This Podcast Will Kill You

Ep 119 Marburg virus: Too fast, too furious

In early February and late March of this year, separate outbreaks of Marburg virus were declared in Equatorial Guinea and in the United Republic of Tanzania. For several months, news of these outbreaks and other sporadic cases made headlines globally, as public health officials watched the number of cases and suspected cases climb, calling to mind previous outbreaks of Marburg virus's relative, the deadly Ebola virus. Fortunately, the WHO declared both outbreaks over in early June, but the threat of this hemorrhagic virus remains. In this episode (recorded in April 2023) we explore why the biology Marburg virus makes it such a deadly pathogen, what its evolutionary history and the history of its discovery can tell us about the changing landscape of pathogen spillover, and how the recent outbreaks reveal how much we still don't know about this virus. Tune in for everything you ever wanted to know about Marburg virus and more.

      
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast might not actually kill you, but Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke cover so many things that can. In each episode, they tackle a different topic, teaching listeners about the biology, history, and epidemiology of a different disease or medical mystery. They do the scientific research, so you don’t have to.
 
Since 2017, Erin and Erin have explored chronic and infectious diseases, medications, poisons, viruses, bacteria and scientific discoveries. They’ve researched public health subjects including plague, Zika, COVID-19, lupus, asbestos, endometriosis and more.

Each episode is accompanied by a creative quarantini cocktail recipe and a non-alcoholic placeborita.

Erin Welsh, Ph.D. is a co-host of the This Podcast Will Kill You. She is a disease ecologist and epidemiologist and works full-time as a science communicator through her work on the podcast. Erin Allmann Updyke, MD, Ph.D. is a co-host of This Podcast Will Kill You. She’s an epidemiologist and disease ecologist currently in the final stretch of her family medicine residency program.

This Podcast Will Kill You is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including science, true crime, comedic interviews, news, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, Buried Bones, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast and more.