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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 get from bats to people.

However, a team working in the Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda may have just gotten a big clue.

Bosco Atukwatse, a Ugandan wildlife biologist working with the Kyambura Lion Project, set up solar-powered cameras near the mouth of Python Cave in the Maramagambo Forest in the park. He knew the cave was home to multitudes of Egyptian fruit bats and was hoping for pictures of leopards and spotted hyenas.

What he got were dozens of images of animals hunting the bats. Birds, snakes, giant lizards called monitors, a very persistent leopard, monkeys, baboons, and a catlike animal called a genet all regularly hunted in the cave.

This behavior was notable on its own. But the bats in this cave are also known to be infected with Marburg virus, a rare but deadly virus that can cause a hemorrhagic fever. Two visitors to the cave had been infected with Marburg, including a Dutch tourist who died in 2008 and a U.S. tourist.

The findings don’t prove that animals who hunt bats are spreading Marburg, says Dr. Alex Braczkowski, Science Director of the Kyambura Lion Project, who reported the discovery on the open repository site Zenodo. They do, however, provide a starting point for possible further investigations.

Listen as Alex and Bosco chat with One World, One Health host Maggie Fox about the bats, the animals that hunt them, and what it all might mean.

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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 resistance. Policymakers don’t know which infections are most common among populations and cannot make informed decisions about needed treatments or vaccines.

This is a major problem across Africa and a new report shows just how complex the problem is.

The Mapping AMR and Antimicrobial use Partnership (MAAP), which included the One Health Trust as well as the African Society for Laboratory Medicine; Africa CDC; the East, Central, and Southern Africa Health Community; Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases, and Disasters, a nonprofit focused on technology and communication;  the clinical research group IQVIA; and the West African Health Organization, collected data from laboratories from 14 countries in Africa (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Eswatini, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe). “The study revealed significant gaps in bacteriology testing capacities,” the group, whose work was paid for by the UK government's Fleming Fund, wrote in PLoS Medicine.

It's the biggest survey yet of testing for antimicrobial resistance – AMR or drug resistance – in Africa.

Among the gaps: too little testing overall, a lack of laboratory capacities, and poor coordination and analysis of records. Many records were kept only on paper, which made them almost impossible to access.

None of this surprises Dr. Sabiha Essack, South African Research Chair in Antibiotic Resistance and One Health and Professor in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. 

In an ideal world, she says, a doctor, nurse or other professional should see a patient, test them to see what specific microbe is causing an infection, check to see which drugs will successfully fight that germ, and then treat the patient accordingly.

Cheap point-of-care tests should be available everywhere and the results of those tests should be entered into systems that officials can use to make policy decisions, she says. Listen as she tells One World, One Health host Maggie Fox other ways to improve our knowledge about the drug-resistant infections that lurk out there. 

Want to know more? You can find One World, One Health episodes on drug-resistant infections in cancer patients; superbugs and microplastics; the personal toll of antibiotic resistance; one woman’s antibiotic resistance nightmare; how to prevent drug resistance, and more.

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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 bit. Just having cancer may have damaged their immune system.

So then they get an infection.

Perhaps it’s no big deal. A round of antibiotics may take care of it. However, increasingly, these infections are resistant to antibiotics – something known as antimicrobial resistance or AMR.

Then, the patient must wait weeks or even months to resume cancer treatment while the infection is treated. And, all too often, the infection itself may kill the patient. In fact, infections are the second-leading cause of death for cancer patients.

Dr. Yehoda M. Martei, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Hematology-Oncology) at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues have been working to find out just how common these infections are. Among patients hospitalized for treatment, cancer patients were up to twice as likely to get a drug-resistant infection, she and colleagues found. Among outpatients – people getting treatment at clinics or offices but not staying in the hospital – cancer patients had three times the risk of drug-resistant infections.

Listen as Dr. Martei tells One World, One Health host Maggie Fox about her findings, what they mean, and what must be done to protect cancer patients and ensure infections don't stop them from getting the treatment they need.

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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 States 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 in the United States since 2003. It’s even worse in Canada, with more than 2,500 reported cases. 

Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, thanks to vaccination, but this very infectious virus has come roaring back because of a decline in vaccination. The decline is overwhelmingly linked to fears and false rumors about vaccines – especially the hard-to-kill notion that the measles vaccine might somehow cause autism.

Now, one of the leading proponents of this thoroughly disproven idea, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and he’s bent on both casting more doubt on vaccines, and on renewing fears about autism.

He got more ammunition in the spring of 2025 with the latest surveillance report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that about 1 in 31, or 3.2 percent, of children aged 8 years old has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. This is up from 1 in 36 in 2020 and 1 in 54 in 2008. Kennedy has called for collecting more data on people with autism while also shedding even more doubt on the safety of vaccines in general.

The CDC itself still says vaccines do not cause autism, but Kennedy, widely blamed for stoking vaccine hesitancy that helped fuel an outbreak of measles in Samoa in 2019 that killed 83 people, is in a position to further weaken vaccination efforts while spreading misinformation about autism.

“It takes 10 minutes to create a vaccine scare and at least 10 years to overcome it,” says Dr. Judith S. Miller, a psychologist in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and a senior scientist and training director in the Center for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Better screening and broader criteria are likely the main reason autism diagnoses are on the rise, says Dr. Miller, who is also Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Listen as Dr. Miller discusses why it’s a waste of time to re-examine the disproven links between vaccines and autism, why establishing new government databases may actually hold back research, and what autism professionals really need from the federal government.

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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 Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. However, the cuts being made by the new Trump administration to the United States biodefense budget are going deeper than ever before. Global efforts to track diseases including Ebola virus and avian influenza have ended. 

Among the latest to fall under the axe: the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC), a federal advisory body to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which had helped shape national infection prevention guidelines meant to keep hospitals safe and contain outbreaks. 

The loss of the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, has already begun devastating not only global health efforts, but also U.S. national security efforts, multiple experts say. 

And things were not in a good place to begin with, says George. “The biodefense community is in for the fight of its life to get the funding it needs,” she said in her latest report on biodefense. “It was starving before. It is going to be anorexic soon.” 

Listen as George explains to One World, One Health host Maggie Fox just what’s at risk for the world if the United States doesn’t start paying attention to biodefense. 

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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 bodies ravaged by the virus.

H5N1 bird flu has swept around the world, destroying poultry flocks and wildlife. Like other influenza viruses, it mutates constantly and swaps genetic material in a process called reassortment. It can now infect not just birds, but livestock such as cattle and sheep as well as mink, pet cats, sea lions, and human beings.

It has devastated egg production and threatens dairy operations. The biggest fear is that it will acquire both the ability to spread from human to human and maintain its most deadly qualities. An H5N1 pandemic has the potential to be much, much worse than Covid-19 was.

People can’t be ready for the virus unless the world keeps an eye on it. That’s what Uhart, who is Director of the Latin America Program at the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center at the University of California, Davis, is trying to do. That’s why her team studied the bodies of the dead elephant seals and other animals killed by the virus.

“Mammal-to-mammal transmission could be a stepping-stone in the evolutionary pathway for these viruses to become capable of human-to-human transmission,” they wrote in their report, published in the journal Nature.

“What we can learn from what happens in wildlife is crucial,” Uhart says. “That is where these viruses evolve.”

Listen as Uhart chats with One World, One Health host Maggie Fox about what her team discovered in Patagonia and what it might mean for every animal on the planet, including  humans.

And listen to our other podcast episodes looking at H5N1 bird flu and how we should be preparing for the next pandemic.

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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 the human body, including in the liver and brain.

Science is done piece by piece, study by study, with no single study painting the whole picture. Now a team at Boston University has added one piece to the puzzle, with a study demonstrating that drug-resistant bacteria grow well on microplastics.

Neila Gross, a PhD candidate at BU, helped lead the research. Her team confirmed that E. coli bacteria form mats known as biofilms especially well on microplastics. The team found that antibiotic-resistant bacteria grew better when they were grown on microplastics.

This raises a specter of billions of tiny pieces of plastic spreading drug-resistant bacteria around the world and being ingested and breathed in by animals from shellfish to marine mammals and, likely, people.

Listen as Neila chats with One World, One Health host Maggie Fox about how this happens and what it might mean for the spread of antimicrobial resistance.

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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 Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

The United States government also says it plans to end funding for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and has cut some funding for the United Nations World Food Program's efforts to feed millions of people in 14 countries.

Before Trump, the United States was the largest donor to global health in the world, contributing about US$12 billion in funding. That’s less than 1 percent of the United States federal budget. But the new administration claimed these efforts were wasteful, did not serve the country's interests, and cost too much. 

It’s not clear who can or will fill the gaps.

“I think we are going through a very dark time,” says Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and president of the One Health Trust. But Dr. Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist and economist, does see some hope. He doubts the United States will permanently end its robust support of global health and he sees opportunities for organizations such as WHO to streamline and become more efficient.

Listen as he chats with One World, One Health host Maggie Fox about the immediate effects of the startling new United States government policies and how he sees things shaking out in the long term.

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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 Hofflinger of Arizona State University and colleagues studied school children in a part of Chile where many people still rely on wood-burning stoves. They found the more air pollution children were exposed to, the lower their grades. It’s another piece of evidence that can help parents, policymakers, officials, and health experts make decisions about where to focus their efforts in reducing pollution. 

In this episode of One World, One Health, host Maggie Fox chats with Dr. Hofflinger about what his team found, about the factors that cause this type of pollution, and what people might be able to do about it.

They found it’s not going to be such an easy problem to solve. Wood is cheap or free for many in parts of Chile, and electricity isn’t. Old habits are hard to break. And clean energy is not always an uncomplicated choice for governments.  

Give it a listen and check out some of our other episodes on air pollution and health.

Learn from Dr. Sarah Chambliss about how people of color and in low resource neighborhoods are disproportionately affected by poor health due to pollution.

Find out about the association between air pollution, depression, and pregnancy in our episode with Dr. Jun Wu. 

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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 Nerdfighteria, as well as a co-host of an annual fundraiser for Project for Awesome. He's also passionate about public health. Green is a member of the board of trustees for Partners in Health and posts regular videos about it.

A trip to Sierra Leone in west Africa got Green interested in tuberculosis. Now he’s written a book about that ancient disease: Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection.

There are more characters than numbers in the book – from Henry, the charismatic young man John met who appears throughout the story, to the thin and pale women who once made people perceive TB as sexy (really). The book brings a star quality to an often-forgotten infection. Green hopes he can focus the attention of his dedicated audience on this leading global killer. His work to bring attention to TB comes at a dire time, as the incidence of drug-resistant TB grows and the U.S. government slashes funding for global TB care and research.

In this episode of One World, One Health, John Green chats with host Maggie Fox about the book, why he wrote it, and what he hopes its publication will accomplish.