We tend to think of pandemics as unlikely events, but disease outbreaks are surprisingly common. Over the past 400 years, the longest stretch of time without a documented outbreak was just four years. So, what's the probability of...

The science behind why the 1918 flu is “the mother of all pandemics” continues to challenge scientists today. Olivia sheds some light on why this flu was so powerful and what we learned from it.

At the heart of outbreaks are people! People are the ones who get sick, transmit diseases, and change the way they live in response to outbreaks. In outbreak science, we can better understand the relationship between people and disease...

If you change your city, you're changing the world, says Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles and chair of C40 Cities, a network of the world's megacities committed to tackling the climate crisis. He shares tangible ways Los Angeles and...

Forget lab rats — meet the Chinese or striped-back hamster, an unassuming little rodent whose role in research over the years has led to breakthroughs in genetics, pharmaceutics and more!

Day to day, hospitals provide all kinds of services to help us get better and stay healthy, but during an outbreak, hospitals are the front line of the emergency. In this episode of Crash Course Outbreak Science, we'll look at how...

Throughout this series, and in our real lives, we've seen the chaos and devastation that outbreaks can cause. But there's good news! Eventually, outbreaks come to an end. In this episode, we'll look at some of the important tools of...

Consider the following scenario: a highly infectious, sometimes deadly respiratory virus infects humans for the first time. It spreads rapidly worldwide, and the WHO declares a pandemic. The death toll starts to rise and everyone is...

We take it for granted that society gets better at tackling infectious disease over time, but when you really think about it the progress we’ve made in the last century is pretty amazing. How does that much progress happen so quickly?...

We’ve changed - and standardized - the way diseases get named because the old way was often stigmatizing and confusing.

You may not realize it, but your body is like a fortress, designed to defend you from tiny foreign invaders known as pathogens. This seemingly small world is actually super diverse, and sometimes super dangerous too. That’s why in this...

SARS-CoV-2 is a new kind of coronavirus that appeared suddenly in late 2019. The disease it causes, called COVID-19, is now showing signs that it's able to spread outside of its place of origin. This raises some questions... like, do we...

Welcome to Crash Course Outbreak Science! What do pathogens actually do to us that makes us sick? Why do societies respond to outbreaks of infectious diseases the way they do? How can we stop the next outbreak? These are the kinds of...

Infectious disease has affected the human species for as long as we’ve existed, but in that time we’ve come a long way in understanding what they are and how they spread. In this episode of Crash Course Outbreak Science, we’ll introduce...

This video is a collaboration with Aatish Bhatia about how to see the COVID-19 tipping point - we present a better way to graph COVID-19 coronavirus cases using a logarithmic scale in "phase space" - plotting the growth rate against the...

You may have heard several different projections about the fatality rate of COVID-19. How do different health organizations come up with these figures, and why do the numbers seem so fluid?

Around the world, Indigenous food cultures vanish because of industrialized agriculture and a shifting, Western-influenced concept of the ideal diet. Food researcher Aparna Pallavi explores why once-essential culinary traditions...

A killer flu outbreak isn’t just a developing-world nightmare. The influenza virus is so adaptable that the West is as vulnerable as anywhere else. This program outlines the history of influenza and explores current research into what...

Over time, the expansion of trade and the exchange of ideas and cultures have led to an increasingly interconnected global economy. As countries, companies, and people reassess how to operate globally, it’s clear that the way we interact...

Joe Biden was president from 2021 to 2025, but he had a long career in politics prior to the getting elected. What's his story, and what were the major issues that marked his presidency? Let's find out.

As the world grappled with a pandemic, a problem has been swimming below the surface

DeSantis accused Trump of 'massive, massive gaslighting' on the Covid-19 response.Source: MSNBC

Graduates exploited by employers using pandemic not to pay

This animation provides background on coronaviruses and COVID-19. The animations shows what happens inside the body when someone gets COVID-19, the novel coronavirus.