply about which pathogens are present. It's about encounters: where they happen, when they happen, and how microbes, vectors, hosts, and human behavior come together.

Night Hike: Following Microbes Into the Dark closes our August journey from the first light of morning to a lake beneath the stars.

All citations in the companion blog post at Infectious Dose.