History's Lessons for Our Post-Virus Future

More than six months into a shape-shifting pandemic that’s killed more than 454,000 people worldwide, it’s clear we are losing the battle against the outbreak. Most experts believe an effective vaccine won’t be ready until well into 2021. So how do we adjust our thinking from bea ...  Show more

The NBA is giving players the option to wear a device that tracks their health data when basketball games begin this July. The device - called an Oura Ring - can measure things like the body’s temperature and heart rate. The hope is that it could provide the league with early war ...  Show more

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n this episode, John Barry, historian and author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, describes what happened with the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, including where it likely originated, how and why it spread, and what may have accounted f ...

Peter interviews the Oxford scientists working at the forefront of research into Disease X - a pathogen which the World Health Organization added to their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases in 2018 to represent the hypothetical cause of our next pandemic... This episode is ...  Show more

Peter begins the final episode of the series in 2014, at the onset of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Whilst that pandemic officially ended in 2016, this virus has caused a brutal outbreak nearly every year since. After his discussion at the start of the series about whether E ...  Show more

April 5, 1918. The first mention of a new influenza outbreak in Kansas appears in a public health report. That strain, later called the Spanish Flu, would go on to kill at least 50 million people worldwide. In a time before widespread global travel, how did this disease spread so ...  Show more