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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 challenge the law, the Scopes “monkey” trial resulted. People did not like to think that they descended from monkeys – although that’s not quite what the science of evolution shows.

Now, the United States and much of the world seems to have regressed into another period when science is denied. This time, much of it centers around vaccines, although there is animosity toward many other public health measures. Climate science is likewise still under attack, decades after the scientific expert community settled the question of whether people’s activities are changing the planet’s climate.

One of the scientists fighting back is Dr. Peter Hotez. Long a champion of fighting neglected tropical diseases such as Chagas disease and leishmaniasis, Hotez has evolved into an advocate for vaccination in general and for inexpensive, freely available vaccines in particular.

He wrote a book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, that explains the disproven notion that vaccination might cause autism – using his own daughter’s case history as an illustration. His latest book, The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, looks at the history of attacks on science, the political and commercial motives of many of the attacks, and the often fatal results.

The attacks have gotten very personal for Hotez, and they’ve worsened under the new Trump Administration in the United States. Now Hotez, who is Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has become one of the most recognizable public faces in the fight to defend science. In this episode of One World, One Health, Hotez describes how he never expected to be cast as a “cartoon villain” when what he mostly wanted to do was help underprivileged people escape disease.

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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 protected.

Yet vaccination rates are falling globally. The result? A 20 percent increase in measles cases between 2022 and 2023,  according to WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That adds up to more than 10 million cases. More than 107,000 people died from measles in 2023, mostly children. 

The problem is worse in some communities, especially where connections to the outside world are limited. One example: the Charedi community in London. Often referred to as ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Charedi often run their own schools and daycare centers and can fall outside the usual public health health system. Vaccination rates have fallen below 70 percent in some of these communities, according to UK health officials.

It can be tricky to encourage people in isolated communities to get themselves and their children vaccinated. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of logistics, and sometimes it’s a matter of overcoming distrust, misinformation, and disinformation.

Dr. Ben Kasstan-Dabush has been studying this problem while at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. One solution he found: Make use of people from within the community to communicate. “I worked with clinical and community partners to produce a short clinic clip that can be screened in primary care waiting rooms,” he says. “It features the voice of a Charedi Jewish healthcare professional and mum.” 

Another success: coloring pages for kids that feature vaccination in a positive light and that use common Jewish names. Common-sense solutions include extending clinic hours so parents can attend outside working hours and religious holidays. 

Now a lecturer of global health policy at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Kasstan-Dabush is continuing to study how people respond to public health outreach attempts around vaccination. Listen as he chats with One World, One Health about some of the reasons kids might not get vaccinated on time and ways to make it easier.

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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 1990s. People living in every country around the world are now threatened by the effects of climate change. It’s the latest in a series of reports showing the world is marching towards disaster.

“We pull our hair out every year,” Dr. Marina Romanello, Executive Director of the Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change, tells One World, One Health. “One of the findings that shocked us the most was the enormous amount of public funding that gets poured into fossil fuels.”

The report shows that oil and gas companies are making record profits and increasing production, driving up the emissions that are making the planet hotter and the weather more extreme and unpredictable.

But there is hope, the report finds. More electricity than ever is being generated by clean modern renewables – up to 10.5 percent in 2021, twice as much as in 2016. And clean energy employed 13.7 million people in 2022.

Listen as Dr. Romanello tells One World, One Health about the growing problems, how governments and companies are ignoring the warnings, and where hope still lies.

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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 drug-resistant infections each year. While the percentage of children killed by these infections has fallen greatly since 1990, hundreds of thousands still die. 

Vaccines can help.  So can infection control measures as simple as handwashing routines. Patients everywhere also need to be able to get the best antibiotics to treat their infections at the right time. These infections are often more difficult to treat in low- and middle-income countries in part because they have fewer staff to clean and to care for patients, less access to effective antibiotics, and crowded neonatal units, which can worsen the spread of germs.

In a special edition of One World, One Health recorded for AMR Awareness Week, we spoke with Dr. Heather Finlayson, a Pediatric Infectious Diseases Specialist at Stellenbosch University’s Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.

Listen as she tells us about her struggles fighting drug-resistant superbugs in the youngest of children.

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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 Organization (WHO) declared mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in August 2024.

Officials are distributing smallpox vaccines to try to control it. The viruses are closely enough related so researchers believe that modern smallpox vaccines can protect people safely against mpox. But the rollout is slow.  It’s not clear why the virus has started spreading in households, but it’s infecting and killing more and more children.

To make matters worse, people are desperate for medicines to prevent infection and help treat symptoms, which include fevers and a rash. They’re seeking antibiotics, which cannot treat a virus. This inappropriate use of antibiotics can drive drug resistance.

This is the second time mpox has been declared a public health emergency by the WHO since 2022. A slightly different strain of mpox has been spreading since then through close contact, often sexual and often among men who have sex with men. Mpox is even now showing up in new cities and countries in North America and Europe.

Nodar Kipshidze, Senior Research Analyst at the One Health Trust, says the virus spreads easily because people often don’t know they have it. It’s also not clear where it originally came from, although small rodents and other mammals can spread it. In this episode of One World, One Health, Nodar tells us mpox is causing a lot of confusion, and we need to ensure we learn from previous outbreaks and share resources globally to stop the spread and save lives.

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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 identified back in the 1950s, but it was pretty rare. Like so many viruses, it causes headaches, body aches, fever, and other unpleasant symptoms. What’s most unusual about Oropouche is that it’s most often carried by midges – small, biting flies, more difficult to see than mosquitoes. All of a sudden, Oropouche has started spreading and infecting more people than ever before and it has been detected in new countries. The virus has also started to kill people in Brazil and there's some evidence it may affect the fetuses of pregnant women.

So what’s going on? Dr. Daniel Romero-Alvarez has an idea. He’s found Oropouche appears in places where forests have been cleared. The change in land use may be making new and better places for the midges that spread the virus to breed, he says. “Midges loves banana and cocoa plantations,” adds Romero-Alvarez, a medical doctor and epidemiologist at Universidad Internacional SEK in Quito, Ecuador. And the movement of humans and other animals that can carry this virus means that we may be hearing more about Oropouche in the future. Listen as he tells One World, One Health what he’s learned about this once-rare virus.

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Most people don’t even think twice when they get an infection. Much of the time, the best treatment is simple: fluids and rest. Bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics – a quick course of pills, maybe a week or 10 days, and you’re done.

But the rise of drug-resistant pathogens is changing that. These germs (viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi) have developed the ability to survive even the strongest of antimicrobial drugs. This phenomenon is known as antimicrobial resistance or AMR.

Drug-resistant infections just from bacteria play a role in close to five million deaths a year. That’s five million people. One of those people was a promising, intelligent young woman named Mallory Smith. An honors student, athlete, and writer, Mallory was just 25 when she died. She had cystic fibrosis, but what killed her was a superbug infection she had caught when she was 12. This happened even after getting a lung transplant.

Now Mallory’s mother, Diane Shader Smith, is telling her daughter’s story to the world. She wants people to know about Mallory and about the threat of antimicrobial resistance. She’s also collecting the stories of other people who have been made victims of this growing threat to humanity because she understands the difference stories make in ensuring people understand the gravity of antimicrobial resistance.

Listen as she tells One World, One Health about her daughter’s struggles and about her own hopes for the future of humanity.

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Rosemary Bartel had no idea her life was going to take a turn when she went to a hospital near her home in Chilton, Wisconsin in the United States for standard knee replacement surgery – her second such operation. She was ready to work hard to recover and return to her busy job at her Roman Catholic diocese. But Rosie developed an all-too-common infection known as MRSA—methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It’s one of the best-known examples of antimicrobial-resistant microbes, often called superbugs. The United Nations is devoting a high-level meeting to the problem in September 2024 in the hopes of getting nations to do more to fight antimicrobial resistance, also known as  AMR.

Now, 15 years later, Rosie has had her leg and hip amputated because the infection got into her bones. She has suffered numerous other infections, been in comas, experienced sepsis, lost her job, lost her health insurance, and lost most of the life she had loved.

“I will probably be paying hospital bills for the rest of my life,” Rosie tells One World, One Health. Rosie is one of the luckier victims of AMR. She’s still alive. Five million people a year die from complications caused by these drug-resistant germs. Today, Rosie shares her story as widely as she can as part of the Patient Family Partners Network, a group of patient advocates working to improve healthcare in the United States, and the Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit patient safety advocacy organization. She’s also written a book, “Rosie’s Story,” about her experience with this devastating and unending infection. 

Listen as Rosie describes what happened to her and what she hopes to do to help stop it from happening to others.

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Dr. Nour Shamas knows about antimicrobial resistance. As a clinical pharmacist, she was trained in how to dispense drugs to treat infections, and her graduate studies in global health policy made her aware of the threat of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. 

Antimicrobial resistance develops when bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites evolve the ability to shake off the effects of drugs developed to fight them. It’s one of the biggest threats to humanity – such a serious threat that the United Nations General Assembly is holding a meeting devoted to the subject. Shamas helps lead the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at the Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs in Jeddah and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She knows about the need to preserve the drugs that still work against the many infections that threaten human life. 

But the issue of AMR got personal for her when her mother developed a urinary tract infection after surgery and a hospital stay. Shamas found herself working with her mother’s doctors, and battling to explain to her mother how she could have developed such an infection in the first place. She also found herself fighting to get the right treatment for her mother, who lives in Lebanon, a country struggling with economic challenges, conflict, and a fragile, underfunded, and overloaded healthcare system. 

Now, as a member of the World Health Organization’s AMR Survivors Task Force, she tells the story of how her mother still fights recurrent infections. Listen as she shares some of her story with One World, One Health. 

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Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common, uncomfortable, and embarrassing. They can also be deadly. These infections of the kidneys, bladder, or urethra affect about 1 in 10 men in their lifetimes and more than half of women. Untreated UTIs can cause a body-wide infection known as sepsis. An estimated 236,000 people globally die every year from UTIs.  

Most UTIs are fairly easy to treat with antibiotics. However, a quarter to a third of urinary tract infections (UTIs) are caused by drug-resistant bacteria. That makes them much more difficult to treat. 

There’s no easy test to tell medical professionals whether an infection will be easy to treat with readily available antibiotics, so they often have to make their best guess. Using the wrong antibiotic to treat any infection can delay recovery and help germs evolve drug resistance. 

Sweden-based Sysmex Astrego developed a test that works in 45 minutes to help determine what type of germ is causing a UTI and which antibiotic should be used to treat it.  

Challenge Works, which awards prizes to encourage solutions to hard problems in global health, climate, technology, and other areas, has awarded Sysmex Astrego the Longitude Prize to help the company develop and commercialize the test. 

“The winning test will be transformational for infection diagnosis and treatment, providing accurate antibiotic susceptibility results in 45 minutes – compared to the 2-3 day wait patients currently face,” Challenge Works says. 

In this episode of One World, One Health, Jasmin Major of Challenge Works explains why diagnostic innovations like this are so important. 

Read more about the One Health Trust’s work on antimicrobial resistance here.