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Dates: 2026-11-10T16:00:00
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10 Years After Flint, The Fight To Replace Lead Pipes Continues
Duration: 00:13:12
Released: 2024
Series: Short Wave
Ten years ago, Flint, Mich. switched water sources to the Flint River. The lack of corrosion control in the pipes caused lead to leach into the water supply of tens of thousands of residents. Pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha recognized a public health crisis in the making and gathered data proving the negative health impact on Flint’s young children. In doing so, she and community organizers in Flint sparked a national conversation about lead in the U.S. water system that persists today. Today on the show, host Emily Kwong and science correspondent Pien Huang talk about the state of Flint and other cities with lead pipes. Efforts to replace these pipes hinge on proposed changes to the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule. Have questions or comments for us to consider for a future episode? Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we’d love to hear from you!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
EMILY KWONG, HOST:
You’re listening to SHORT WAVE…
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KWONG: …From NPR.
Hey, SHORT WAVErs. Emily Kwong here. So 10 years ago, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha was a pediatrician at Hurley Medical Center, living in Flint, Mich. The city was near bankruptcy, and to save money, Flint decided to switch water sources from Lake Huron to the Flint River on April 25, 2014.
MONA HANNA-ATTISHA: We had greenish and brownish water, and it smelled weird, and it was giving people rashes, and they were losing hair.
KWONG: And families in Flint kept telling her, something’s not right with the water.
HANNA-ATTISHA: They were asking, was it OK to use this tap water to mix their baby’s formula?
KWONG: State and city officials said there was nothing to worry about. And Mona told her patients the same thing.
HANNA-ATTISHA: For a year and a half, I was telling my patients that, of course, everything’s OK. Like, how can - how could our drinking water not be OK? Like, this is America. It is the 21st century. All the folks in charge, despite all these concerns, were saying everything was OK.
KWONG: But everything was not OK.
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KWONG: Over a glass of wine, one of Mona’s high school friends who used to work at the EPA implored her to look into this issue.
HANNA-ATTISHA: And she literally stared me down. She was like, Mona, it doesn’t have corrosion control.
KWONG: The Flint water system lacked something important called corrosion control. Corrosion control changes the chemistry of the water to make it less likely to leach lead from the pipes. And without that corrosion control, the lead in Flint’s pipes got into the water supply.
HANNA-ATTISHA: And that is the moment that I heard about the possibility of lead being in the water, and that’s the moment my life changed.
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HANNA-ATTISHA: We need water to survive. It’s a medical and public health necessity. And the younger you are, the more our bodies are made up of water.
KWONG: The CDC says that no amount of lead in children is safe. For kids, lead poisoning can have serious consequences. It can damage their brains and nervous systems, causing learning and behavioral problems and issues with hearing and speech down the line. Mona saw a crisis in the making and began looking for any data she could on kids’ blood lead levels. And in September 2015, a year and a half after that water switch, she went public with her results…
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HANNA-ATTISHA: This research is concerning. These results are concerning.
KWONG: …Showing that the number of children in Flint with elevated levels of lead in their blood had gone up.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HANNA-ATTISHA: And when our national guiding organizations tell us primary prevention is the most important thing and that lead poisoning is potentially irreversible, then we have to say something.
KWONG: At first, the state dismissed her findings. But Mona Hanna-Attisha was right. It’s been 10 years, and the city’s water quality has improved. Flint switched back to Lake Huron, and thousands of lead pipes have been replaced.
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KWONG: But there is still a lot of work to be done in Flint to replace them all. And the truth of the matter is there are cities and towns all over the country facing their own issues with water quality, aging infrastructure and inadequate laws that don’t protect people from lead poisoning. Flint is an example of how speaking up with science can turn a crisis around. So 10 years on, we’re bringing in science reporter Pien Huang to focus on those trying to stop another crisis in another city - Chicago. You’re listening to SHORT WAVE, the science podcast from NPR.
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KWONG: So to help us understand the emerging lead crisis in Chicago, we’ve got science reporter Pien Huang in the studio. Hi, Pien.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Hey, Emily.
KWONG: Hello.
HUANG: It’s great to see you.
KWONG: Good to see you, too.
HUANG: And it’s also so cool that you got to talk to Dr. Mona.
KWONG: It was so cool. And Mona is still on the front lines of trying to make life better for kids in Flint, where more than two-thirds of children live in poverty. She’s the founding director of the Pediatric Public Health Initiative, which connects families to programs and services to alleviate that poverty. One of them, Rx Kids, gives new moms in Flint a no-strings-attached check of $7,500.
HANNA-ATTISHA: In a city that so many folks know as a city that failed kids is a city that’s learning, that’s leading with science, that’s leading with prevention to promote kind of the health and development of kids by boldly kind of eradicating infant poverty.
KWONG: I asked her what she thought of the situation in Chicago, and she didn’t hold back on her thoughts and feelings.
HANNA-ATTISHA: Chicago has a long history of lead advocates, but also a long history of lead misuse. Chicago continued to use lead in their service lines until it was restricted in 1986 and built into the code - if you wanted water from the main, you were mandated to use lead in your plumbing. So Chicago has the most lead lines than any other city in our nation. And, you know, if you respect the science of lead, if you understand that it has no safe level, lead should not be the straw that is delivering our drinking water to so many children and families.
HUANG: And, Emily, that lead is still in the water even now. So there was a recent JAMA Pediatrics study that found that most children under the age of 6 in Chicago are probably drinking leaded water.
KWONG: Most children - wow. OK. And that research was spearheaded by Benjamin Huynh at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, right?
HUANG: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So he is an assistant professor of environmental health and engineering there, and his focus is on data science and environmental justice. In this case in particular, he’s got personal ties to the topic.
BENJAMIN HUYNH: So I’m from Chicago. And, you know, those of us in Chicago, we’ve known for a long time that most of our pipes are made out of lead.
HUANG: Including the house that his parents live in. In Chicago, there are around 400,000 homes that have lead pipes connecting the water main to the house. And Ben wanted to know, what does that actually mean for people drinking water from those taps?
KWONG: So how did Ben figure this out, like, that so many kids were drinking leaded water? What data did he use?
HUANG: Yeah. So it’s rooted in the fact that Chicago has a free water testing program. It’s for people who want to test their tap water for lead. And so far, this program has run about 38,000 tests. People have voluntarily collected water samples from their home, sent them to the city. And while these tests are free, Ben says not everybody uses them.
HUYNH: We found that the people who took those tests - they’re more likely to be in white neighborhoods, like, wealthier neighborhoods, and also neighborhoods that are less likely to have lead in the first place.
KWONG: Oh, so there was a huge sampling bias in this data.
HUANG: Right, exactly. And he had to correct for that. So he took that data, and he combined it with other sources of data, so data on local health, demographics, survey results on how many people use tap versus filtered or bottled water as their main drinking source. And then with the help of machine learning, he and his team figured out an estimate. They figured out that 68% of young children in Chicago are drinking tap water with lead.
HUYNH: On top of that, you know, we’re seeing Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are more likely to have lead exposure, but also less likely to be tested for lead.
KWONG: But the federal government does allow for some lead to be in the water. So at what point does the Environmental Protection Agency say, this is too much lead in the water - this is the cutoff?
HUANG: The EPA does have something called the Lead and Copper Rule. And this rule sets an action level for lead at 15 parts per billion.
KWONG: OK.
HUANG: And when water systems find that amount of lead in the water, they’re supposed to initiate that corrosion control that we mentioned earlier.
KWONG: So is Chicago in compliance with this 15-parts-per-billion limit?
HUANG: Yeah. I mean, the city says that it is, and they’ve done everything that they’re supposed to be doing.
KWONG: Sure.
HUANG: But there are other places that might not be.
KWONG: OK.
HUANG: I talked to Elizabeth Southerland. She’s formally with the EPA. And she says that audits from the agency actually showed that in some 90% of these cases where there are excess levels of lead in the water, those cases never even got reported to the federal government.
ELIZABETH SOUTHERLAND: This was probably the worst reported and enforced regulation in the history of the drinking water program.
HUANG: Yeah. And many researchers and advocates say the rule was weak and inadequate. Now even the EPA itself says that those regulations need to change. So last year, the EPA proposed the Lead and Copper Rule improvements, and those are expected to be finalized by October this fall.
KWONG: OK. I’m pulling up their website now. So let’s see what could happen if these proposed changes to the Lead and Copper Rule were to take effect. One proposed rule change is that every water system in the country produce a map of where their lead pipes are. That could be huge.
HUANG: Yeah, totally.
KWONG: Also on this list are calls for improving water sampling and lowering that lead action level from 15 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion. OK.
HUANG: There are some people who think that it should be even less than that, but that would significantly lower the trigger level for lead.
KWONG: OK. And then the last thing - ah, requiring the vast majority of water systems to replace all their lead pipes within the next 10 years.
HUANG: And many people are saying, because the lead protections for the drinking water haven’t really been working, this is what we really need to fix the problem. But you said the vast majority, and I want to…
KWONG: Yeah.
HUANG: …Point that out, because that’s a really important point, because in that proposed rule, Chicago gets an exemption because it simply has too many pipes. The regulation, as it’s proposed, is really concerned with what’s realistic and feasible. And so what the EPA is saying is that it’s realistic to expect a city to replace around 10,000 lead service lines a year, and this is based on what other cities have already done. So since most cities have under 100,000 pipes, they should be able to make that deadline. But Chicago, with its 400,000 lead pipes, would get around 40 years or more to switch out their pipes.
KWONG: Wow.
HUANG: And that 40-year timeline has community advocates, like Chakena Perry with the Natural Resources Defense Council, pretty upset.
CHAKENA PERRY: That’s decades, that’s generations of children and adults, you know, consuming lead-contaminated water. It’s incomprehensible to tell a resident that they have to wait that long for safe drinking water.
HUANG: Chakena and others are really pushing for the EPA to close up those exemptions when they issue the final rule in the fall.
KWONG: So to be determined, really, how this rule might impact Chicago in the long run.
HUANG: Yeah. Meanwhile, people have to grapple with the reality of their lead pipes. Remember when I said earlier that Ben’s parents have lead pipes? Well, a few weeks ago, Ben’s mom got sick with symptoms that were consistent with lead poisoning.
KWONG: Oh, yikes.
HUANG: Yeah. And it turns out that a water main near their home had burst. And the city went out to fix it, but they didn’t tell his parents right away that they were doing it. And in the meantime, his mom was drinking the tap water. So Ben helped his parents order a test for lead in their water, and he walked them through the process of collecting multiple bottles of water for the samples.
HUYNH: I know this - right? - ’cause I’m an expert on this, but, like, this is probably happening to, like - all over the city, or I know this is happening all over the city.
HUANG: Ben thinks that the city could be doing a much better job of getting more people to test for lead in their water. Right now, less than 10% of households have gotten tested. And he also says that they could do a much better job of providing lead filters to everyone who’s at risk of lead poisoning.
KWONG: Yeah. I mean, all of this just affirms what Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha was saying earlier about public policy needing to keep up with science, right?
HUANG: Totally.
KWONG: I mean, it’s just - I think this is the real legacy of Flint in many respects, this acknowledgment that people everywhere deserve to know what’s in their water and deserve to be informed on what to do if the water is compromised.
HUANG: Yeah. Emily, you know, the Safe Drinking Water Act was passed 50 years ago, but there’s still a ways to go to make sure that all tap water in the U.S. is safe. If listeners are worried, they can take a couple of simple steps to figure out what their pipes are made out of. They can test their water like Ben did, and if there’s lead, they can filter it out.
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KWONG: Pien Huang, science reporter, thank you for walking us through where we are at this moment in our country’s history when it comes to lead and water and human health. It’s been really good to talk to you.
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KWONG: This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by me and Pien. Patrick Murray was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Collin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I’m Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to SHORT WAVE from NPR.
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Abel Wolman, ‘Friend of the Thirsty’ - A Life and Legacy of Water Sanitization
Abel Wolman, “Friend of the Thirsty”: A Life and Legacy of Water Sanitization
Duration: 00:23:30
Released: 2026
Series: Public Health On Call
About this episode: At the turn of the 20th century, waterborne diseases like typhoid and dysentery posed a significant threat to public health, accounting for a large part of infant mortality and overall morbidity. Enter Abel Wolman, an early graduate of Johns Hopkins’ engineering program and a professor at the university’s school of public health. In this episode: the story of the Baltimore-born pioneer of water sanitization and how his work in water chlorination and infrastructure set the stage for better health across the globe. Note: This episode was produced in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University sesquicentennial campaign. Guest: Graham Mooney, PhD, is an associate professor of history of medicine and epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Host: Ari Goldstein, MD, is a family medicine physician and a recent alum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health General Preventive Medicine Residency program. This year, Dr. Goldstein served a one-month rotation with Public Health On Call. Show links and related content: Heroes of Public Health: Abel Wolman—Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Friend of the Thirsty—New York Times
All About Legionnaires’ Disease
Duration: 00:13:09
Released: 2026
Series: Public Health On Call
About this episode: Cooling towers rife with Legionella bacteria are fueling an outbreak of a serious respiratory disease in New York City. Legionnaires’ disease is common in the summer months as the water we use to shower and cool our air conditioning systems warms, creating a breeding ground for bacteria. In this episode: Environmental scientist Natalie Exum details the symptoms of Legionnaires’ disease, who is most at risk of infection, and how cities can monitor and treat water systems to reduce exposure. Guest: Natalie Exum, PhD, MS, is an assistant professor of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Host: Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Show links and related content: Fourth death confirmed in NYC Legionnaires’ disease outbreak—NBC News Legionnaires’ Disease—NYC Health Two-Year Evaluation of Legionella in an Aging Residential Building: Assessment of Multiple Potable Water Remediation Approaches—Science of the Total Environment Transcript information: Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel. Contact us: Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website. Follow us: @PublicHealthPod on Bluesky @PublicHealthPod on Instagram @JohnsHopkinsSPH on Facebook @PublicHealthOnCall on YouTube Here’s our RSS feed Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.
Are Humans Hot Enough to Survive a Fungal Apocalypse?
Duration: 00:14:03
Released: 2026
Series: Public Health On Call
About this episode: New research has identified massive fungal blooms in North America in the Cretaceous period, suggesting significant ecological upheaval before and after the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. In this episode: Arturo Casadevall, senior author of the study, explains why these findings are so significant and his hypothesis that fungi gave mammals an evolutionary leg-up over reptiles. Guest: Dr. Arturo Casadevall, PhD, MS, is chair of the department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a global expert in host defense mechanisms, fungi, and antibody-based therapies. He is also co-author of the book What If Fungi Win? with Stephanie Desmon. Host: Stephanie Desmon, MA, is a former journalist, author, and the director of public relations and communications for the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs. Show links and related content: Fungal Surges Marked Cretaceous Mass Extinction that Ended Age of Dinosaurs—Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health What zombie show ‘The Last of Us’ gets right about fungus in a warming world—Washington Post What If Fungi Win?—Johns Hopkins University Press The Discovery of a New Clade of Candida Auris—A “Critical Pathogen”—Public Health On Call (August 2024) Transcript information: Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel. Contact us: Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website. Follow us: @PublicHealthPod on Bluesky @PublicHealthPod on Instagram @JohnsHopkinsSPH on Facebook @PublicHealthOnCall on YouTube Here’s our RSS feed Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.
Black Gold - The Future of Food We Throw Away
Black Gold: The Future of Food…We Throw Away
Duration: 00:51:11
Released: 2022
Series: Gastropod
For a few weeks in 1987, trash was temporarily headline news: a barge filled with waste that would no longer fit in New York City’s overflowing landfills spent months wandering up and down the East Coast with nowhere to dump its smelly, rotting cargo. The trash barge’s travels triggered a long overdue public rethink of the wisdom of sending all of our waste to landfills—including food. But fast forward more than thirty years, and food still takes up more space in American landfills than anything else. About 30 to 40 percent of food produced in the US gets thrown away, rather than eaten. What’s more, putting all that rotting food inside landfills produces a lot of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Our ancestors knew exactly what to do with food waste; the earliest descriptions of composting were written on clay tablets more than 4,000 years ago. So why didn’t the GarBarge kick off a composting craze? And why is it so hard for us to keep food waste out of landfills? This episode, Gastropod visits the future of food waste: the high-tech facilities as well as the innovative policies that promise to keep our discarded food out of landfills, keep methane from escaping into the atmosphere, and turn those food scraps into something useful. Can a state the size of California really keep 75 percent of its food waste out of landfills, as it has pledged to do by 2025—and what will happen if it does? Listen in for compost blow-dryers, fruit-sticker bingo, and a lot of microbes! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chemical Contaminants and Fungal Fixes in Wastewater and Agriculture
Duration: 00:14:39
Released: 2026
Series: Public Health On Call
About this episode: Biosolids created by the wastewater treatment process are useful fertilizers in agriculture, but they often contain chemical compounds from the pharmaceutical and personal care products we send down our drains. In this episode: Researcher Carsten Prasse details new findings that suggest that fungi could reduce our risk of exposure to these compounds in our drinking water and food. Guest: Carsten Prasse, PhD, MSc, is an associate professor of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he studies organic contaminants in the urban water cycle and their impact on environmental and human health. Host: Stephanie Desmon, MA, is a former journalist, author, and the director of public relations and communications for the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs. Show links and related content: White-Rot Fungi Show Promise for Reducing Pharmaceutical Residues in Biosolids—Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Magic Mushrooms? White-Rot Fungal Degradation of Psychoactive Pharmaceuticals in Biosolids—ACS Environmental Au Transcript information: Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel. Contact us: Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website. Follow us: @PublicHealthPod on Bluesky @PublicHealthPod on Instagram @JohnsHopkinsSPH on Facebook @PublicHealthOnCall on YouTube Here’s our RSS feed Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.
Cyclospora - Explosive Diarrhea Everywhere
Duration: 00:54:38
Released: 2026
Series: This Podcast Will Kill You
You’ve seen the headlines: a food-borne parasite is infecting people across the US, leaving them chained to the toilet sometimes for weeks on end, as they are ravaged by wave after wave of gastrointestinal upset. What the heck is cyclosporiasis and where did it come from? How scared should we be of our raspberries or lettuce or cilantro? To dish out the answers as fast we could, we put together this fact-filled episode about the biology of Cyclospora cayetanensis, how this parasite makes you sick, when we first learned about it (more recently than you might think), and what we know about this current outbreak (or outbreaks). We also probe how recent changes to foodborne pathogen surveillance on a national scale are contributing to the challenges in understanding the scope and origin of outbreaks such as this. You don’t want to miss this one! Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Environmental Microbiology (TESTING WASTEWATER FOR DISEASES) with Amy Kirby
Duration: 01:03:51
Released: 2022
Series: Ologies with Alie Ward
Oh boy. This episode may seeeeem crappy but it is certainly not a waste of your time. We’re not kidding, while the episode is of course wonderful, mostly thanks to our wonderful guests, it is also certainly about poopy wastewater and what we can all learn from it. About those terrific guests: we mostly speak with Dr. Amy E. Kirby, Ph.D., MPH of the frickin’ CDC (yes, that CDC) about the National Wastewater Surveillance System or NWSS. Did you know sewer water is not just a feature of teenage mutant ninja turtle habitats? Epidemiologists have been using the contents of our collectively owned chocolate waterfall to track disease since polio, but it was only in response to COVID-19 that the CDC launched the NWSS “to coordinate and build the nation’s capacity to track the presence of SARS-CoV-2.” So we learn a bit about what all that means, as we talk weird waste, medication levels in the water, whether or not “silent but deadly” is flim flam, and more in this absolutely gushing sluicegate of an ep.BUT WAIT. That’s not all. We got two little extra guests! First up, your ol’ Dadward did a prank call on Amy Narimatsu of Shorerivers.org, so she has a fun little cameo, and we conclude with previous virology guest, Dr. Shannon Bennett, of the California Academy of Sciences to discuss what’s happening with COVID these days, and why it’s important to stay safe for those who still need protection.It’s an absolutely bursting septic tank of an episode so… Hang on to your butts.Follow the CDC on TwitterLearn more about the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance SystemFollow Dr. Bennett on TwitterA donation was made this week to ShoreRiversSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Up in Smoke
Duration: 00:29:57
Released: 2024
Series: Radiolab
Two scenes. In the first, a doctor gets a call — the hospital she works at is having an outbreak of unknown origin, in the middle of the worst wildfire season on record. In the second, an ecologist stands in a forest, watching it burn. Through very different circumstances, they both find themselves asking the same question: is there something in the smoke? This question will bring them together, and reveal – to all of us – a world we never saw before. This is the first episode in an ongoing series hosted by Molly Webster, in conversation with scientists and science-y people, doing work at the furthest edges of what we know. More to come! Special thanks to Leda Kobziar, at the University of Idaho, and Naomi Hauser, at the University of California, Davis. Plus, James and Shelby Kaemmerer, and Paula and John Troche.We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it’s your turn! Radiolab has teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. This is your chance to make your mark on the heavens. Submit your name ideas now through September, or vote on your favorites starting in November: https://radiolab.org/moonEPISODE CREDITS: Hosted and Reported by - Molly WebsterProduced by - Sindhu GnanasambandanFact-checking by - Diane A. Kellyand Edited by - Pat WaltersEPISODE CITATIONS:Articles - And lastly, wanna learn more about bacteria in snow-making machines – check out this New York Times article (https://zpr.io/t6HKi7HMuHMZ), or this science-explainer (https://zpr.io/VygRVBb5vspq)! Scientific Papers - Read Leda’s paper on microbes in smoke (https://zpr.io/d3JVm7gEf2dc)!For more details on the outbreak at Naomi’s hospital, you can check out this abstract of her findings (https://zpr.io/DGgS9UCFicpJ). Leda was inspired to stick petri dishes into smoke after reading a science research paper written by a father-daughter team, as part of a high school science project in Texas. Go read it (https://zpr.io/D3LVMy2raLr9)! Audio - For further fungal listening, Radiolab and Molly have covered fungus and hospital outbreaks (https://radiolab.org/podcast/fungus-amungus) before (plus: dinosuars!), in our episode Fungus Amungus.You can also listen to Super Cool (https://radiolab.org/podcast/super-cool-2017), a Radiolab episode about wild horses, microbes, and things freezing instantaneously. (It’s seriously one of Molly’s favorite Radiolab episodes and it has a moment of such SPONTANEOUS joy, she re-plays it at least once a year to smile.)Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.org.Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Video Clips
Drowning in seaweed How to stop invasive Sargassum
nature video, 01 25, 2023
Video (10:31)
Description
The story of Sargassum stretches from the Congo to the Amazon, from soybean farming to climate change and from toxic gases to robotic vehicles. In this documentary researchers from around the world explain the vast scope of the Sargassum problem and the solutions that may one day begin to address it.
Additional photographs and footage in this film were provided by Drake Lee-Patterson, Gary Marshall, Joseph Weekes, Driven Visual Media, Kerwin Noel, Nick Hurley, Akeisha Clark, Sargassum Information Hub, NASA, Chuanmin Hu, Jeff Davis’s team, Hazel Oxenford, Caroline Juang, Melvina Walsh, Morgan Lewis, Kerton Jobe, P McConney, Markel Gomez Letona and Nico Frohberg who were mistakenly missed off the film credits.
Transcript
0:03 · VOICE OVER: The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is the largest seaweed bloom in the world, and it’s expanding.
0:11 · Visible from space, it’s a growing problem for coastal communities.
0:15 · HARSHINI VUMMADI: The beaches, genuinely, if they aren’t maintained, you just can’t go there.
0:21 · You’d be up to your knees in sargassum.
0:24 · VOICE OVER: But as a key sequester of carbon, this invasive species also presents an opportunity.
0:30 · AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: We want to gather sargassum using robotic vehicles.
0:34 · You sink it down 2,000 metres, our current model suggests that that particular water body does not come back in contact with the atmosphere for at least 100 years.
0:42 · VOICE OVER: Can scientists take a global challenge and turn it into an opportunity to buy time in the race against climate change?
1:00 · VOICE OVER: Sargassum has been in the Atlantic since the time of Christopher Columbus, floating mats of seaweed that gave its name to the Sargasso Sea – a nutrient-poor patch of the Atlantic penned in by ocean currents.
1:13 · AJIT: You can think of it as a floating rainforest or an upside-down coral reef because each raft of sargassum is a hotspot of biological activity.
1:22 · VOICE OVER: But in the last couple of decades, a new population has emerged, further south near the coast of Brazil and the Caribbean.
1:29 · SHELLY-ANN COX: In 2011, we were all taken back by this new phenomenon, where we saw tons of sargassum being brought and beached in the region.
1:42 · VOICE OVER: Based in Barbados, scientist and entrepreneur Shelly-Ann Cox specialises in fisheries management.
1:49 · She first noticed the impact of sargassum on the sea urchin divers she was working with.
1:54 · SHELLY-ANN: Fisher folk had reported sargassum mats as far as their eyes can see.
2:01 · Some of them can’t get to the boat or the boats can’t get through the sargassum to get out.
2:07 · Those near shore, the spear fishers as well, they reported some of their skin being irritated when they’re diving and the berries that keep the sargassum floating have gotten into their ears as well.
2:21 · VOICE OVER: The impact on tourism – the lifeblood of the Caribbean – has been huge.
2:25 · OFF-SCREEN VOICE: This weed is going right up to the sanitation plant by Barnacle Point.
2:33 · People, get ready for the smell tomorrow.
2:39 · VOICE OVER: Around the same time, other scientists working in the Atlantic had also noticed a change.
2:45 · Oceanographer Ajit Subramaniam has been working in the South Atlantic for more than 25 years.
2:50 · AJIT: In 2018, it was astounding how much sargassum we ran into, and it was really striking.
2:55 · It was something that we’d never seen before and then, bam.
2:58 · We were there, and the ship was often surrounded by sargassum that was hundreds of metres around the ship.
3:05 · VOICE OVER: Sargassum wasn’t thought to be found this far south.
3:08 · AJIT: We were seeing things that we had not seen before, and I was trying to get context for that.
3:12 · VOICE OVER: Ajit linked up with colleagues at the University of South Florida, who had been making their own observations.
3:17 · AJIT: They’d been actually watching this on their satellite data, and they had actually seen this explosion of this new population that is growing much closer to the equator.
3:26 · VOICE OVER: With the satellite data, scientists were able to hazard an estimate of its size.
3:31 · SHELLY-ANN: 24.2 million metric tons in June, from the satellite imagery.
3:38 · VOICE OVER: Dubbed the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, this is almost certainly the world’s largest macroalgal bloom.
3:44 · It’s thought that intensive agriculture, especially soya plantations, has increased nitrogen concentrations in the Atlantic, causing rapid sargassum growth.
3:54 · SHELLY-ANN: Sargassum is really known as a symptom of climate change because, due to increasing surface temperatures, nutrients from the Amazon and Congo, Saharan dust which brings in iron, upwelling as well, the change in currents, all of these factors have led to the proliferation of sargassum.
4:19 · HARSHINI: Outside of the Caribbean, I don’t think many people are talking about this.
4:23 · VOICE OVER: Harshini Vummadi is a biology major undergraduate, who’s recently returned from an exploratory trip to the Dominican Republic.
4:32 · HARSHINI: It affects the Caribbean and I believe West Africa, and a bit of East Asia as well.
4:40 · VOICE OVER: Harshini is part of an interdisciplinary team from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
4:44 · They’re working with the school of biological sciences to try and explore solutions to the sargassum problem.
4:49 · RESEARCHER: Yeah, so, I’m just collecting some sargassum samples and there are lots of different plants in here.
4:57 · HARSHINI: I am the biology major on their team. We have a chemical engineer, a civil engineer, a mechanical engineer.
5:03 · VOICE OVER: A solution of some sort is definitely needed, and urgently.
5:07 · HARSHINI: I just didn’t realise how much of it there would be, like we watched a clean-up crew work and work, and in 2 hours they like hardly made a dent. The growth just seems to be almost exponential.
5:18 · VOICE OVER: While there are many creative small-scale craft uses of sargassum, local communities have yet to find a viable solution to disposing of vast quantities of the stuff, or even better, making it useful.
5:30 · HARSHINI: It uptakes a lot of different heavy metals, particularly arsenic, which makes it like quite dangerous to use as, say, like a fertiliser because, again, now you’re introducing arsenic to these land systems where it could potentially leach into groundwater.
5:47 · So, we try to like branch out from fertiliser. One of our team members focused on an application involving bricks.
5:55 · Someone else focused on black soldier fly larvae, which could consume the sargassum and then in turn be used as a sort of biofuel in like an anaerobic digester.
6:08 · I personally have been working on using it as a bioaccumulate. Why not use it in waste water treatment?
6:16 · It can absorb those heavy metals that we were so concerned about in the first place.
6:21 · VOICE OVER: Harshini’s team are working on ways to make the sargassum financially viable.
6:26 · Meanwhile, Ajit is thinking more broadly, exploring the bigger checks and balances of the global carbon cycle.
6:32 · He’s come up with a radical plan.
6:34 · AJIT: So, the way we want to do this is essentially gather nets of sargassum using robotic vehicles, have them ballasted and then sink them down to 2,000 metres.
6:46 · VOICE OVER: Sargassum sequesters a lot of carbon, but it also releases it when it decays.
6:52 · This approach would theoretically remove the carbon from the atmosphere, effectively buying the planet time in the race against climate change.
6:59 · AJIT: Sinking down 2,000 metres, our current model suggests that that particular water body does not come back in contact with the atmosphere for at least 100 years.
7:08 · VOICE OVER: The idea of sinking the sargassum has been proposed before, but the suggestion is usually to sink it where it grows, in shallower water.
7:15 · AJIT: Merely capturing it at the surface and getting rid of it just off the beach at 100 metres or something like that will basically have the carbon coming right back up.
7:26 · It might even actually come back up in a more potent form if you are starting to have it rotting and forming methane.
7:32 · VOICE OVER: Ajit plans to sink the sargassum in deeper water, but there are a lot of questions still to be answered.
7:38 · AJIT: We want to make sure that the carbon that we are capturing is actually going down to the sea floor and will stay down there, and so we want to follow it down to the sea floor.
7:46 · VOICE OVER: In addition, as a biologist, he’s keen to understand the impact of this plan on the ecosystem.
7:51 · AJIT: So, we actually have a fisheries scientist on the team who will be looking at what kind of communities the sargassum rafts harbour, and therefore we’ll have a sense of what we might be impacting if we were to do the sinking.
8:02 · It’s not that we’re going to decimate the ocean of sargassum.
8:06 · VOICE OVER: The list of problems attributed to sargassum is growing. From the harmful gases released when it decays to its impact on wildlife.
8:13 · HARSHINI: Especially when it washes up on beaches where turtles go to lay their eggs, a lot of these baby turtles are actually unable to climb over these sargassum things, and so they’re unable to make it into the ocean due to these big patches of sargassum.
8:28 · SHELLY-ANN: So, every year we’re seeing more countries reporting the influx and the catastrophic impacts on tourism, fisheries sectors, maritime and transport and then the health impacts.
8:43 · So, some of our colleagues recently published a paper on the impacts on pregnant women who were exposed to hydrogen sulfide and ammonia when the sargassum decomposes.
8:57 · Those pregnant ladies who live near the coast and were exposed were at a higher risk of preeclampsia.
9:04 · VOICE OVER: Going into the future, it’s likely that the challenge presented by sargassum, like many of the challenges of climate change, might be bigger than one scientist or one idea.
9:14 · HARSHINI: There needs to be some sort of economically driven, or at least be governmentally subsidised, but there needs to be some sort of way to like tackle and solve the problem.
9:27 · AJIT: I feel that countries like Barbados are the populations that contribute the least to climate change and yet are facing the greatest impact of climate change.
9:36 · I would like to figure out a financing model where we can actually have credit going to communities in Barbados for the carbon that is sequestered.
9:46 · SHELLY-ANN: There are lots of bright, brilliant minds out there developing solutions that need this support.
9:53 · They need the financial support to upscale until governments realise that this problem is really here to stay, then they will be willing then to invest in building up sargassum industries.
10:07 · HARSHINI: Nothing has like had any concrete potential yet. There’s just several isolated research groups.
10:15 · But I just think that things would move a lot faster if everyone could like work together.
Mexico’s Caribbean beaches overwhelmed by record sargassum influx I Inside Latin America
Al Jazeera English, 09 05, 2026
Video (10:02)
Description
The Caribbean is facing a growing sargassum seaweed crisis, with huge quantities washing onto beaches across the region and threatening tourism, ecosystems and public health.
Mexico’s Riviera Maya has been particularly affected, with the influx reaching thousands of tonnes of seaweed each day.
As the algae decomposes on beaches, it can release toxic gases, raising health concerns for residents and tourists. Scientists also warn that the accumulation of sargassum can damage seagrass ecosystems and affect beach stability.
The crisis is putting pressure on Mexico’s tourism industry, while the Mexican Navy has stepped up efforts to collect the seaweed before it reaches the shore.
But some businesses are looking at sargassum differently.
Companies including Carbonwave and Sargablock are developing ways to transform the invasive algae into products such as bio-fertilizers, footwear and construction materials.
Could an environmental crisis become a new source of sustainable materials?
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Transcript
0:04 · [music] Welcome to Inside Latin America and to Mexico’s Riviera Maya. For the last decade, growing amounts of algae called sargassum have been washing up on beaches across the Caribbean, transforming once pristine coastlines and threatening the communities that depend on them.
0:25 · From the beaches of Puerto Rico to the fishing villages of the Dominican Republic, this phenomenon is taking a toll. And 2026 brought record quantities with more than 12 million tons detected across the region. But where is it all coming from and why now?
0:42 · This is the Sargasso Sea. Scientists say around 2010, changing currents began moving seaweed from here into warmer waters, forming the Great Atlantic Sargasso Belt, a vast band of floating algae stretching from West Africa across the Atlantic. Then, nutrient pollution, including fertilizer runoff carried by rivers, helped fuel its explosive growth.
1:06 · Experts agree the regional response still doesn’t match the scale of the problem. But with so much sargassum arriving, governments are being forced to act while private citizens are looking to upcycle this seaweed in an effort to turn this new reality into an opportunity.
1:25 · 9,000 tons a day. That’s how much sargassum washed up on Mexico’s Caribbean coast at the height of this year’s season.
1:34 · With its main tourist beaches under threat, the Mexican government has invested resources in tackling the problem.
1:41 · It enlisted the Navy in a process that starts with sea monitoring.
1:45 · Once blooms are located, especially designed vessels collect as much as they can.
1:51 · Barriers redirect what the ships miss, and divers work daily setting up additional nets and anchoring them beneath the surface.
2:00 · Every part of this process is extremely labor-intensive. If this ship has to be continuously repositioning itself so it can drag in all that sargassum. Once it’s full, it will go back to land and it will have to all be unloaded again before being taken to a processing plant.
2:17 · The goal is to keep the sargassum from reaching the beaches where growing evidence shows prolonged exposure to the decomposing seaweed can be toxic.
2:26 · And if you were to like hang around it for a long time, it would probably cause like respiratory distress and some other issues, but um in some places in the Caribbean, like it’s it’s very strong and it persists for weeks at a time and they are actually seeing adverse human health effects from the hydrogen sulfide.
2:41 · But removing sargassum is also expensive.
2:44 · Putting this option out of reach for many island nations in the Caribbean. The result is beaches that look like this. And when beaches become unusable, people whose livelihoods depend on tourism and fishing suffer, too.
2:59 · People come here, see this, and turn right around and leave.
3:05 · From Guadeloupe to Puerto Rico, more than 70% of people in the Caribbean live along the coast and depend on it to survive. And experts agree, without a joint international approach to sargassum and soon, the human and economic toll will only grow.
3:22 · This phenomenon can fundamentally change how people interact with the beach. For more on that, we spoke to Brigitta van Tussenbroek, a biologist with Mexico’s National Autonomous University, who’s been researching how sargassum is affecting communities along the coasts.
3:38 · Well, if you just think of the village community, of course, their connection with the sea is getting less because you don’t want to go to the beach on the Sunday afternoon with your family when you’ve got the what the amounts of sargassum there. If it’s a fishing community, um it’s more difficult for the boats to go out. Of course, for the tourist industry, it’s a disaster. And a lot of them, the tourist complex which have money, they can attend it to a certain degree. They can put up barriers.
4:08 · They can put small boats which collect the sargassum. They can try to replenish the beach which is eroded.
4:15 · You just mentioned erosion. Can you tell me a little bit about how sargassum is having an effect on what’s already a problem?
4:23 · Sargassum just being there causes erosion. Then sometimes bad practices. So, they remove the sargassum from the beach, but they take a lot of sand with it, which is another problem. And the other problem the major, I think, which I think was one of the major problem because it’s my area of research, it kills the sea grasses in the nearshore. And sea grasses are very important to maintain stable beaches.
4:49 · Do you think of sargassum as a plague?
4:51 · It’s a marvelous seaweed. I I’m still amazed by it. It’s a a seaweed which spends its whole life floating in the ocean. It forms these enormous rafts in the open sea. And the open sea is a desert, basically, for a lot of organisms. And then in the middle of the desert, you have this really biodiverse a raft with small critters, with a lot of bacteria, with epibionts which which grow on the sargassum. It’s beautiful.
5:23 · But having these huge masses of biomass decaying, getting on the beach, and then getting into the sea, it it causes a enormous disequilibrium of of whole life here in these systems.
5:36 · We’ve spent the last few days looking at all the efforts on various different scales of trying to get rid of the sargassum, take it out of the sea, uh clean it from the beaches. It feels like a titanic effort.
5:49 · I think at least the people who make the decisions I I think they still don’t understand the scale they have to work at. But we should do 100 times more or 1,000 times more. So, it should be so much more and I think this should be a really, uh, coherent strategy of managing the sargassum.
6:09 · Are you concerned?
6:10 · Well, I think it’s very difficult to be positive in the in the scenario, isn’t that?
6:16 · Because, as I say, most likely, um, this is not going to stop. This ecosystem is already damaged, uh, beyond the level I won’t ever see it recovering.
6:29 · So, I think we we have to be realistic in this this scenario and I think it it’s very difficult to be realistic, of course, because it it doesn’t look very nice. But, either really scale up a lot and invert a lot and and I really try to diminish the quantity of sargassum getting to the shore or adapt.
6:50 · But what does adapting look like? For a series of entrepreneurs in this region, the answer lies in turning this sargassum into products that can have life beyond the sea. Today’s sargassum harvest in Puerto Morelos, on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, ready to be processed and turned into bio-fertilizer. It’s a time-sensitive operation. Tons of seaweed must be weighed, cleaned, and pressed before it starts to decompose.
7:21 · Carbonwave is a company specializing in upcycling sargassum, filtering it in multiple steps to extract nutrients that boost crop yields and reduce the need for chemical fertilizer. After years of development, its creators say they have finally secured export agreements with the US, Colombia, and Ecuador.
7:40 · We already prove that sargassum can be turned into something that is reliable financially that can create incomes, right? That can create economy along the communities here.
7:54 · In fact, the process sargassum that Carbonwave doesn’t use for agricultural products ends up on people’s feet. Sargasso Sandals mixes sargassum powder with EVA foam, the same material Nike and Adidas use in sneakers to make its soles. Each pair is between 10 and 15% sargassum.
8:14 · This is the fiber that I need.
8:16 · And not far from Carbonwave’s plant, Omar Vasquez is using sargassum to make building blocks.
8:22 · Sargablock is an artisanal process. Each block contains 40% sargassum. The rest is other organic materials. They can make up to 6,500 blocks per day [music] using some 40 tons of sargassum. Sargablock says they’ve already donated 21 small homes made of this material to poor families in this community. And they say interest in this product is growing, certainly locally. This truck is going to a local business around here that’s just starting a construction project.
8:54 · But Omar dreams of taking this product far beyond Mexico’s coasts.
8:59 · And I went to Africa, I went to Ghana, and the problem that they have with sargassum it’s major. Nobody talks about those countries because they don’t have the money that we have in Mexico because tourism they don’t go there as here. So, where I see myself bringing Sargablock all over the world and donating houses to all over the people.
9:17 · In Mexico alone, at least 200 projects are now looking for ways to turn a growing environmental problem into an economic opportunity. And while none of these solutions can single-handedly absorb the millions of tons of sargassum washing ashore each year, they are showing that this unwanted seaweed may have value beyond the beach.
9:40 · Governments and citizens alike are rushing to adapt the best they can to a phenomenon that is no longer just a seasonal nuisance, but rather an increasingly permanent fixture of coastal communities along the Caribbean. Thanks for watching Inside Latin America. Now back to Doha with more news.
9:58 · Still ahead on Al Jazeera, from buried underpants. Yes, you heard that
There’s Something Living in Wildfire Smoke
NOVA PBS Official, 01 13, 2025
Video (1:58)
Description
Wildfire smoke can carry thousands of living microorganisms, like bacteria and fungi, across long distances. Some of them could potentially infect humans. With wildfires on the rise, experts are studying the risk this poses to our health.
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Transcript
0:01 · [Narrator] Wildfire smoke is loaded with harmful particles like charred plant matter, incinerated materials, and noxious gases. But it’s also carrying stuff that’s alive, thousands of teeny-tiny microorganisms like bacteria and fungi.
0:15 · But why doesn’t the heat from a wildfire kill all these microorganisms?
0:19 · Well, not all parts of a wildfire are hot.
0:23 · When we look at fire on the scale of a microorganism, there are likely pockets of cold air, areas that are not being burned at all.
0:32 · [Narrator] In those tiny pockets of cooler air, microorganisms can catch rides on bits of carbon, or water vapor, rise high into the atmosphere and travel long distances. And some could potentially infect humans. Some health experts are already noticing a concerning relationship between wildfire smoke exposure and rates of infection. One study in California found an uptick in fungal infections after wildfires within a 200-mile radius of hospitals. And climate change is making wildfires more intense and more impactful.
1:08 · Compared to the yearly average in the 1970s, the average wildfire season in the US is now 105 days longer, burns six times the number of acres and has three times as many large fires.
1:21 · Fires are affected by dry conditions and warmer conditions. Climate change is causing more of those extremes. More extreme conditions, more extreme wildfires. They go together, hand by hand.
1:34 · [Narrator] Though there are still many unknowns, risk is growing for more people.
1:40 · We would expect that we’re all just gonna become exposed on a regular basis. We’d have to look out for that in places that we wouldn’t normally be on the lookout. (gentle music)
When Mold in the Home Is a Problem
California Department of Public Health, 01 06, 2021
Video (1:37)
Description
A first animated video in the 6-part Mold in the Home Video Series. It is an introduction to the series and explains when mold in the home rises to the level of a problem that must be addressed.
The Mold in the Home Video Series is created by the Environmental Health Investigations Branch of the California Department of Public Health. It is designed to answer basic questions about mold in the home using plain language in English and Spanish.
Attn: The web link at 1:26 has expired, please use go.cdph.ca.gov/mold for more information.
To view this story with audio descriptions go to – https://youdescribe.org/video/3umAOe1eSUg?ad=6310fb4773ff460a05c83653
If you need additional information, or are having difficulty accessing this content, please contact askehib@cdph.ca.gov to request this information in an alternate format
Transcript
Intro
0:06 · Mold is in the air everywhere but you can’t see it It is not an issue until mold in your home finds water and starts to grow.
0:15 · Water can come into the home through roofing problems, plumbing leaks, bathroom moisture, and air gaps around windows and doors.
Signs of Mold Problem
0:26 · You have a problem when mold appears near a leak or other dampness in the home.
0:31 · Signs of a mold problem include the smell of mold.
0:35 · Mold has a musty odor.
0:38 · Sometimes you can’t see the mold because it is hidden behind wall paper, dry wall, or paneling, or is on the underside of carpets.
0:48 · The smell lets you know that it is an important problem.
0:52 · If someone cleans or paints over the mold, it will return.
0:56 · This is because the water problem causing mold to grow is not fixed.
Prevention of Mold
1:04 · Mold is common around bathroom tiles, windows, showers, and sinks.
1:09 · It can be hard to keep these damp places completely free of it But you can usually prevent this mold from growing by cleaning it regularly and increasing the air flow.
1:21 · For more information, see the next videos in this series.
1:25 · Visit the CA Department of Public Health’s website cdph.ca.gov/Mold for information about mold in the home.