Vectors
Human Health & the Environment
Class Meetings
Dates: 2026-11-12T16:00:00, 2026-11-17T16:00:00, 2026-11-19T16:00:00
Assigned Background
Our tick nightmare
Duration: 00:28:42
Released: 2026
Series: Today, Explained
Ticks are exponentially expanding their territory, using us for their next blood meal. We must fight back. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. The common wood tick, which can transmit Borrelia and TBE viruses to humans and animals. Photo by Patrick Pleul/dpa/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
**SEAN RAMESWARAM (host): Every summer we accept that we’re gonna get bit by mosquitoes.
SEAN: We bleed. We scratch. We kill. We complain. But in the end, we laugh it off and we head towards winter.
SEAN: But ticks are a much more serious concern.
SCORING IN – IMPENDING GLOOM - BMC (lol)
SEAN: Lemme just remind you how many tick-bourne diseases there are?
Lyme, you know. Shoutouts Connecticut. Then there’s Alpha-gal syndrome, which can make you allergic to red meat for the rest of your life. Also dairy.
But there’s so much more! Should we go alphabetical? And I apologies in advance for my pronunciation here:
SEAN: Anaplasmosis, Babesiosis, Bourbon virus, Colorado tick fever, Ehrlichiosis, hard tick relapsing fever, Heartland virus, Powassan virus, Rickettsia parkeri rickettsiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Soft tick relapsing fever, STARI, Tularemia, 364D rickettsiosis.
SEAN: Symptoms of all these range from nausea, vomiting and bleeding to seizures, organ failure, facial paralysis, and of course, our old friend, death.
And for those of you who are like NBD – that’s just a Northeast thing. Well, not anymore!
Our national tick nightmare, on Today, Explained from Vox.
[THEME]
SEAN: Sean Rameswaram. Today, Explained covered ticks and Lyme disease on the show way back in 2018 when the word on the trail was this was getting much worse. We asked science writer Jonathan Mingle, who recently wrote about ticks for the New York Times newspaper, how much worse this has gotten since then.
JONATHAN MINGLE (science journalist): You know some experts I talk to use the word exponential.
SCORING IN - Discretion
JONATHAN: So what’s happening is that some of these tick species are spreading into areas where people aren’t familiar with them, doctors aren’t familiar with them.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE CBS BOSTON
In the last 15 years, the Lonestar tick has gone from non-existent on the island to fully abundant and everywhere.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE NBC NEWS
The tick is present in at least 21 states and is rapidly spreading across the eastern US.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE CBS MORNINGS
Emergency room visits for bites are the highest in nearly a decade as ticks spread into new parts of the country.
JONATHAN: Thanks to warmer winters, climate change. Ticks are expanding their hunting season. You may have a day that’s like 40 degrees in January, ticks are out looking for you, waiting for you to walk by and grab on and grab a meal.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE NBC 10
A newborn baby is suspected of contracting a rare tick borne virus. It’s called Powassan virus.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE NBC 10
Lyme’s disease has been an ongoing fight on this island. I’ve had it.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE 6 ABC
This morning, a New Jersey man is the first known person to die after a tick bite triggered a severe meat allergy.
JONATHAN: So in 2024 a pilot named Brian Weitzel, father of three in northern New Jersey, he had a hamburger, at a barbecue, went home to mow his lawn, and a few hours later was unresponsive on the floor and he died that night. And his family, you know, was left in shock, of course, you know, trying to figure out why he had died. And it turned out that he had likely been bitten by the lone star tick, and had developed an allergy to red meat. And so this is referred to as Alpha-gal syndrome. And Alpha-gal syndrome is just the latest entrant into the files of all the many ways in which tick bites can make us sick. and the most familiar one, of course, is Lyme disease. Each year about half a million people are treated for Lyme disease. It’s the fastest growing vector-borne disease in the US. cases have more than doubled over the past decade. And those cases are mostly as a result of getting bitten by the black legged tick or the deer tick. And the thing is both of these ticks and many other ticks that are also marching northward and westward and just, you know, expanding their empires rapidly across North America, they can deliver all kinds of pathogens.
SCORING OUT
JONATHAN: They’re claiming more and more of the map and they’re claiming more and more of our psychic map right? It’s like one of the results of reporting this piece is that I now have phantom tick crawling sensations at all hours of the day.
SEAN: Oh, man.
JONATHAN:I tell people I’m not a tick expert, although I talked to a bunch of them for this story, but I’ve become a tick expert in the sense that I am very familiar with tick paranoia and how it can keep you from venturing out into the places you love you know, hiking paths or picnic grounds or parks. And so that was part of the story I wanted to write about, too, is: Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren’t we fighting back?
SEAN: And why is it? Are we not fighting back against the ticks?
JONATHAN: Not really. I mean, this is one of the surprising takeaways from my reporting is that we’re barely even trying. And one way of understanding that, you could think about two numbers. So one number is 90%. 90% of vector-borne disease cases in the US are from ticks, right?
SEAN: 90%?
JONATHAN: Yeah. And yet despite the fact that 90% of cases of vector-borne illness come from tick bites, if you look at what local city, county health agencies do in terms of vector control, 80% of what they do is mosquito control and about 10 or 11% of these local health agencies around the country do any kind of tick control. So why is that? It’s a familiar story in the public health world. It’s not enough funding or policy support for trying out, testing, deploying new approaches to controlling ticks.
SEAN: Even though people are dying?
JONATHAN: We’re just kind of taking for granted that, ‘Oh, well, what can you do? You just tuck your pants in and spray some insecticide on your boots and that’s all you can do.’ It’s like, well, actually we have a long history of going to war
SEAN: Mm!
JONATHAN: Before there was tick control, there was mosquito control. And the CDC was founded with the sole mandate in 1946 of wiping out malaria and fighting mosquitoes.
<CLIP> C-SPAN THE FIGHT AGAINST COMMUNICABLE DISEASES
Scientific information on the subject is discussed and analyzed. Decisions are made and one of these is to design more effective equipment to combat the dreaded mosquito.
SEAN: I did not know that.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I didn’t know it either.
SEAN: It feels like they lost that fight because in my neighborhood …
JONATHAN: Yeah.
SEAN: … you can’t go out between the hours of seven and nine o’clock.
JONATHAN: Yeah. The mosquitoes haven’t gone away, but malaria did for the most part. You know, in talking to experts today, they told me that, including folks at the CDC, there’s a suite of tools we could be using if we wanted to get serious about fighting ticks. As one veteran tick expert at the CDC told me, if you want to make a dent in this problem, you have to get to the deer. So the deer are the engine driving a lot of these tick species spread.
SEAN: Mm.
JONATHAN: And we just have way more deer than we did decades ago, especially in the Eastern US and suburban parts of America. So how do you get to the deer? I had people in the comments section of my piece saying the clear answer is just we should all be hunting deer.
SEAN: Mm-hm.
JONATHAN: But in talking to the experts, they’ll tell you it’s not really a feasible solution. You would have to knock deer populations way down to make a dent in the tick populations. What is more promising is kind of a combined approach of stuff like vaccines. There are people developing vaccines that you could deliver to deer or to rodents, which are another important host for these ticks so that when the tick bites them, they’ll die. That I learned from talking to folks who do this kind of research for a living is a more promising avenue for controlling ticks than all of us picking up crossbows and becoming deer hunters.
SFX
JONATHAN: You know, what I heard from experts is that we’re not even funding this research in a serious way. We do this stuff for mosquitoes. People don’t realize it, but your local county health agency, they go out and they find where the mosquito breeding grounds are and stagnant pools the water and they treat it. And it takes this sustained quiet effort. It’s like we saw the consequences of not doing that recently. This is a bit tangential, but screwworm. You know, screwworm was this flesh eating larval pest that devastates cattle herds. And it was eradicated in the US in 1966 and it was kept at bay by the vigilance of people at USDA and USAID who ran these programs to release millions of sterile screwworm males out of airplanes. And it created this wall that kept it from coming into Southern US and now they’re here.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE CBS LA
But since the beginning of June, at least a dozen animal infections have been confirmed in Texas and New Mexico, putting California and the rest of the nation on alert.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE MS NOW
His Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk decided to cut the funding that was specifically dedicated to monitoring and containing the screw worm in Central America.
JONATHAN: And probably if we stopped doing the mosquito control at a local scale, we’d see more cases of dengue fever, West Nile virus, all these other rare but serious illnesses that climate change is making more of a threat here in the US.
SCORING IN
SEAN: Jonathan Mingle wrote “We’re Living in a Tick Nightmare. It’s Time to Go to War.” for the New York Times.
The guy with the power to go to war is named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And one of the kinda curious things about him is he’s kinda obsessed with Lyme disease.
More on that mmm puzzle? When Today, Explained continues.
[BREAK]
AVISHAY ARTSY (producer): Today, Explained.
MEG TIRRELL: Hi, I’m Meg Tirrell. I am a medical correspondent at CNN.
SEAN: Okay, we just spent half the show talking about Lyme disease and how the government’s not doing enough to combat it, but earlier this year, our Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy the Second…
MEG:
SEAN: …pledged to fight Lyme disease. What is RFK Junior’s relationship to Lyme?
MEG: Oh wow, RFK Jr.’s Lyme story goes way back
SEAN: Woah!
SCORING IN - On a Straight Down Train Car
MEG: Well, I mean, it’s a really RFK Jr-y kind of disease because he’s a falconer. He talks a lot about his work with birds of prey. He goes into the woods a lot, he posts lots of photos of himself in nature. And when you start to pay attention to RFK Jr. And Lyme disease, which I have been doing, he starts to tell the same story a few times.
SEAN: Huh.
MEG: It involves him in a bathtub in the 1980s…
<CLIP> INSTAGRAM – SECRETARY ROBERT F KENNEDY: I remember one day in 1987 when I stood in my bathtub and picked 29 ticks off myself.
MEG: He says he did at one point get Lyme disease. He got the classic bullseye rash on his forearm. He says he took antibiotics and it was cured, but he also describes most of his children have had Lyme disease, some with pretty severe effects of Lyme disease. So he’s very focused on it. It also ticks like some other RFK Junior boxes where there is this community of people who feels like they’ve been neglected and ignored and in his words gaslit, particularly by the federal government. and those are people who have like chronic Lyme disease or long Lyme disease. So this is Lyme disease that hasn’t been cured by antibiotics. And that people have been living with these symptoms for a really long period of time. And so he’s trying to address that population of people. He had a round table discussion with a lot of those patients, patient advocates, as well as doctors and people who are trying to work on this space.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE – SECRETARY ROBERT F KENNEDY: It is an invisible illness. For many years, this agency had a deliberate policy to refuse to engage with the Lyme community.
MEG: And so he’s really speaking to that group of people, but at the same time, Lyme disease is a growing problem …
SEAN: Right!
MEG: … for anybody who lives in a tick-infested area, which is so many of us.
SCORING OUT
SEAN: So it sounds like people who have Lyme disease have an ally …
MEG: Mm-hm.
SEAN: … in the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And of course RFK Jr. Is known to spin up conspiracy theories, pedal falsehoods …
<CLIP> NYPOST
SECRETARY ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: COVID-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and Black people
<CLIP> YOUTUBE JOE ROGAN PODCAST
SECRETARY ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: Wi-Fi radiation opens up your blood brain barrier and so all these toxics that are in your body can now go into your brain.
SEAN: … not a fan of vaccines. Does any of that get into the Lyme disease mix?
MEG: Well, I mean, so he convened this round table and it had doctors, it had lawmakers. And so you had these folks speaking around the table about different things that you could do.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE: The Lyme Clinical Trials Network is designed to build evidence for repurposing medicines and other treatments so we can improve the lives of people suffering now
MEG: And one of the things that RFK Jr.’s really focused on is improving diagnostics and improving treatment.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE: There’s investments we’ve made in identifying new antibiotics that potentially could have a longer, better effects, as well as potentially protective monoclonal antibodies that can be used as a treatment strategy
MEG: What you don’t hear him talk about is a vaccine for Lyme disease. And he talks about things like we’ve got to make it safer for kids to go back in the woods. Vaccine could be one way of doing that. And we actually have a vaccine now that is approaching the regulatory approval process from Pfizer. They reported phase three results. They said they were going to take this to regulatory agencies. And so that was earlier this year. I became interested in, okay, well, RFK Jr. Is a big proponent of solutions for Lyme disease. Is he going to be supportive of this vaccine? Will this be the vaccine that RFK Jr. Sort of wins him over?
SEAN: Tell us a bit more about the history of Lyme disease vaccines because they’ve been trying for some time to my recollection.
MEG: So there actually was an approved Lyme disease vaccine. It was called Lymerix. It was brought to market by GSK, the huge British drug maker. This was about 25-ish years ago. And it worked. It was something like 70 or 80% effective at reducing your risk of getting Lyme disease. But it had kind of this tepid endorsement from the federal vaccine agencies. So the FDA kind of gave it a… It wasn’t like the most extreme endorsement, I guess you could say, the way people described it to me. They noted it was just for specific age groups. And then the CDC’s group of vaccine advisors, they essentially recommended it for people who might have exposure to ticks. You might consider this. So it wasn’t like a strong endorsement that everybody should get this vaccine. And so what we saw was that when it hit the market, the sales were really tepid.
And then some people thought that the vaccine was actually giving them arthritis.
SEAN: Ohh.
MEG: And so this is the kind of thing you’re trying to prevent you from getting Lyme disease. You’re trying to prevent getting arthritis. The FDA looked into this extensively. Researchers looked at this. The signal did not play out from the conversations I’ve had with experts about it, but there were lawsuits that were filed. Ultimately GSK just decided to pull the vaccine off the market.
SEAN: Huh.
MEG: So now you have like 20 years later, Pfizer coming back with this vaccine. So this is approaching regulatory agencies. We might get this Lyme disease vaccine and have to see how RFK Jr’s HHS would receive that.
SEAN: What’s the vibe from HHS and RFK Jr? I mean, he cares about Lyme disease. He thinks there’s this forgotten population of people with chronic Lyme disease. He’s in charge. He’s got an incredible amount of power to do something about it. And here’s this vaccine that could be the easy solution. Is it like a match made in tick heaven?
MEG: Well, tick hell.
SEAN: Tick Hell.
MEG: Preventing the ticks from being able to give us Lyme disease. Although I don’t think they care if they give us Lyme disease, they just want to drink our blood. But you know, Kennedy was asked during his confirmation hearing by Susan Collins, because Maine of course is very hard hit by Lyme disease, whether he would support a Lyme disease vaccine. And he told her, quote:
<CLIP> YOUTUBE PBS NEWS HOUR – SECRETARY ROBERT KENNEDY: There’s nobody who will fight harder to find a vaccine or a treatment for Lyme disease than me.
MEG: Now I reached back out to HHS when I wrote this story back in March about Pfizer’s Lyme vaccine application. And a spokesperson for HHS told me HHS supports rigorous gold standard science to better understand, prevent, and treat Lyme disease. So I wrote back, “Does that include a vaccine?” And they just didn’t respond.
SEAN: Why? Why are they being cagey about this vaccine? It feels like a golden opportunity for them.
MEG: You would think, and it’s interesting. I’ve reached out to other folks who are sort of in this realm and most of them are very supportive of a vaccine. It’s something that they would like to have as part of the toolkit. I will say there is one population that is skeptical of a vaccine and that is certain folks who have this chronic Lyme who live with long Lyme disease, they feel like they were burned by the first vaccine. They still believe that there were safety problems with that vaccine, at least some portion of this group who I spoke with. And so they’re nervous about it, but other people really want a vaccine.
SEAN: Where does it leave us ultimately, you think? Is this a time to feel hopeful that there are solutions that are, solutions incoming here as these ticks become more and more just like a concern every summer across this country? Or is it a time to feel ultimately fearful?
MEG: Well, I mean, it definitely feels like we’re in a time with this, like, massive upsurge in ticks. They’re all around, they’re spreading new, newly discovered pathogens. So it definitely doesn’t feel like we’re on the downtrend of that by any means. And the government has put out a plan to try to at least address Lyme disease and to an extent alpha gal, but it’s not perceived from people I’ve spoken with to be enough. It’s not a moonshot by any means to address these kinds of things.
SEAN: What’s the plan?
MEG: Yeah. So this came out in May. They call it a sweeping plan to combat Lyme disease and advanced treatment. So you might expect huge amounts of money being poured into this big research consortiums working with the industry. The details are less sort of powerful than that from what we see in the release that HHS put out. They say the actions include a multimillion dollar pilot program focused on tick control up to two and a half million dollars in innovation challenges, funding for NIH researchers to combat alpha gal syndrome and a public-private collaboration to help patients connect with experienced providers.
SEAN: Huh.
MEG: So I think people are glad that there is focus on this, but yeah, whether it’s the moonshot that is needed especially…
SEAN: Mm.
MEG: …with the backdrop of broader cuts to science funding. I think experts in this space think it leaves something to be desired.
SCORING IN - Hot Plate
SEAN: Bummer! But in the meantime, what do you do if you’re going camping this weekend? Jonathan?
JONATHAN: Doing tick checks. And we do it in my household pretty much daily when you come home, do a thorough tick check, throw your clothes in the dryer. Ticks hate heat. And some people like to use permethrin, spray this insecticide that’s designed to kill ticks on your boots or your pants when you go out for a hike. So there are things that, I mean, for decades, researchers have known these things are really effective if you keep doing them, if you stay vigilant. Right? And all it takes is that one time, that one time you go out for a hike and you come back and you forget to do the tick check. So we need those kinds of personal measures of vigilance and protection, but we still need to kind of push for a bigger public health response to this….
SCORING BUMP
JONATHAN: Because the ticks are going to keep, they’re going to keep spreading into the calendar too in the sense that as winters get warmer, more and more days of the year when you’re outdoors, you’re going to encounter ticks who are hungry and they’re looking for you.
SCORING BUMP
SEAN: Thanks, Jonathan! And thanks Meg! And thanks Danielle Hewitt, for producing the show today. Amina Al-Sadi for editing. Gabriel Dunatov for fact checking. And Patrick Boyd for flying solo.
Be careful out there, friends!**
Ticks are a growing problem, no matter where you live
Duration: 00:13:14
Released: 2026
Series: Short Wave
In the grand scheme of things, Lyme disease is a fairly new scientific discovery. It was first traced back to ticks in the late 70s and early 80s. The tick-borne illness can cause a rash, fever, pain, neurological complications, and even facial paralysis. It’s spread by only two of the nearly 50 species of ticks in the United States. Historically, most Lyme cases were limited to a small region, including the Great Lakes area and northeastern US. But thanks to changing temperatures, animal migration and shifts in land use, scientists say tick territory is expanding. So what does that mean for Lyme disease risk? And do you have to be worried about it in your own backyard?Interested in more episodes about pests and parasites? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. It includes perks like bonus episodes, early access, archive access, curated playlists and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.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
Should we reengineer the world’s deadliest animal?
Duration: 00:11:59
Released: 2026
Series: Short Wave
The most ferocious predator for us humans is actually quite small: the mosquito. They are hungry for blood, spreading diseases like malaria, yellow fever and dengue – and picking up new ones all the time. But what if we could wipe out the mosquito? Gene-editing technology could do it, potentially saving millions of lives. But it comes with serious potential for risk. Which begs the question: Should we get to decide when humanity rewrites nature? Here to discuss that is Ben Bradford, the host of a new podcast distributed by the NPR Network: Are We Doomed?Interested in more science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.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
SPEAKER: You’re listening to Short Wave from NPR.
EMILY KWONG: The most ferocious predator for us humans is actually quite small.
[BUZZING]
KWONG: It’s the mosquito. They are hungry for blood and spreading diseases all the time, including serious ones, like malaria, yellow fever, and dengue. But what if we could wipe out the mosquito, We have the technology to do it. But should we? Here to discuss that is Ben Bradford, the host of a new podcast distributed by the NPR Network. It’s called Are We Doomed?
BEN BRADFORD: It is. Hi, Emily.
KWONG: So, Ben, your podcast Are We Doomed? covers a lot, from killer AI to nuclear weapons and, of course, the bloodthirsty micropredators I want to talk about today. How do you feel about mosquitoes, by the way?
BRADFORD: I think they’re gross, and I think they’re rude. And you mentioned, Emily, new gene-editing techniques could allow us to eradicate our little insect nemesis, potentially saving millions of lives.
KWONG: Yes. I learned that from you, from your show.
BRADFORD: Yeah, thank you.
KWONG: The tech is here.
BRADFORD: Yeah. Thank you. And it would be amazing. But also, in that technology is something inherently more dangerous. I talked to Kevin Esvelt, who is a biologist now at the MIT Media Lab.
KEVIN ESVELT: And if you can engineer a mosquito so it can’t spread disease, you could engineer a mosquito so it always spreads disease.
[CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC]
KWONG: Today on the show, the technology that allows us to kill the mosquito comes with all kinds of complications.
BRADFORD: So what does it mean to try to change an entire species? Who gets to decide? What might the ripple effects be? How do you test it? How do you protect it?
KWONG: Easy questions, you know. You’re listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
[CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC]
KWONG: OK, Short Wavers. I’m here with Ben Bradford, who’s just done all this reporting on have to save millions of people from malaria by wiping out the mosquito. Ben, how does that even work?
BRADFORD: Yeah. So let’s go back to early last decade. Scientists developed a new form of gene editing, which you may know as CRISPR. It’s this way of scalpelling out a tiny strand of DNA. And you kind of like suture in a new trait. It doesn’t quite look like that, but that’s essentially what’s happening. And so with CRISPR, you can cure a genetic disease or engineer a cow to grow without horns, both things that they have done in labs.
KWONG: Wow.
BRADFORD: But Kevin Esvelt, this biologist now at the MIT Media Lab, had his own realization.
ESVELT: Turns out, it doesn’t just let you engineer organisms in the lab. It lets you let them go, and the engineered trait will spread to most of the ones in the wild. That’s incredibly exciting.
BRADFORD: Kevin is the person who figured out you could CRISPR a creature, do this little DNA surgery, so it always passes along the gene that you put into it. And so with CRISPR, the idea is you can create a mosquito that, for instance, always has males, and then its offspring will always have males. And so you put it into an area, and it extinguishes all these species carrying malaria in that area.
KWONG: Because there aren’t females to mate with.
BRADFORD: Yeah. And so to do this, you, of course, have to engineer a mosquito from hell. In the show, we called him Jerry.
JERRY: Hi.
[MACHINERY WHIRRING]
[SPLAT]
BRADFORD: To clarify, Jerry’s mission is actually not to murder all mosquitoes, because they’re just trying to target in an area with malaria. And that’s because mosquitoes are ecologically important.
KWONG: They are important to the environment. It’s true.
BRADFORD: I didn’t know that, but they are. And it was disappointing. They’re pollinators and birds–
KWONG: Wow.
BRADFORD: –and spiders, yeah, all kinds of critters eat them.
KWONG: Yeah. It would be reckless to wipe out mosquitoes entirely. But when it comes to Jerry, the mosquito from hell, he’s just meant to wipe out the mosquitoes that carry malaria in a certain region. But then the question becomes, how do you do that without affecting birds and spiders?
BRADFORD: So the idea is to offer birds and spiders a different kind of mosquito to snack on, one that doesn’t transmit malaria, because there’s a whole bunch of different types of mosquito species. And even better or worse, Kevin says, we don’t need to take out the malaria-carrying mosquitoes forever, even.
KWONG: Right. You say in the show, they just need to, quote, \“go on a sabbatical.\”
BRADFORD: Yeah. That’s right. We just need them to, like, disappear for a little while.
ESVELT: Malaria transmission requires humans, and it requires mosquitoes. So this is a back-and-forth transmission chain.
BRADFORD: So if the mosquitoes go on sabbatical for long enough, for the malaria to die out in the humans that the mosquitoes pick up the malaria from and transmit it between, then when the mosquitoes come back, the malaria is gone, and there’s just nothing for them to transmit.
KWONG: This plan is bold. It’s like, use CRISPR, make mosquito. Mosquito Jerry, though, only makes sons. And then the malaria mosquitoes will be wiped out, but not for too long, because that would be bad.
BRADFORD: Just enough.
KWONG: Just a sabbatical.
BRADFORD: Yeah. And so it turns out that there’s a whole bunch of steps that you kind of have to follow if you’re going to do this in a way where you, one, test that the thing actually is going to work, and two, test that it’s not going to work too well and go around the world and create a whole bunch of problems.
KWONG: So how do you even go about testing this?
BRADFORD: Well, you need an area where you’re going to put out your mosquitoes into the wild, kind of a cordoned-off area where they’re going to be on their own. And basically, what we’re describing is a mosquito Jurassic Park. And then that leads to other questions, which is, how do you stop what happens in every Jurassic Park movie?
KWONG: Uh, the dinosaurs get out.
BRADFORD: And so, of course, this is the challenge. And we know what we’re trying to avoid, because we’ve seen it in history.
KWONG: Let’s listen to a section of the episode that talks about how this can all go wrong.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
BRADFORD: Take a tangent with me to the shores of Australia and New Zealand in the late 1800s. European ships landed, bringing sailors and soldiers and felons and rabbits. Europeans brought rabbits over for food and hunting, snacks and sport. Of course, the rabbits quickly escaped and bred all over both islands and became a scourge on an environment totally unprepared for them. They eat everything. New Zealanders looked to fight back. They brought over ferrets and weasels to sic on the rabbits. And when that failed, ferrets and weasels became more invasive species. Skip to the 1990s. Neighboring Australia, largely by accident, unleashed an only partially tested biological weapon against its rabbits.
SPEAKER: This nasty virus that wiped out, like, 2/3 of all rabbits or more.
BRADFORD: New Zealand had been considering using this virus as well, but it wanted more testing first.
SPEAKER 1: New Zealand government said, we’re not sure of safety and so forth. So for now, you’re forbidden to import this virus into New Zealand.
BRADFORD: So what do you think happened at this point? New Zealand farmers, losing millions of dollars as rabbits destroyed their crops, began taking little vacations to Australia to go hunting for infected rabbits.
SPEAKER 1: And they smuggled in diced up, infected rabbit parts from Australia illegally.
BRADFORD: They liquefied the body parts into virus-laden smoothies, which they spread on their fields. Bam. New Zealand had the rabbit virus.
SPEAKER 1: And what’s the government going to do?
SPEAKER 2: When it’s out, it’s out.
BRADFORD: This is Kevin’s fear. If we do create a mosquito Jurassic Park to test Jerry, which we have to do to make sure he works and doesn’t cause a ripple effect of unknown ecological destruction, Kevin says some New Zealand farmers are going to steal one of our mosquitoes.
ESVELT: Of course someone would do that, and they would tell themselves a perfect story in which they’re the hero, right?
BRADFORD: If Jerry gets out, we don’t know what harm he would cause because we haven’t field tested. Consider the possibilities. Jerry and his descendants could travel around the world. These mosquitoes would spawn only males wherever they go, leading to globally extinguishing all of his species. Worse, what if it turns out Jerry can mate with another type of mosquito and he passes along his all-boys gene to one of them? What if that one can mate with another species, and so on? Maybe that gene travels throughout all types of mosquito and does eradicate them entirely. What if birds and spiders and flowers can’t adapt to that loss, and it creates a domino effect of environmental destruction? Then we’ve got a problem.
[RELAXING MUSIC]
[END PLAYBACK]
KWONG: This approach, you know, clearly comes with so many unintended consequences. You say on the show, the point is to insert a trait that spreads like wildfire, and wildfire is hard to stop.
BRADFORD: Yeah. And so that is the main argument against doing this thing, this technology, which is basically called an engineered gene drive. And so there are people who think we should, you know, pack this up, seal it away, never do it.
KWONG: And a gene drive in nature is when, like, a trait kind of naturally evolves to get passed on.
BRADFORD: It gets really good at being passed through its offspring.
KWONG: But here, humans are interfering to make that happen.
BRADFORD: Here, we’re making it happen. Yeah. That’s sort of the debate. But, of course, the stakes are, do you get rid of malaria? Do you get rid of dengue fever? And so when I talked to Kevin, the person who kind of figured out, hey, we could do this, his biggest concern is that an accidental, untested release of, let’s say, Jerry, poisons the whole discourse around this and any attempt to do it.
ESVELT: We know what happens when there’s a backlash to technology. We’re seeing it right now for vaccines and other things. And we saw it even in biomedicine with something like gene therapy, where a single death in a poorly planned clinical trial that led to tragedy set back the entire field by more than a decade. More than a decade is more than 5 million dead children.
KWONG: That’s a lot of pressure. Because, you know, mosquito-borne diseases cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year. But on the other hand, you don’t want to roll out a gene drive project too quickly because something could go terribly wrong.
BRADFORD: And you can hear, in our episode, that pressure that Kevin feels because of that. And so it does. It creates all of these hurdles, all of these kind of like little puzzles that you need to solve to be able to do that. You know, we need to test our mosquitoes, like Jerry, to make sure he doesn’t cause unintended consequences. You have to do this sort of like field test your Jurassic Park. But how do you do the Jurassic Park without risking those consequences, where someone’s going to steal him or he’s going to get out? I mean, they fly, for God’s sakes. So, like, what are you going to do?
KWONG: It is such a puzzle. And in your episode, you talk about some ways to work the puzzle, to actually, like, take what’s theoretical and make it happen in the real world.
BRADFORD: These guys are so smart. They’re so smart.
KWONG: What is your takeaway from all this when it comes to the ethics of a gene drive for mosquitoes, but really, also for any species?
BRADFORD: Yeah. I think that the possibilities here are really exciting. I mean, malaria is terrible. And the mosquito has killed more people than any other creature on the Earth. And so you start thinking about how we can solve that for our species. That’s amazing. But, you know, I will say, you know someone else on our team, our animator, who was watching this episode and doing our animation for it– and he heard it and was like, this is insane. We should never do this.
KWONG: Mm. Ben Bradford, your podcast Are We Doomed? is out now. Thank you so much for coming into Short Wave.
BRADFORD: Thank you for having me.
KWONG: Check out the show. It’s really good. You can find it all the places you typically get your podcasts. And also, if you haven’t already, download the NPR app. My bosses really want you to do it, and you will honestly get great journalism from it. Thank you. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer. I’m Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.
A New Test for Lyme Disease, Developed by High Schoolers
Duration: 00:11:50
Released: 2026
Series: Public Health On Call
About this episode: A group of students from suburban Atlanta has developed a new method for detecting Lyme disease using the gene-editing tool CRISPR. In this episode: why there’s such a desperate need for a new diagnostic, how the students’ model works, and why it’s so promising for the treatment of Lyme and other diseases. Guest: Nicole Baumgarth, PhD, DVM, is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and the director of the Lyme and Tickborne Disease Research and Education Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Sankalp Yeleti is a recent graduate of Lambert High School and a rising freshman at New York University, where he plans to study biomolecular science. 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: Teens may have come up with a new way to detect, treat Lyme disease using CRISPR gene editing—CBS News Lancet—Lambert iGEM 2025 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.
Optional Material (Dive Deeper)
Podcasts
A new approach to fighting malaria
Duration: 00:25:28
Released: 2019
Series: Better Off
Each year, more than 200 million people around the world are infected with malaria and more than 400,000 die. For the past two decades, the most successful method of malaria prevention has involved treating bed nets with long-lasting insecticides that kill mosquitoes. But that progress is being threatened as mosquitoes increasingly grow resistant to the most commonly used insecticides. Now, new Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health research offers a potential fresh approach to fighting malaria: directly target the parasite responsible for the disease. A recent study showed that mosquitoes that landed on surfaces coated with the antimalarial compound atovaquone were completely blocked from developing Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria. The study was led by Flaminia Catteruccia, professor of immunology and infectious diseases and Doug Paton , a research fellow at the Harvard Chan School. In this week’s episode we sit down with Paton to discuss the findings—and how they could be used to make progress in the fight against malaria. Full Transcript: hsph.me/malaria-pod
A New Test for Lyme Disease, Developed by High Schoolers
Duration: 00:11:50
Released: 2026
Series: Public Health On Call
About this episode: A group of students from suburban Atlanta has developed a new method for detecting Lyme disease using the gene-editing tool CRISPR. In this episode: why there’s such a desperate need for a new diagnostic, how the students’ model works, and why it’s so promising for the treatment of Lyme and other diseases. Guest: Nicole Baumgarth, PhD, DVM, is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and the director of the Lyme and Tickborne Disease Research and Education Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Sankalp Yeleti is a recent graduate of Lambert High School and a rising freshman at New York University, where he plans to study biomolecular science. 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: Teens may have come up with a new way to detect, treat Lyme disease using CRISPR gene editing—CBS News Lancet—Lambert iGEM 2025 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.
Acaropathology (TICKS + LYME DISEASE) Updated Mega Encore with Neeta Pardanani Connally & Andrea Swei
Acaropathology (TICKS & LYME DISEASE) Updated Mega Encore with Neeta Pardanani Connally & Andrea Swei
Duration: 02:32:48
Released: 2023
Series: Ologies with Alie Ward
It’s 2-for-1! Ticks AND Lyme: together in one helpful, disgusting, gossipy, empowering episode. This pair of episodes is about tiny, thirsty ticks and the diseases they spit into you is wall to wall wisdom from Dr. Neeta Pardanani Connally of the West Connecticut State University Tick Lab and Dr. Andrea Swei of SFSU’s Swei Lab cover how to remove a tick, if you should spray your yard and with what, how landscaping affects tick exposure, why Lyme Disease is spreading, the Lone Star Tick rolling into town, how to protect your pets and why the CC ruined poppyseed muffins. Also: Powassan virus, meat allergies, paralysis ticks, and twin princesses Borrelia and Babesia. Dr. Neeta Pardanani Connally and Dr. Andrea Swei will charm their way into your heart like a hypostome under your skin.Dr. Neeta Pardanani Connally’s videos, website, Twitter and InstagramFollow Dr. Andrea Swei and her lab SweiLab on TwitterDonations were made to TickEncounter, Union of Concerned Scientists, and 826 ValenciaMore episode sources and linksOther episodes you may enjoy: Opossumology (O/POSSUMS), Scorpiology (SCORPIONS), Epidemiology (DISEASES), Cervidology (DEER), Forest Entomology (CREEPY CRAWLIES), Planariology (VERY COOL WORMS, I PROMISE, Dipterology (FLIES), Kinetic Salticidology (DANCING SPIDERS), Diplopodology (MILLIPEDES & CENTIPEDES), Myrmecology (ANTS), Sparklebuttology (FIREFLIES), Spheksology (WASPS), Lepidopterology (BUTTERFLIES), Melittology (BEES), Entomology (INSECTS), Urban Rodentology (SEWER RATS)Sponsors 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 InstagramEditing by Steven Ray Morris, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions, and 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.
An Early Start to West Nile Virus Season?
Duration: 00:15:37
Released: 2026
Series: Public Health On Call
About this episode: West Nile virus is the most common mosquito-borne illness in the U.S., and while most people who contract it won’t even know they’re infected, it can be debilitating for older adults and the immunocompromised. In this episode: an expert in insect-borne diseases gives listeners the essential information on West Nile, offers a forecast on this year’s disease season, and answers the most important question: can we just get rid of mosquitoes? Guest: Douglas Norris, PhD, is a professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology who studies vector-borne diseases. 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: CDC Encourages Americans to Stay Mosquito Bite-Free during America’s 250th Independence Day holiday weekend—CDC Early, intense West Nile season may signal a severe year for the mosquito-borne illness, CDC says—CNN How to Prevent Dengue or “Break-Bone Fever”—Public Health On Call (May 2024) Why Are Some Humans’ Scents More Preferable to Mosquitoes?—Public Health On Call (June 2023) 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 Rats Running This Podcast?
Duration: 00:14:05
Released: 2023
Series: Short Wave
This week, New York City crowned Kathleen Corradi its first rat czar. The new position is part of a multipronged approach from city officials. Reporter and New Yorker Anil Oza called up rodentologists to understand — does their approach withstand the test of scientific research? We love hearing your musings and questions about the science in your everyday life. Reach us by emailing shortwave@npr.org.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
CRISPR Mosquitoes
Duration: 00:54:21
Released: 2026
Series: Big Picture Science
The powerful gene editing tool CRISPR is already being tested on animal and plant cells. It has even been used on humans. How might this revolutionary tool change our lives? On the one hand, it could cure inherited diseases and rid the world of malaria-spreading mosquitoes. On the other hand, scientists using it are accelerating evolution and introducing novel genetic combinations that could transform our biological landscape in unforeseen ways. We explore the ramifications of this revolutionary technology. Guests: Nathan Rose – Molecular biologist and head of malaria programs at U.K. based biotech company, Oxitec. Hank Greely – Law professor and director of the Center for Law in the Biosciences at Stanford University and author of “CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.” Antonio Regalado – Senior Editor for Biomedicine, MIT Technology Review. originally posted April 17, 2023 Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Disease Ecology (LYME + TICK-BORNE ILLNESSES) with Andrea Swei
Disease Ecology (LYME/TICK-BORNE ILLNESSES) with Andrea Swei
Duration: 01:12:54
Released: 2019
Series: Ologies with Alie Ward
Lyme Disease! Powassan virus! That Lonestar tick meat allergy! Paralysis ticks! Acarology taught us all about the eight-legged villains that aim for our crevices, but Disease Ecologist Dr. Andrea Swei offers a deep dive under the skin to learn more about what nasties a tick can give us. We chat a whole bunch about Lyme Disease: its prevalence, testing, treatment, which animals carry it, “chronic Lyme” vs. post-treatment Lyme. We also cover how lizards might harbor a helpful protein, two Ukrainian princesses by the names of Borrelia and Babesia, why you’ll want chickens and possums hanging out at your barbecues, Lyme vaccines, pet care, symptoms, prevention and what scares her most. This one’s a wonderful episode on its own, but is even better as a follow up to Acarology: the nightmare lesson of how ticks work. Listen to the Acarology (TICKS) episode: alieward.com/ologies/acarologyFollow Dr. Swei on Twitter @Andeswei or @SweiLab Donations went to: Union of Concerned Scientists, and 826 ValenciaSponsor links: “You” podcast by Okta; Kiwico.com/Ologies; HelixSleep.com/Ologies; thegreatcoursesplus.com/ologiesMore links at alieward.com/ologies/diseaseecologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologiesFollow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWardSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Does It Feel Like Mosquitoes Are Getting Worse?
Duration: 00:13:19
Released: 2025
Series: Short Wave
Mosquitoes are the deadliest animal on the planet, and some of them may be on the rise. At least in listener Abigail Krich-Starr’s area, that’s due to warmer, wetter weather — which, yes, is linked to climate change. But it doesn’t stop there: Ecologists and entomologists say increased heat could also alter mosquito behavior, shift their natural habitat, and even change how pathogens incubate and spread inside their bodies.So how do you protect yourself against the (mosquito) masses? Our experts suggested several things:- Assess your risk by checking local mosquito surveillance efforts, like this one for the state of Massachusetts- Consider rescheduling outdoor events happening between dusk and dawn, which is peak biting time for multiple mosquito species- Wear long-sleeved shirts and pants, weather-permitting, to limit exposed skin- Use an EPA-approved DEET repellent, and/or a permethrin spray for clothing and outdoor gearThis episode is part of Nature Quest, a monthly Short Wave segment that answers listener questions about the local environment.Got a question about changes in your local environment? Send a voice memo to shortwave@npr.org with your name, where you live and your question. We might make it into our next Nature Quest episode! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.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
Hantavirus - the risks, the science and what you need to know
Duration: 00:12:57
Released: 2026
Series: Short Wave
On May 2, the World Health Organization got an alarming report: People aboard a ship in the Atlantic Ocean were falling ill. The culprit is now confirmed as hantavirus, a pathogen that some rodents carry that can infect humans in rare, but often deadly, instances. Multiple passengers have died, and more people are showing symptoms. So, we’re talking to Emily Abdoler, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Michigan, about the news – how common is hantavirus in humans, what are the consequences of getting it, and how can at-risk people protect themselves from it? If you found this episode interesting, listen to our episode on Rocky Mountain spotted fever.Interested in more science in the news? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.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
How Do You Kill a Mosquito?
Duration: 00:36:25
Released: 2026
Series: Are We Doomed?
Mosquitoes are little jerks. They suck your blood to make more mosquitoes, spread deadly diseases like malaria and dengue, and have killed more humans than any other creature in the history of Earth. But now, we can fight back. Gene-editing technology (CRISPR, gene drives) could temporarily wipe out disease-carrying mosquitoes in whole regions — potentially saving millions of lives. A miracle, but with an unsettling question of its own: Who gets to decide when humanity rewrites nature?Also: radiation-blasted flies, Australian rabbit smoothies, and … Mosquito Jurassic Park.Support Are We Doomed?, get bonus episodes, and more: https://doompod.com/support/ To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: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
Inside The Race To Save Honeybees From Parasitic Mites
Duration: 00:18:09
Released: 2024
Series: Science Friday
Last year, almost half of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. died, making it the second deadliest year for honeybees on record. The main culprit wasn’t climate change, starvation, or even pesticides, but a parasite: Varroa destructor.“The name for this parasite is a very Transformer-y sounding name, but … these Varroa destructor mites have earned this name. It’s not melodramatic by any means. [They are] incredibly destructive organisms,” says Dr. Sammy Ramsey, entomologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.These tiny mites feed on the bees and make them susceptible to other threats like diseases and pesticides. They’re also highly contagious: They arrived in the US in 1987, and now they live in almost every honeybee colony in the country. Honeybees pollinate many important crops, like apples, peaches, and berries, and their pollinator services add up to billions of dollars.Ramsey and his lab are trying to put an end to the varroa mites’ spree. Part of their research includes spying on baby bees and their accompanying mites to learn how the parasites feed on the bees and whether there’s a way to disrupt that process.In Boulder, Colorado, SciFri producer Rasha Aridi speaks with Dr. Ramsey and fellow entomologist Dr. Madison Sankovitz about how the varroa mites terrorize bees so effectively, and what it would take to get ahead of them.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Oropouche Virus - More than a smidge worrisome
Duration: 01:12:38
Released: 2026
Series: This Podcast Will Kill You
Though discovered relatively recently, Oropouche virus has been making headlines as an emerging vector-borne infectious disease on the rise. Not transmitted by the usual suspects (like ticks and mosquitoes), this virus is instead spread through the bites of midges or no-see-ums. Since these arthropods are already widely distributed and their range is growing thanks to climate change, this is a recipe for potential disaster. In this episode, we take you through the story of Oropouche virus, from how it makes us sick to what the construction of a highway has to do with its discovery, from surprising prevalence statistics to the history of One Health. Tune in for the full scoop on this midge and the virus it carries. Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Our tick nightmare
Duration: 00:28:42
Released: 2026
Series: Today, Explained
Ticks are exponentially expanding their territory, using us for their next blood meal. We must fight back. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. The common wood tick, which can transmit Borrelia and TBE viruses to humans and animals. Photo by Patrick Pleul/dpa/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
**SEAN RAMESWARAM (host): Every summer we accept that we’re gonna get bit by mosquitoes.
SEAN: We bleed. We scratch. We kill. We complain. But in the end, we laugh it off and we head towards winter.
SEAN: But ticks are a much more serious concern.
SCORING IN – IMPENDING GLOOM - BMC (lol)
SEAN: Lemme just remind you how many tick-bourne diseases there are?
Lyme, you know. Shoutouts Connecticut. Then there’s Alpha-gal syndrome, which can make you allergic to red meat for the rest of your life. Also dairy.
But there’s so much more! Should we go alphabetical? And I apologies in advance for my pronunciation here:
SEAN: Anaplasmosis, Babesiosis, Bourbon virus, Colorado tick fever, Ehrlichiosis, hard tick relapsing fever, Heartland virus, Powassan virus, Rickettsia parkeri rickettsiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Soft tick relapsing fever, STARI, Tularemia, 364D rickettsiosis.
SEAN: Symptoms of all these range from nausea, vomiting and bleeding to seizures, organ failure, facial paralysis, and of course, our old friend, death.
And for those of you who are like NBD – that’s just a Northeast thing. Well, not anymore!
Our national tick nightmare, on Today, Explained from Vox.
[THEME]
SEAN: Sean Rameswaram. Today, Explained covered ticks and Lyme disease on the show way back in 2018 when the word on the trail was this was getting much worse. We asked science writer Jonathan Mingle, who recently wrote about ticks for the New York Times newspaper, how much worse this has gotten since then.
JONATHAN MINGLE (science journalist): You know some experts I talk to use the word exponential.
SCORING IN - Discretion
JONATHAN: So what’s happening is that some of these tick species are spreading into areas where people aren’t familiar with them, doctors aren’t familiar with them.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE CBS BOSTON
In the last 15 years, the Lonestar tick has gone from non-existent on the island to fully abundant and everywhere.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE NBC NEWS
The tick is present in at least 21 states and is rapidly spreading across the eastern US.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE CBS MORNINGS
Emergency room visits for bites are the highest in nearly a decade as ticks spread into new parts of the country.
JONATHAN: Thanks to warmer winters, climate change. Ticks are expanding their hunting season. You may have a day that’s like 40 degrees in January, ticks are out looking for you, waiting for you to walk by and grab on and grab a meal.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE NBC 10
A newborn baby is suspected of contracting a rare tick borne virus. It’s called Powassan virus.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE NBC 10
Lyme’s disease has been an ongoing fight on this island. I’ve had it.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE 6 ABC
This morning, a New Jersey man is the first known person to die after a tick bite triggered a severe meat allergy.
JONATHAN: So in 2024 a pilot named Brian Weitzel, father of three in northern New Jersey, he had a hamburger, at a barbecue, went home to mow his lawn, and a few hours later was unresponsive on the floor and he died that night. And his family, you know, was left in shock, of course, you know, trying to figure out why he had died. And it turned out that he had likely been bitten by the lone star tick, and had developed an allergy to red meat. And so this is referred to as Alpha-gal syndrome. And Alpha-gal syndrome is just the latest entrant into the files of all the many ways in which tick bites can make us sick. and the most familiar one, of course, is Lyme disease. Each year about half a million people are treated for Lyme disease. It’s the fastest growing vector-borne disease in the US. cases have more than doubled over the past decade. And those cases are mostly as a result of getting bitten by the black legged tick or the deer tick. And the thing is both of these ticks and many other ticks that are also marching northward and westward and just, you know, expanding their empires rapidly across North America, they can deliver all kinds of pathogens.
SCORING OUT
JONATHAN: They’re claiming more and more of the map and they’re claiming more and more of our psychic map right? It’s like one of the results of reporting this piece is that I now have phantom tick crawling sensations at all hours of the day.
SEAN: Oh, man.
JONATHAN:I tell people I’m not a tick expert, although I talked to a bunch of them for this story, but I’ve become a tick expert in the sense that I am very familiar with tick paranoia and how it can keep you from venturing out into the places you love you know, hiking paths or picnic grounds or parks. And so that was part of the story I wanted to write about, too, is: Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren’t we fighting back?
SEAN: And why is it? Are we not fighting back against the ticks?
JONATHAN: Not really. I mean, this is one of the surprising takeaways from my reporting is that we’re barely even trying. And one way of understanding that, you could think about two numbers. So one number is 90%. 90% of vector-borne disease cases in the US are from ticks, right?
SEAN: 90%?
JONATHAN: Yeah. And yet despite the fact that 90% of cases of vector-borne illness come from tick bites, if you look at what local city, county health agencies do in terms of vector control, 80% of what they do is mosquito control and about 10 or 11% of these local health agencies around the country do any kind of tick control. So why is that? It’s a familiar story in the public health world. It’s not enough funding or policy support for trying out, testing, deploying new approaches to controlling ticks.
SEAN: Even though people are dying?
JONATHAN: We’re just kind of taking for granted that, ‘Oh, well, what can you do? You just tuck your pants in and spray some insecticide on your boots and that’s all you can do.’ It’s like, well, actually we have a long history of going to war
SEAN: Mm!
JONATHAN: Before there was tick control, there was mosquito control. And the CDC was founded with the sole mandate in 1946 of wiping out malaria and fighting mosquitoes.
<CLIP> C-SPAN THE FIGHT AGAINST COMMUNICABLE DISEASES
Scientific information on the subject is discussed and analyzed. Decisions are made and one of these is to design more effective equipment to combat the dreaded mosquito.
SEAN: I did not know that.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I didn’t know it either.
SEAN: It feels like they lost that fight because in my neighborhood …
JONATHAN: Yeah.
SEAN: … you can’t go out between the hours of seven and nine o’clock.
JONATHAN: Yeah. The mosquitoes haven’t gone away, but malaria did for the most part. You know, in talking to experts today, they told me that, including folks at the CDC, there’s a suite of tools we could be using if we wanted to get serious about fighting ticks. As one veteran tick expert at the CDC told me, if you want to make a dent in this problem, you have to get to the deer. So the deer are the engine driving a lot of these tick species spread.
SEAN: Mm.
JONATHAN: And we just have way more deer than we did decades ago, especially in the Eastern US and suburban parts of America. So how do you get to the deer? I had people in the comments section of my piece saying the clear answer is just we should all be hunting deer.
SEAN: Mm-hm.
JONATHAN: But in talking to the experts, they’ll tell you it’s not really a feasible solution. You would have to knock deer populations way down to make a dent in the tick populations. What is more promising is kind of a combined approach of stuff like vaccines. There are people developing vaccines that you could deliver to deer or to rodents, which are another important host for these ticks so that when the tick bites them, they’ll die. That I learned from talking to folks who do this kind of research for a living is a more promising avenue for controlling ticks than all of us picking up crossbows and becoming deer hunters.
SFX
JONATHAN: You know, what I heard from experts is that we’re not even funding this research in a serious way. We do this stuff for mosquitoes. People don’t realize it, but your local county health agency, they go out and they find where the mosquito breeding grounds are and stagnant pools the water and they treat it. And it takes this sustained quiet effort. It’s like we saw the consequences of not doing that recently. This is a bit tangential, but screwworm. You know, screwworm was this flesh eating larval pest that devastates cattle herds. And it was eradicated in the US in 1966 and it was kept at bay by the vigilance of people at USDA and USAID who ran these programs to release millions of sterile screwworm males out of airplanes. And it created this wall that kept it from coming into Southern US and now they’re here.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE CBS LA
But since the beginning of June, at least a dozen animal infections have been confirmed in Texas and New Mexico, putting California and the rest of the nation on alert.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE MS NOW
His Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk decided to cut the funding that was specifically dedicated to monitoring and containing the screw worm in Central America.
JONATHAN: And probably if we stopped doing the mosquito control at a local scale, we’d see more cases of dengue fever, West Nile virus, all these other rare but serious illnesses that climate change is making more of a threat here in the US.
SCORING IN
SEAN: Jonathan Mingle wrote “We’re Living in a Tick Nightmare. It’s Time to Go to War.” for the New York Times.
The guy with the power to go to war is named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And one of the kinda curious things about him is he’s kinda obsessed with Lyme disease.
More on that mmm puzzle? When Today, Explained continues.
[BREAK]
AVISHAY ARTSY (producer): Today, Explained.
MEG TIRRELL: Hi, I’m Meg Tirrell. I am a medical correspondent at CNN.
SEAN: Okay, we just spent half the show talking about Lyme disease and how the government’s not doing enough to combat it, but earlier this year, our Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy the Second…
MEG:
SEAN: …pledged to fight Lyme disease. What is RFK Junior’s relationship to Lyme?
MEG: Oh wow, RFK Jr.’s Lyme story goes way back
SEAN: Woah!
SCORING IN - On a Straight Down Train Car
MEG: Well, I mean, it’s a really RFK Jr-y kind of disease because he’s a falconer. He talks a lot about his work with birds of prey. He goes into the woods a lot, he posts lots of photos of himself in nature. And when you start to pay attention to RFK Jr. And Lyme disease, which I have been doing, he starts to tell the same story a few times.
SEAN: Huh.
MEG: It involves him in a bathtub in the 1980s…
<CLIP> INSTAGRAM – SECRETARY ROBERT F KENNEDY: I remember one day in 1987 when I stood in my bathtub and picked 29 ticks off myself.
MEG: He says he did at one point get Lyme disease. He got the classic bullseye rash on his forearm. He says he took antibiotics and it was cured, but he also describes most of his children have had Lyme disease, some with pretty severe effects of Lyme disease. So he’s very focused on it. It also ticks like some other RFK Junior boxes where there is this community of people who feels like they’ve been neglected and ignored and in his words gaslit, particularly by the federal government. and those are people who have like chronic Lyme disease or long Lyme disease. So this is Lyme disease that hasn’t been cured by antibiotics. And that people have been living with these symptoms for a really long period of time. And so he’s trying to address that population of people. He had a round table discussion with a lot of those patients, patient advocates, as well as doctors and people who are trying to work on this space.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE – SECRETARY ROBERT F KENNEDY: It is an invisible illness. For many years, this agency had a deliberate policy to refuse to engage with the Lyme community.
MEG: And so he’s really speaking to that group of people, but at the same time, Lyme disease is a growing problem …
SEAN: Right!
MEG: … for anybody who lives in a tick-infested area, which is so many of us.
SCORING OUT
SEAN: So it sounds like people who have Lyme disease have an ally …
MEG: Mm-hm.
SEAN: … in the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And of course RFK Jr. Is known to spin up conspiracy theories, pedal falsehoods …
<CLIP> NYPOST
SECRETARY ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: COVID-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and Black people
<CLIP> YOUTUBE JOE ROGAN PODCAST
SECRETARY ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: Wi-Fi radiation opens up your blood brain barrier and so all these toxics that are in your body can now go into your brain.
SEAN: … not a fan of vaccines. Does any of that get into the Lyme disease mix?
MEG: Well, I mean, so he convened this round table and it had doctors, it had lawmakers. And so you had these folks speaking around the table about different things that you could do.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE: The Lyme Clinical Trials Network is designed to build evidence for repurposing medicines and other treatments so we can improve the lives of people suffering now
MEG: And one of the things that RFK Jr.’s really focused on is improving diagnostics and improving treatment.
<CLIP> YOUTUBE: There’s investments we’ve made in identifying new antibiotics that potentially could have a longer, better effects, as well as potentially protective monoclonal antibodies that can be used as a treatment strategy
MEG: What you don’t hear him talk about is a vaccine for Lyme disease. And he talks about things like we’ve got to make it safer for kids to go back in the woods. Vaccine could be one way of doing that. And we actually have a vaccine now that is approaching the regulatory approval process from Pfizer. They reported phase three results. They said they were going to take this to regulatory agencies. And so that was earlier this year. I became interested in, okay, well, RFK Jr. Is a big proponent of solutions for Lyme disease. Is he going to be supportive of this vaccine? Will this be the vaccine that RFK Jr. Sort of wins him over?
SEAN: Tell us a bit more about the history of Lyme disease vaccines because they’ve been trying for some time to my recollection.
MEG: So there actually was an approved Lyme disease vaccine. It was called Lymerix. It was brought to market by GSK, the huge British drug maker. This was about 25-ish years ago. And it worked. It was something like 70 or 80% effective at reducing your risk of getting Lyme disease. But it had kind of this tepid endorsement from the federal vaccine agencies. So the FDA kind of gave it a… It wasn’t like the most extreme endorsement, I guess you could say, the way people described it to me. They noted it was just for specific age groups. And then the CDC’s group of vaccine advisors, they essentially recommended it for people who might have exposure to ticks. You might consider this. So it wasn’t like a strong endorsement that everybody should get this vaccine. And so what we saw was that when it hit the market, the sales were really tepid.
And then some people thought that the vaccine was actually giving them arthritis.
SEAN: Ohh.
MEG: And so this is the kind of thing you’re trying to prevent you from getting Lyme disease. You’re trying to prevent getting arthritis. The FDA looked into this extensively. Researchers looked at this. The signal did not play out from the conversations I’ve had with experts about it, but there were lawsuits that were filed. Ultimately GSK just decided to pull the vaccine off the market.
SEAN: Huh.
MEG: So now you have like 20 years later, Pfizer coming back with this vaccine. So this is approaching regulatory agencies. We might get this Lyme disease vaccine and have to see how RFK Jr’s HHS would receive that.
SEAN: What’s the vibe from HHS and RFK Jr? I mean, he cares about Lyme disease. He thinks there’s this forgotten population of people with chronic Lyme disease. He’s in charge. He’s got an incredible amount of power to do something about it. And here’s this vaccine that could be the easy solution. Is it like a match made in tick heaven?
MEG: Well, tick hell.
SEAN: Tick Hell.
MEG: Preventing the ticks from being able to give us Lyme disease. Although I don’t think they care if they give us Lyme disease, they just want to drink our blood. But you know, Kennedy was asked during his confirmation hearing by Susan Collins, because Maine of course is very hard hit by Lyme disease, whether he would support a Lyme disease vaccine. And he told her, quote:
<CLIP> YOUTUBE PBS NEWS HOUR – SECRETARY ROBERT KENNEDY: There’s nobody who will fight harder to find a vaccine or a treatment for Lyme disease than me.
MEG: Now I reached back out to HHS when I wrote this story back in March about Pfizer’s Lyme vaccine application. And a spokesperson for HHS told me HHS supports rigorous gold standard science to better understand, prevent, and treat Lyme disease. So I wrote back, “Does that include a vaccine?” And they just didn’t respond.
SEAN: Why? Why are they being cagey about this vaccine? It feels like a golden opportunity for them.
MEG: You would think, and it’s interesting. I’ve reached out to other folks who are sort of in this realm and most of them are very supportive of a vaccine. It’s something that they would like to have as part of the toolkit. I will say there is one population that is skeptical of a vaccine and that is certain folks who have this chronic Lyme who live with long Lyme disease, they feel like they were burned by the first vaccine. They still believe that there were safety problems with that vaccine, at least some portion of this group who I spoke with. And so they’re nervous about it, but other people really want a vaccine.
SEAN: Where does it leave us ultimately, you think? Is this a time to feel hopeful that there are solutions that are, solutions incoming here as these ticks become more and more just like a concern every summer across this country? Or is it a time to feel ultimately fearful?
MEG: Well, I mean, it definitely feels like we’re in a time with this, like, massive upsurge in ticks. They’re all around, they’re spreading new, newly discovered pathogens. So it definitely doesn’t feel like we’re on the downtrend of that by any means. And the government has put out a plan to try to at least address Lyme disease and to an extent alpha gal, but it’s not perceived from people I’ve spoken with to be enough. It’s not a moonshot by any means to address these kinds of things.
SEAN: What’s the plan?
MEG: Yeah. So this came out in May. They call it a sweeping plan to combat Lyme disease and advanced treatment. So you might expect huge amounts of money being poured into this big research consortiums working with the industry. The details are less sort of powerful than that from what we see in the release that HHS put out. They say the actions include a multimillion dollar pilot program focused on tick control up to two and a half million dollars in innovation challenges, funding for NIH researchers to combat alpha gal syndrome and a public-private collaboration to help patients connect with experienced providers.
SEAN: Huh.
MEG: So I think people are glad that there is focus on this, but yeah, whether it’s the moonshot that is needed especially…
SEAN: Mm.
MEG: …with the backdrop of broader cuts to science funding. I think experts in this space think it leaves something to be desired.
SCORING IN - Hot Plate
SEAN: Bummer! But in the meantime, what do you do if you’re going camping this weekend? Jonathan?
JONATHAN: Doing tick checks. And we do it in my household pretty much daily when you come home, do a thorough tick check, throw your clothes in the dryer. Ticks hate heat. And some people like to use permethrin, spray this insecticide that’s designed to kill ticks on your boots or your pants when you go out for a hike. So there are things that, I mean, for decades, researchers have known these things are really effective if you keep doing them, if you stay vigilant. Right? And all it takes is that one time, that one time you go out for a hike and you come back and you forget to do the tick check. So we need those kinds of personal measures of vigilance and protection, but we still need to kind of push for a bigger public health response to this….
SCORING BUMP
JONATHAN: Because the ticks are going to keep, they’re going to keep spreading into the calendar too in the sense that as winters get warmer, more and more days of the year when you’re outdoors, you’re going to encounter ticks who are hungry and they’re looking for you.
SCORING BUMP
SEAN: Thanks, Jonathan! And thanks Meg! And thanks Danielle Hewitt, for producing the show today. Amina Al-Sadi for editing. Gabriel Dunatov for fact checking. And Patrick Boyd for flying solo.
Be careful out there, friends!**
Parasitic Bugs Are Making Combacks Across The Country
Duration: 00:44:51
Released: 2026
Series: 1A
In 1966, the United States declared victory over a destructive flesh-eating parasite that devastated livestock. The New World Screwworm is a fly whose larvae burrow into the living flesh of mammals. It was eradicated after a long campaign that involved releasing millions of sterile flies over infested areas.Last week, that fly came back.The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed five cases of larvae contamination in Texas and New Mexico – the first detections in decades. Federal officials say the food supply is safe, but the cattle industry is on high alert. The American cattle supply is already at a 75-year low. Beef prices are high. And a screwworm outbreak could make it worse.Outside farms and ranches, the tick population is growing and spreading in new parts of the country. Emergency room visits for tick bites hit a 10-year seasonal high in April. And a growing number of Americans are discovering they’ve developed an allergy to red meat triggered by tick bites.We sit down with a panel of experts to talk about it.Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.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
Return of Alpha Gal
Duration: 01:00:00
Released: 2021
Series: Radiolab
Tuck your napkin under your chin. We’re about to serve up a tale of love, loss, and lamb chops - with a side of genetic modification. Several years ago we told a story about Amy Pearl. For as long as she could remember, Amy loved meat in all its glorious cuts and marbled flavors. And then one day, for seemingly no reason, her body wouldn’t tolerate it. No steaks. No brisket. No weenies. It made no sense: why couldn’t she eat something that she had routinely enjoyed for decades? It turned out Amy was not alone. And the answer to her mysterious allergy involved maps, a dancing lone star tick, and a very particular sugar called Alpha Gal. In this update, we discover that our troubles with Alpha Gal go way beyond food. We go to NYU Langone Health hospital to see the second ever transplant of a kidney from a pig into a human, talk to some people at Revivicor, the company that bred the pig in question, and go back to Amy to find out what she thinks about this brave new world. The original episode was reported by Latif Nasser, and produced by Annie McEwen and Matt Kielty. Sound design and scoring from Dylan Keefe, Annie McEwen, and Matt Kielty. Mix by Dylan Keefe with Arianne Wack. The update was reported and produced by Sarah Qari. It was sound designed, scored, and mixed by Jeremy Bloom. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Rift Valley Fever - Ruminating on ruminants
Duration: 01:15:26
Released: 2025
Series: This Podcast Will Kill You
Hemorrhagic virus? Check. Deadly disease? Check. Mosquito-borne? Check. Affected by animal movement, human activity, and environmental change? Check. Rift Valley Fever has all the markings of a classic TPWKY episode. This week, we’re doing a deep dive on this deadly virus, taking a One Health approach to explore the intricate relationships between animals, humans, and the environment to understand how this virus moves across the landscape. We trace the various paths this virus takes: through the organisms it infects, across the globe as it spreads, and over time as it appears to be evolving to be deadlier. Tune in to learn more about Rift Valley fever and what we might see with this pathogen in the years to come.Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAu See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Should we reengineer the world’s deadliest animal?
Duration: 00:11:59
Released: 2026
Series: Short Wave
The most ferocious predator for us humans is actually quite small: the mosquito. They are hungry for blood, spreading diseases like malaria, yellow fever and dengue – and picking up new ones all the time. But what if we could wipe out the mosquito? Gene-editing technology could do it, potentially saving millions of lives. But it comes with serious potential for risk. Which begs the question: Should we get to decide when humanity rewrites nature? Here to discuss that is Ben Bradford, the host of a new podcast distributed by the NPR Network: Are We Doomed?Interested in more science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.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
SPEAKER: You’re listening to Short Wave from NPR.
EMILY KWONG: The most ferocious predator for us humans is actually quite small.
[BUZZING]
KWONG: It’s the mosquito. They are hungry for blood and spreading diseases all the time, including serious ones, like malaria, yellow fever, and dengue. But what if we could wipe out the mosquito, We have the technology to do it. But should we? Here to discuss that is Ben Bradford, the host of a new podcast distributed by the NPR Network. It’s called Are We Doomed?
BEN BRADFORD: It is. Hi, Emily.
KWONG: So, Ben, your podcast Are We Doomed? covers a lot, from killer AI to nuclear weapons and, of course, the bloodthirsty micropredators I want to talk about today. How do you feel about mosquitoes, by the way?
BRADFORD: I think they’re gross, and I think they’re rude. And you mentioned, Emily, new gene-editing techniques could allow us to eradicate our little insect nemesis, potentially saving millions of lives.
KWONG: Yes. I learned that from you, from your show.
BRADFORD: Yeah, thank you.
KWONG: The tech is here.
BRADFORD: Yeah. Thank you. And it would be amazing. But also, in that technology is something inherently more dangerous. I talked to Kevin Esvelt, who is a biologist now at the MIT Media Lab.
KEVIN ESVELT: And if you can engineer a mosquito so it can’t spread disease, you could engineer a mosquito so it always spreads disease.
[CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC]
KWONG: Today on the show, the technology that allows us to kill the mosquito comes with all kinds of complications.
BRADFORD: So what does it mean to try to change an entire species? Who gets to decide? What might the ripple effects be? How do you test it? How do you protect it?
KWONG: Easy questions, you know. You’re listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
[CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC]
KWONG: OK, Short Wavers. I’m here with Ben Bradford, who’s just done all this reporting on have to save millions of people from malaria by wiping out the mosquito. Ben, how does that even work?
BRADFORD: Yeah. So let’s go back to early last decade. Scientists developed a new form of gene editing, which you may know as CRISPR. It’s this way of scalpelling out a tiny strand of DNA. And you kind of like suture in a new trait. It doesn’t quite look like that, but that’s essentially what’s happening. And so with CRISPR, you can cure a genetic disease or engineer a cow to grow without horns, both things that they have done in labs.
KWONG: Wow.
BRADFORD: But Kevin Esvelt, this biologist now at the MIT Media Lab, had his own realization.
ESVELT: Turns out, it doesn’t just let you engineer organisms in the lab. It lets you let them go, and the engineered trait will spread to most of the ones in the wild. That’s incredibly exciting.
BRADFORD: Kevin is the person who figured out you could CRISPR a creature, do this little DNA surgery, so it always passes along the gene that you put into it. And so with CRISPR, the idea is you can create a mosquito that, for instance, always has males, and then its offspring will always have males. And so you put it into an area, and it extinguishes all these species carrying malaria in that area.
KWONG: Because there aren’t females to mate with.
BRADFORD: Yeah. And so to do this, you, of course, have to engineer a mosquito from hell. In the show, we called him Jerry.
JERRY: Hi.
[MACHINERY WHIRRING]
[SPLAT]
BRADFORD: To clarify, Jerry’s mission is actually not to murder all mosquitoes, because they’re just trying to target in an area with malaria. And that’s because mosquitoes are ecologically important.
KWONG: They are important to the environment. It’s true.
BRADFORD: I didn’t know that, but they are. And it was disappointing. They’re pollinators and birds–
KWONG: Wow.
BRADFORD: –and spiders, yeah, all kinds of critters eat them.
KWONG: Yeah. It would be reckless to wipe out mosquitoes entirely. But when it comes to Jerry, the mosquito from hell, he’s just meant to wipe out the mosquitoes that carry malaria in a certain region. But then the question becomes, how do you do that without affecting birds and spiders?
BRADFORD: So the idea is to offer birds and spiders a different kind of mosquito to snack on, one that doesn’t transmit malaria, because there’s a whole bunch of different types of mosquito species. And even better or worse, Kevin says, we don’t need to take out the malaria-carrying mosquitoes forever, even.
KWONG: Right. You say in the show, they just need to, quote, \“go on a sabbatical.\”
BRADFORD: Yeah. That’s right. We just need them to, like, disappear for a little while.
ESVELT: Malaria transmission requires humans, and it requires mosquitoes. So this is a back-and-forth transmission chain.
BRADFORD: So if the mosquitoes go on sabbatical for long enough, for the malaria to die out in the humans that the mosquitoes pick up the malaria from and transmit it between, then when the mosquitoes come back, the malaria is gone, and there’s just nothing for them to transmit.
KWONG: This plan is bold. It’s like, use CRISPR, make mosquito. Mosquito Jerry, though, only makes sons. And then the malaria mosquitoes will be wiped out, but not for too long, because that would be bad.
BRADFORD: Just enough.
KWONG: Just a sabbatical.
BRADFORD: Yeah. And so it turns out that there’s a whole bunch of steps that you kind of have to follow if you’re going to do this in a way where you, one, test that the thing actually is going to work, and two, test that it’s not going to work too well and go around the world and create a whole bunch of problems.
KWONG: So how do you even go about testing this?
BRADFORD: Well, you need an area where you’re going to put out your mosquitoes into the wild, kind of a cordoned-off area where they’re going to be on their own. And basically, what we’re describing is a mosquito Jurassic Park. And then that leads to other questions, which is, how do you stop what happens in every Jurassic Park movie?
KWONG: Uh, the dinosaurs get out.
BRADFORD: And so, of course, this is the challenge. And we know what we’re trying to avoid, because we’ve seen it in history.
KWONG: Let’s listen to a section of the episode that talks about how this can all go wrong.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
BRADFORD: Take a tangent with me to the shores of Australia and New Zealand in the late 1800s. European ships landed, bringing sailors and soldiers and felons and rabbits. Europeans brought rabbits over for food and hunting, snacks and sport. Of course, the rabbits quickly escaped and bred all over both islands and became a scourge on an environment totally unprepared for them. They eat everything. New Zealanders looked to fight back. They brought over ferrets and weasels to sic on the rabbits. And when that failed, ferrets and weasels became more invasive species. Skip to the 1990s. Neighboring Australia, largely by accident, unleashed an only partially tested biological weapon against its rabbits.
SPEAKER: This nasty virus that wiped out, like, 2/3 of all rabbits or more.
BRADFORD: New Zealand had been considering using this virus as well, but it wanted more testing first.
SPEAKER 1: New Zealand government said, we’re not sure of safety and so forth. So for now, you’re forbidden to import this virus into New Zealand.
BRADFORD: So what do you think happened at this point? New Zealand farmers, losing millions of dollars as rabbits destroyed their crops, began taking little vacations to Australia to go hunting for infected rabbits.
SPEAKER 1: And they smuggled in diced up, infected rabbit parts from Australia illegally.
BRADFORD: They liquefied the body parts into virus-laden smoothies, which they spread on their fields. Bam. New Zealand had the rabbit virus.
SPEAKER 1: And what’s the government going to do?
SPEAKER 2: When it’s out, it’s out.
BRADFORD: This is Kevin’s fear. If we do create a mosquito Jurassic Park to test Jerry, which we have to do to make sure he works and doesn’t cause a ripple effect of unknown ecological destruction, Kevin says some New Zealand farmers are going to steal one of our mosquitoes.
ESVELT: Of course someone would do that, and they would tell themselves a perfect story in which they’re the hero, right?
BRADFORD: If Jerry gets out, we don’t know what harm he would cause because we haven’t field tested. Consider the possibilities. Jerry and his descendants could travel around the world. These mosquitoes would spawn only males wherever they go, leading to globally extinguishing all of his species. Worse, what if it turns out Jerry can mate with another type of mosquito and he passes along his all-boys gene to one of them? What if that one can mate with another species, and so on? Maybe that gene travels throughout all types of mosquito and does eradicate them entirely. What if birds and spiders and flowers can’t adapt to that loss, and it creates a domino effect of environmental destruction? Then we’ve got a problem.
[RELAXING MUSIC]
[END PLAYBACK]
KWONG: This approach, you know, clearly comes with so many unintended consequences. You say on the show, the point is to insert a trait that spreads like wildfire, and wildfire is hard to stop.
BRADFORD: Yeah. And so that is the main argument against doing this thing, this technology, which is basically called an engineered gene drive. And so there are people who think we should, you know, pack this up, seal it away, never do it.
KWONG: And a gene drive in nature is when, like, a trait kind of naturally evolves to get passed on.
BRADFORD: It gets really good at being passed through its offspring.
KWONG: But here, humans are interfering to make that happen.
BRADFORD: Here, we’re making it happen. Yeah. That’s sort of the debate. But, of course, the stakes are, do you get rid of malaria? Do you get rid of dengue fever? And so when I talked to Kevin, the person who kind of figured out, hey, we could do this, his biggest concern is that an accidental, untested release of, let’s say, Jerry, poisons the whole discourse around this and any attempt to do it.
ESVELT: We know what happens when there’s a backlash to technology. We’re seeing it right now for vaccines and other things. And we saw it even in biomedicine with something like gene therapy, where a single death in a poorly planned clinical trial that led to tragedy set back the entire field by more than a decade. More than a decade is more than 5 million dead children.
KWONG: That’s a lot of pressure. Because, you know, mosquito-borne diseases cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year. But on the other hand, you don’t want to roll out a gene drive project too quickly because something could go terribly wrong.
BRADFORD: And you can hear, in our episode, that pressure that Kevin feels because of that. And so it does. It creates all of these hurdles, all of these kind of like little puzzles that you need to solve to be able to do that. You know, we need to test our mosquitoes, like Jerry, to make sure he doesn’t cause unintended consequences. You have to do this sort of like field test your Jurassic Park. But how do you do the Jurassic Park without risking those consequences, where someone’s going to steal him or he’s going to get out? I mean, they fly, for God’s sakes. So, like, what are you going to do?
KWONG: It is such a puzzle. And in your episode, you talk about some ways to work the puzzle, to actually, like, take what’s theoretical and make it happen in the real world.
BRADFORD: These guys are so smart. They’re so smart.
KWONG: What is your takeaway from all this when it comes to the ethics of a gene drive for mosquitoes, but really, also for any species?
BRADFORD: Yeah. I think that the possibilities here are really exciting. I mean, malaria is terrible. And the mosquito has killed more people than any other creature on the Earth. And so you start thinking about how we can solve that for our species. That’s amazing. But, you know, I will say, you know someone else on our team, our animator, who was watching this episode and doing our animation for it– and he heard it and was like, this is insane. We should never do this.
KWONG: Mm. Ben Bradford, your podcast Are We Doomed? is out now. Thank you so much for coming into Short Wave.
BRADFORD: Thank you for having me.
KWONG: Check out the show. It’s really good. You can find it all the places you typically get your podcasts. And also, if you haven’t already, download the NPR app. My bosses really want you to do it, and you will honestly get great journalism from it. Thank you. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer. I’m Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.
Ticks are a growing problem, no matter where you live
Duration: 00:13:14
Released: 2026
Series: Short Wave
In the grand scheme of things, Lyme disease is a fairly new scientific discovery. It was first traced back to ticks in the late 70s and early 80s. The tick-borne illness can cause a rash, fever, pain, neurological complications, and even facial paralysis. It’s spread by only two of the nearly 50 species of ticks in the United States. Historically, most Lyme cases were limited to a small region, including the Great Lakes area and northeastern US. But thanks to changing temperatures, animal migration and shifts in land use, scientists say tick territory is expanding. So what does that mean for Lyme disease risk? And do you have to be worried about it in your own backyard?Interested in more episodes about pests and parasites? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. It includes perks like bonus episodes, early access, archive access, curated playlists and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.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
What’s Next for a New Lyme Vaccine
Duration: 00:15:55
Released: 2026
Series: Public Health On Call
About this episode: A new vaccine shows 70% efficacy in preventing Lyme disease, but limitations to the clinical trials put the fate of this intervention in limbo. In this episode: Anna Durbin, an expert in experimental vaccines, explains where this vaccine shows promise, where it falls short, and what could happen next for licensing and regulation. Guest: Dr. Anna Durbin is a professor of International Health and the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Immunization Research. 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: Pfizer and Valneva Announce Lyme Disease Vaccine Candidate Demonstrates Strong Efficacy in Phase 3 VALOR Trial—Pfizer Tickborne Diseases Are on the Rise—Here’s What To Know—Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health F.D.A. Reverses Decision and Agrees to Review Moderna’s Flu Vaccine—New York Times It’s Tick Season!—Public Health On Call (April 2025) 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.
Video Clips
‘Nutty’ situation in Lincoln Park WGN Investigates
WGN News, 09 29, 2026
Video (4:23)
Description
The piles of nuts first began appearing outside a Lincoln Park home a few years ago, attracting a swarm of squirrels. Since then, workers carrying matching shoulder bags have been spotted dumping piles of nuts a few blocks away in the park, and no one can figure out why. WGN’s Ben Bradley has the full story.
Transcript
0:07 · MICAH MATERRE: WGN INVESTIGATES SOMETHING IS HAPPENING IN LINCOLN PARK. RESIDENTS REACH OUT TO INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER BEN BRADLEY FOR HELP AFTER CITY FINDS FAILED TO SOLVE A SQUIRRELLY SITUATION.
0:22 · I WAS WALKING AROUND THE PARK AND I KNOW DOZENS OF POLLS AROUND TREES AND THEN I STARTED SEEING MORE AND MORE HOLES AROUND DIFFERENT TREES.
0:28 · WHEN HERE THERE’S A DOZEN HOLES AROUND THE STREET HERE.
0:31 · AND THEN A FEW MONTHS AGO, I WENT FOR A WALK AT DUSK AND WITHIN 15 MINUTES I COUNTED 42 RATS RUNNING AROUND.
0:41 · YEAH, AS YOU CAN SEE, I MEAN, THERE’S A TON OF RAT BURROWS HERE THAT EVEN PIKE WAS SO STUNNED BY THE SWARM OF RATS IN LINCOLN PARK. HE TOOK THIS VIDEO. OTHER NEIGHBORS NOTICED YOU KNOW, YOU SEE SOME RATS IN THE ALLEY AND STUFF RIGHT NEAR THE TRASH. AND THAT’S AGAIN, COME TO BE EXPECTED. BUT THIS WAS DIFFERENT. CAN SEE HERE IS A RAT TRAIL. IT WASN’T UNTIL RECENTLY THAT THEY REALIZED HOW DIFFERENT THIS ALI IS.
1:07 · BUT I JUST GRABBED THE PEOPLE OF THIS GETS INTO THE STRANGER THAN FICTION ASPECT OF IT. IT’S LIKE A A LOT OF NICE KNOTS. I’M TALKING BRAZIL, NOT AND I WAS LOOKING AND I KNOW, YOU KNOW, ARBORIST, BUT THESE DO NOT COME FROM THE STREET. THESE ARE NOT ACORNS. YOU CAN SEE ALL THE SCATTERED KNOTS AROUND.
1:28 · YOU SEE THOSE NUTS AREN’T FALLING FROM TREES. THEY APPEAR TO BE IMPORTED.
1:34 · JI SUK YI: AND WHILE THEIR PILES BIZARRE, EXPENSIVE, NOT EVERYWHERE IN OUR PARK.
1:39 · NO ONE COULD CRACK THE NUT OF AN EXPLANATION UNTIL ONE MORNING THIS YEAR WHEN CAROLINE NOVAK WAS OUT FOR A WALK.
1:45 · AND I ACTUALLY SAW A HANDFUL OF THEM. I THINK IT WAS 5 WALKING EARLY IN THE MORNING OF THE SAME SHOULDER BAG. AND SO I JUST SAID, HEY, WHAT ARE YOU GUYS DOING?
1:52 · BECAUSE THEY WERE THROWING THE KNOT.
1:53 · SHE’S NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO WITNESSED IT. I NOTICE SOMEONE WITH A SATCHEL AND JUST THOUGHT IT WAS SOMEONE OUT THERE FEEDING SQUIRRELS.
2:04 · JI SUK YI: SO I WALKED UP AND I, YOU KNOW, JUST HAD HAND. I WAS JUST CURIOUS WHAT YOU GUYS ARE DOING WIRE 3 AND HE’S NOT GOING TO THESE TREES. AND SHE SAID WERE ALLOWED TO DO THIS. AND I SAID, OH, YEAH, I WAS JUST CURIOUS WHY YOU WERE DOING IT. SHE SAID WE’RE NOT FEELING THE WRATH UNPROMPTED. I DIDN’T EVEN BRING UP. SHE SAID WE’RE NOT PAYING HULL, OK? WELL. I THINK YOU INADVERTENTLY ARE.
2:26 · THEY AND OTHER NEIGHBORS COMPLAINED TO THE CITY WHICH DETERMINE TO A NEARBY HOMEOWNER WAS LEAVING NOTTS OUTSIDE THEIR OWN HOUSE ATTRACTING NOT ONLY SQUIRRELS, BUT THEY’RE RODENT COUSINS, RATS. THE NEIGHBORS SUSPECTED THE CREW LEAVING THE NUTS A FEW BLOCKS AWAY IN THE PARK ARE DOING SO AT THE DIRECTION OF THE HOMEOWNER.
2:45 · JOSH FRYDMAN: EVEN DOUBT WITH IT. BUT WE’VE NEVER DEALT WITH A SITUATION WHERE IT’S LIKE FEED FOR HIRE FOR BETTER OR LACK OF THE TERM WHERE SOMEONE’S PAYING SEVERAL EMPLOYEES TO FEED THE ANIMALS IN THE SURROUNDING AREA.
2:59 · BEN BRADLEY: THE ALDERMAN SAID THE CITY CONTACTED THE HOMEOWNER AND EVEN ISSUED MULTIPLE VIOLATIONS, WHICH HE SAYS HAVE BEEN PAID AND NOT CONTESTED.
3:06 · TYPICALLY WHEN YOU TICKET SOMEBODY, IT STOPS THEIR BAD BEHAVIOR. THIS IS NOT STOPPED IT. IF ANYTHING, THE BEHAVIOR IS INCREASE, THE FEEDING INCREASED SINCE WE’VE TICKETING THAT.
3:20 · LAST MONTH THE ALDERMAN’S OFFICE SENT THIS LETTER WARNING THAT MORE FINES COULD BE COMING IF THEY DON’T KNOCK IT OFF WITH A KNOTS. WE DON’T WANT TO THROW ANYONE UNDER THE BUS. WE JUST WANT TO STOP THIS FEEDING THAT’S CAUSING PROBLEMS IN A DENSE NEIGHBORHOOD.
3:34 · BEN BRADLEY: ALDERMAN KNUDTSON SAID HE ISN’T SURE HOW THIS WILL END OR EVEN WHY IT STARTED. WE WANTED TO KNOW OURSELVES. SO WE PAID THE HOME OF VISIT AND ENCOUNTERED A WOMAN WHO WOULD NOT GIVE HER NAME.
3:45 · I’M JUST TRYING BETTER UNDERSTAND LIKE WHY ARE ALL THESE KNOTS BEEN GATHERED UP?
3:47 · WHY ARE THEY BEING DISTRIBUTED IN LINCOLN PARK? I REALLY HAVE NO COMMENT FOR HIM. SORRY.
3:50 · I’D SAY MY GOAL IS TO GET RID OF THE RATS. I MEAN, I WANT TO FEEL COMFORTABLE HAVING MY KIDS PLAY IN THE PARK TOGETHER RIGHT NOW. IT’S AN ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET FOR THE RATS AND SQUIRRELS. MY BEN BRADLEY: NEIGHBORS SAY THEY HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH THE PROVERBIAL OLD MAN FEEDS PIGEONS IN THE PARK. BUT THEY SAY THIS. HE’S GOTTEN SO STRANGE.
4:10 · THEY’D LAUGH IF IT WEREN’T FOR ALL THE RATS AND DAMAGE IN THE PARK AFTER THE CITY ISSUED A FINAL WARNING LATE LAST MONTH, WE DID SEE A WORKER’S SWEEPING UP OUTSIDE THE PA RK THE HOU
Chicago trials rat birth control in Lincoln Park alleys to curb rat population
WGN News, 09 09, 2026
Video (3:59)
Description
Chicago has spent decades trying to get rid of rats.
Traps, poison, you name it. None of it has changed our title as the rattiest city in America, but in the alleys of Lincoln Park, a new experiment is asking a very different question: What is, instead of trying to kill the rats, we get them to stop making more?
Transcript
0:05 · TRAFFIC UPDATE TO CHICAGO HAS SPENT DECADES TRYING TO GET RID OF RATS. THEY’VE USED WRAPS POISON. YOU NAME IT.
0:11 · NONE OF IT HAS CHANGED OUR TITLE AS THE READY. A CITY IN AMERICA.
0:18 · LOURDES DUARTE: WGN’S ERIN MCELROY IS HERE WITH THE STORY OF THE LATEST QUEST TO MAKE MAYBE FIGHT THIS PROBLEM, RIGHT? YOU’RE IN REPORT ON WE THAT TITLE, THOUGH, FOR LIKE 10 YEARS BREAKING WRITES, I YEARS ANYWAY TONIGHT, ALONG WITH THE WIND COME WITH ME TO THE ALLEYS OF LINCOLN PARK WHERE A NEW EXPERIMENT IS ASKING A VERY DIFFERENT QUESTION. WHAT IF INSTEAD OF TRYING TO KILL THE RATS, WE GET THEM TO STOP MAKING MORE.
0:50 · CHICAGO AND RATS HAVE BEEN SHARING ALLEYS FOR A VERY LONG TIME. NOT PARTICULARLY HAPPILY.
0:58 · JI SUK YI: THE CITY’S POLICE AND THEN TRAPPED IN COLLAPSED. THEIR BURROWS, EVEN PUMPED DRY ICE UNDERGROUND AND STILL.
1:01 · HERE WE ARE FOR 10 STRAIGHT YEARS. CHICAGO SENT A TOP ONE PEST CONTROL COMPANIES LIST OF AMERICA’S READY U.S. CITIES. WE FINALLY DROPPED TO NUMBER 2 LAST YEAR. NOT EXACTLY A SILVER MEDAL THAT ANYBODY WANTS. BUT TUCKED INTO 5 BLOCKS OF LINCOLN PARK, RESEARCHERS ARE TRYING SOMETHING NOVEL. THIS IS ALLY NUMBER ONE. JUST THREW TO THE TIME A JUDGE HERE AND WE HAVE.
1:29 · 3 BAIT STATIONS IN THIS ALLEY. THIS IS ONE OF GAYNOR HALL: 15 BAIT STATIONS. 5 ALLEYS MOTION ACTIVATED INSIDE THE BOXES OUR SAUSAGE IS YES, SAUSAGES THAT THESE GUYS COME WITH A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA BIRTH CONTROL. A LOT OF CARS AND A LOT OF SO IT’S VERY APPEALING TO THE ARREST, WHICH IS RELIABLE.
1:55 · THAT’S URBAN WILDLIFE ASSOCIATION LEAD RESEARCHER MAUREEN MURRAY, WHO SAYS THE CONTRACEPTIVE IS ACTUALLY COTTONSEED SINCE JUNE. A TEAM OF ROUGHLY 10 VOLUNTEERS HAS BEEN MONITORING THE BOXES AND CAMERAS.
2:07 · GAYNOR HALL: PART OF A COMMUNITY FUNDED PROJECT THAT’S RAISED MORE THAN $30,000 TO SEE WHETHER CONTROLLING REPRODUCTION MIGHT DO WHAT DECADES OF KILLING RATS HASN’T. EVERY FEW WEEKS RESEARCHER SARA JACOBSON COMES LOOKING FOR EVIDENCE IN KIND OF MEASURE. HOW THINGS ARE AT COME SOMETIMES THE RATS APPROACHED THE STATION AND NEVER GO IN.
2:26 · SOMETIMES THEY GO IN BUT SKIPPED DINNER AND EVERY ONCE IN AWHILE. OKAY. WE GOT SOME ACTION. ONE OF THESE SAUSAGES HAS RATS REPRODUCE. SO INCREDIBLY QUICKLY. THAT IS EXTREMELY HARD TO KILL FASTER THAN THEY CAN AGREE. THERE’S ANOTHER REASON THIS EXPERIMENT LANDED HERE. A FAMILY OF GREAT HORNED OWLS AND NORTH POND DIED AFTER EXPOSURE TO RAT POISON WAS MOTHER AND A FATHER AND JEW LIKE A BABY ALL AND ONE BY ONE.
2:55 · THEY ALL DIED OF RAT POISON. 70 1% OF THE RAT STRAPPED HAD VERDANT ASIDE IN THEIR BLOODSTREAM, BUT THEY WERE STILL RUNNING AROUND.
3:02 · JI SUK YI: SO THAT MEANS THAT, YOU KNOW, THEY WERE AVAILABLE TO BE PRAY FOR BIRDS.
3:11 · THEIR DEATHS HELPED GALVANIZE A PARTNERSHIP AMONG LINCOLN PARK ZOO CHICAGO BIRD ALLIANCE AND ALDERMAN TO MICAH KNUTSON. WE HAVE TO MOVE AWAY FROM RAT POISON BECAUSE IT’S KILLING OUR LOVE. LIKE WHICH IS WHY MOST OF VOLUNTEERS CHECKING THESE BIRTH CONTROL BAIT STATIONS ARE FROM THE CHICAGO BIRD ALLIANCE.
3:28 · THE REAL TEST FOR THE BIRTH CONTROL PROJECT COMES THIS SPRING WHEN RENT NUMBERS BEGAN CLIMBING AGAIN BECAUSE AFTER DECADES OF TRYING TO MAKE THREATS DISAPPEAR, THIS EXPERIMENT IS TRYING SOMETHING DECIDEDLY LESS DRAMATIC. IF YOU ARE RATS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
3:48 · AND RESEARCHERS WILL BE COMPARING THE FIVE-BLOCK AREA WITH THE CONTROL AREA WHERE CONTRACEPTIVE IS NOT BEING USED. THE LONG GAME IS NOT JUST THESE LOWER NUMBERS, BUT HERE WE GO FAR LESS
City Hall’s plans to put out new trash bins may impact street parking
Eyewitness News ABC7NY, 04 17, 2026
Video (2:52)
Description
Darla Miles has the latest on the new trash bins in New York City.
https://abc7ny.com/post/containerized-trash-expand-6-new-districts-york-city/18905826/
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Transcript
0:06 · BEANS WILL SOON BE HITTING THE STREETS OF NEW YORK CITY AS PART OF THE ADMINISTRATION’S PUSH TO KEEP BAGS OF TRASH OFF THE SIDEWALKS.
0:13 · BUT THESE BINS TAKE UP SPACE, ESPECIALLY PARKING SPOTS IN A CITY WHERE PARKING SPOTS ARE ALREADY HARD TO COME BY. EYEWITNESS NEWS REPORTER DARLA MILES IS LIVE THIS AFTERNOON IN CROWN HEIGHTS, WHERE THE MAYOR SPOKE JUST A SHORT TIME AGO.
0:26 · DARLA.
0:28 · THAT’S THAT’S RIGHT. SANDRA AND DAVID, WE KNOW THAT THERE IS A DIRECT CORRELATION TO TRASH TRASH CONTAINERIZATION, NOT JUST WITH THE REDUCTION OF PARKING SPACES, BUT THE BIG THING HERE IS ITS IMPACT ON THE RAT POPULATION. AND THE NUMBERS DO NOT LIE. THERE WAS A 25% DECREASE IN 311 RAT SIGHTINGS WHEN THIS PROGRAM WAS IMPLEMENTED IN WEST HARLEM.
0:50 · NOW, THIS MORNING HERE IN CROWN HEIGHTS, MAYOR MAMDANI AND NEW SANITATION COMMISSIONER GREGORY ANDERSON ANNOUNCED NEW FUNDING AND A PLAN TO CONTINUE THE IMPLEMENTATION OF CITYWIDE TRASH CONTAINERIZATION THAT STARTED BACK IN 2023. THIS IS A LOOK AT WHAT THEY CALL EMPIRE BINS THAT ARE BEING PHASED IN AT LOW DENSITY APARTMENT BUILDINGS. NOW, UNLIKE THE PHASE WHERE FOOD RELATED BUSINESSES, THESE ARE BEING PROVIDED TO PROPERTY OWNERS BY THE CITY AT NO COST TO THEM.
1:22 · AND MAYOR MAMDANI THIS MORNING SAYS HE HAS ALLOCATED $15 MILLION TO LEASE THESE BINS AND STAFFING RELATED COSTS, AS WELL AS ANOTHER $35 MILLION IN CAPITAL IN THE CAPITAL GAINS BUDGET, IN THE CAPITAL BUDGET. RATHER, TO PURCHASE THOSE SANITATION TRUCKS THAT ARE SPECIALLY DESIGNED TO LIFT THESE BINS.
1:47 · WE HAVE ABOUT. YOU CAN CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG HERE, 70% OF TRASH IN NEW YORK CITY IS CONTAINERIZED AT THIS POINT. THIS IS ADDRESSING THE REMAINING 30%. THESE ARE THE LARGER SCALE RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS THAT RIGHT NOW ARE PUTTING THEIR TRASH OUT IN BAGS.
2:04 · AND AS GROWING UP IN NEW YORK CITY, WE’VE BECOME ACCUSTOMED TO THIS. BUT I THINK, FRANKLY, THERE’S TOO MUCH IN OUR POLITICS THAT WE EXCEPTIONAL SAYING THAT THIS IS JUST HOW IT IS IN NEW YORK CITY. IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. WE LOOK AT CITIES ACROSS THE WORLD. THIS IS NOT HOW THEY LIVE.
2:19 · NOW LET’S ■TAKE A LOOK AT WHERE THESE EMPIRE BINS WILL BE DISTRIBUTED. FIRST, THEY’RE GOING TO BE THREE NEIGHBORHOODS IN BROOKLYN. YOU SEE HERE, THE SIX NEIGHBORHOODS IN THE BRONX.
2:29 · THERE ARE FIVE NEIGHBORHOODS IN MANHATTAN, THREE IN QUEENS AND THE NORTH SHORE OF STATEN ISLAND. NOW, AGAIN, THIS APPLIES TO LOW DENSITY APARTMENT BUILDINGS WITH 30 OR MORE UNITS AND MAY IMPACT SOME APARTMENT BUILDINGS WITH 10 TO 30 UNITS. BUT THE PLAN, THE GOAL HERE IS TO KICK THIS TRASH BAGS OFF THE CURB AND ALL RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS BY 2031.
Nonprofit turns vacant lots into urban farms
WBAL-TV 11 Baltimore, 09 30, 2026
Video (2:42)
Description
A Baltimore nonprofit founded by military veterans is revitalizing vacant lots into green spaces and urban farms, transforming communities and addressing food access challenges. The 6th Branch, established in 2010, has converted more than 23 acres of vacant lots into thriving green spaces and urban farms. The 6th Branch continues to bring hope to Baltimore neighborhoods, one seed at a time.
WBAL-TV is your home for Baltimore breaking news and weather. For your latest Baltimore news and weather visit: https://www.wbaltv.com/
For licensing inquiries: https://www.wbaltv.com/licensing
Transcript
0:00 · HOW THE SIXTH BRANCH IS MAKING A DIFFERENCE.
0:05 · FROM FLOWERS TO TREES, VEGETABLES AND HONEY AND MORE, THESE URBAN FARMS ARE TRANSFORMING AREAS ACROSS THE CITY.
0:13 · I THINK IT’S REALLY HARD TO GIVE PE HOPE WHENHERE’S TRASH ALL AROUND YOU.
0:19 · THE SIXTH BRANCH IS CHANGING THAT.
0:22 · SO FAR, THEY’VE TRANSFORMED MORE THAN 23 ACRES VACANT LOTS GREEN SPACES AND URBAN FARMS.
0:27 · WE DON’T GO INTO A SPACE UNLESS RE INVITED AND ASKED TO, AND THEN WE’RE SITTING AND LISTENING SO TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THE COMMUNITY WANTS.
0:37 · THEN WE HELP MAKE THAT VISION A REALITY WITH THE COMMUNITY.
0:41 · THE NONPROFIT, FOUNDED I 2010 BY RETURNING VETERANS, HAS A MISSION TO BUILD TRUST WITHIN COMMUNITIES IN JOHNSTON SQUARE, BLOCKS OF HOMES WERE DEMOLISHED.
0:53 · NOW IT’S BRIMMING WFE.
0:55 · EVERY THURSDAY, YOU CAN GET A BAG OF, YOU KNOW, COLLARDS AND SQUASH AND G PEPPERS AND RED PEPPERS AND HOT PEPPERS, WHICH ARE MY FAVORITE.
1:05 · AND THEY’RE STR RIGHT FROM THE GROUND.
1:08 · GRACE CHAMPION MANAGES THE T URBAN FARMS,HICH ALLOWS THEM TO DISTRIBUTE THOUSANDS OF POUNDS OF FRESH PRODUCE PER YEAR.
1:15 · IN ADDITION TO LIKE KALE COLLARDS, WE DO SWISS CHARD.
1:20 · WE ALSO DO A LOT OF R VEGETABLES, TOMATOES, EGGPLANT, REALLY KIND OF LNG TO THE CLIMATE AND DOING WHAT WILL WANT TO PERFORM HERE.
1:30 · SO WE’RE GONNA PLANT SOME PURPLE TOP TURNIPS.
1:33 · SHE SAYS THEY REA FOCUS ON WHAT CAN BE HARVESTED WEEKLY AND SHARED WITH THE 100 OR SO FAMILIES THEY S EVERY WEEK IN THIS FOOD DESERT.
1:42 · I THINK IT’S REALLY POWERFUL TO INTERACT AND BE CLOSE TO GREEN SPACES AND BE MORE CONNECTED TO THE FOOD.
1:49 · IF YOU CAN, YOU NOTICE YOU’RE NOT SEEING A LOT OF AVAILABLE FRESH PRODUCE IN THESE AREAS.
1:55 · THEY ALSO SELL COMPOST AND HONEY IN ADDITION TO TILLING, FERTILIZING, AND PLANTING.
2:00 · T6B HAS SEVERAL PROGRAMS, INCLUDING FOOD ACCESS, CANOPY AND WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT.
2:04 · DOCTOR TERRELL WILLIAMS IS A MARINE CORPS VET AND BOARD MEMBER AND SAYS ORGANIZATIONS LIKE T-6B ARE NEECAUSE THEY HELP ACTIVATE COMMUNITIES AND BRING HOPE.
2:14 · IF YOU G OVER TO THE.
2:16 · HENRIETTA LACKS EDUCATIONAL PARK, IT’S AN INCREDIBLE SPA AND IT GIVES ME JOY BECAUSEA EVERY TIME I DRIVE BY AND I DRIVE BY DAILY, THERE ARE FAMILIES IN TRK, AND I NEVER FAMILIES IN THE PARK BEFORE.
2:29 · HOPE PLANTED ONE SEED AT TIME
Trash containers making a difference in NYC’s war on rats
CBS New York, 08 06, 2026
Video (1:56)
Description
There have been fewer complaints about rats to 311, which appears to show trash container efforts are working. CBS News New York’s Dave Carlin reports.
For video licensing inquiries, contact: licensing@veritone.com
Transcript
0:04 · CALL IT A TRASHY TRIUMPH FOR CITY LEADERS IN THEIR WAR AGAINST RATS. AS DAVE CARLIN REPORTS, FEWER COMPLAINTS ABOUT RATS TO 311 APPEAR TO SHOW THOSE CONTAINER EFFORTS ARE WORKING.
0:17 · HIS EAST VILLAGE APARTMENT IS ON A STREET WHERE RATS SEEM TO HIDE DURING THE DAY. BUT AFTER THE SUN GOES DOWN, THEY’RE OUT FOR BUFFET TIME, SAYS JOHN HENNIGAN.
0:26 · AT NIGHT, THEY’RE VERY ACTIVE.
0:30 · ACTIVE ALSO DESCRIBES CITY SANITATION WORKERS DEPLOYING EMPIRE BINS. THE JOB IS DESCRIBED AS DONE IN PARTS OF HARLEM AND MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, WHERE WE SEE THE NEW BINS FOR BUILDINGS, NEW RAT RESISTANT CORNER LITTER BASKETS AND APPROVED SECURE BINS FOR BUSINESSES. FELIX MOLINA SITS IN A PARK HE ONCE AVOIDED FOR BEING RAT INFESTED.
0:50 · NOW IT’S NO PROBLEM AT ALL.
0:51 · MY WIFE ACTUALLY HAD A A FLOWER BED IN OUR FRONT WINDOW THAT WE COULDN’T KEEP FLOWERS IN BECAUSE THE RATS WOULD JUST COME IN AND DIG IT ALL UP AND TEAR IT ALL TO PIECES.
1:02 · AND WHAT ABOUT NOW?
1:04 · NOT NOT A PROBLEM.
1:06 · GREGORY ANDERSON IS COMMISSIONER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION, AND WE ASKED HIM WHAT’S GOING ON WITH RAT SIGHTINGS CITYWIDE.
1:14 · AND YOU HAVE SUCCESS.
1:14 · SO IT’S ROUGHLY 22% DECLINE IN RAT COMPLAINTS IN THE FIRST SEVEN MONTHS OF THIS CALENDAR YEAR COMPARED TO THE SAME TIME LAST YEAR. CONTAINERIZATION IS THE REASON.
1:24 · HELP WITH RATS ROLLING.
1:25 · OUT NEIGHBORHOOD BY NEIGHBORHOOD. AND IT’S GOING TO TAKE TIME. ACCORDING TO THE CITY, THE CITY MUST BUY HUNDREDS MORE OF THESE AUTOMATED SIDE LOADING COLLECTION TRUCKS TO GO WITH THE EMPIRE BINS.
1:35 · EVEN THOUGH WE’VE TAKEN TWO 3% OF PARKING SPACES, IT’S REALLY MADE A BIG IMPACT ON JUST HOW THE NEIGHBORHOOD LOOKS AND FEELS.
1:45 · THE FOCUS NOW PARTS OF BROOKLYN, INCLUDING DUMBO, THAN THE REST OF THE CITY.
1:48 · WE WILL BE CITYWIDE BY 2031.
1:50 · SO WE’RE ESTIMATING AROUND 60,000 BINS.
1:53 · LOOK FOR THE PARTS OF BROOKLYN TO BE COMPLETELY CONTAINE
Films
The Urban Jungle
Human Footprint The Urban Jungle Season 1
Episode 5 of Human Footprint (Season 1) - Released: 2023-08-02 - Duration: 00:54:41
<iframe width=“560” height=“315” title=Human Footprint The Urban Jungle Season 1 allow=“autoplay; encrypted-media; fullscreen” allowfullscreen=“” src=https://player.pbs.org/portalplayer/the-urban-jungle-7grk9d/?uid=2486c076-d951-436d-bf82-bac59b0b60f5&userPassportStatus=yes&callsign=KUON&station_id=b107784d-680c-48d5-8d48-ccb870cbb9dc&unsafeDisableUpsellHref=true&autoplay=true&unsafeDisableContinuousPlay=true>
Description
Shane explores three thriving urban species and envisions a wilder future for our cities.
Transcript
Shane, voice-over: Once upon a time, the Lenape called this place “Manahatta.”
A land of densely forested hills and slow-flowing streams… …it was, as Henry Hudson wrote in 1609, “as pleasant a land as one need tread upon.”
Today, all that remains of that place is the ground I’m standing on.
Rakim: If you was born in New York City Let me year you say, “You know that” Crowd: You know that!
In just a few hundred years, we cut down the forests, rerouted the streams, and leveled the hills.
In their place, we constructed a labyrinth of tunnels and pipes beneath a grid of asphalt streets lined with towers of concrete, glass, and steel.
In the blink of an eye, “Manahatta” became Manhattan.
Nas: Yeah, yeah Nas: Yo, black it’s time word?
Today, half of all humans– more than 4 billion people– live in cities.
But they’re not just a place to live.
Cities are a new ecosystem spreading across our planet.
One made by us, for us.
So how is this purpose-built human habitat treating us?
And what will it take to keep these urban jungles wild?
Nas: To the New York state of mind [Horns honking] Welcome to the Age of Humans… where one species can change everything and what we do reveals who we truly are.
This is “Human Footprint.”
The idyllic Manhattan of yesteryear was shaped by beavers, hydrological engineers whose vast earthworks transformed the entire ecosystem.
We humans alter the landscape, too.
We just do it bigger.
Humans have been called the ultimate ecosystem engineers.
And here in New York City, our talents are on full display.
Chorus: In Napoli where love is king When boy meets girl Simmering beneath this iconic skyline is a melting pot of more than 8 million people who speak 200 different languages and eat at over 1,400 pizzerias.
Man: As a New Yorker, I always lean towards pepperoni.
Shane: I can respect that.
Shane, voice-over: Bobby Corrigan is one of those 8 million New Yorkers.
He loves everything about this place: a good slice of pepperoni, the city lights, and, oh, yeah…rats.
In college, I had to save money, so I took a job as an exterminator.
They put me in the sewers right away… and I thought, “Oh, this is cool.”
Literally working your way from the bottom up.
Exactly.
Shane, voice-over: Bobby spends his free time writing poetry on the street, but by day, he’s a world-renowned urban rodentologist.
Are rats the scourge that people make them out to be?
I admire them.
I respect them.
However, they live in dirty areas.
Shane, voice-over: And, uh, that dirt got cooties.
It’s viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoans.
55 different diseases.
55?
Wow.
OK. And think of the plague, Shane.
You know, I mean, 25 million people go down with the black rat and their fleas.
Yeah.
Shane, voice-over: No place needs Bobby’s expertise more than New York, where it seems like rats are pretty much everywhere.
Here we are, sitting at a restaurant.
If that door over there is not pest proof into the pizza shop, across the kitchen counter, and urinates and defecates and leaves a film, and then someone touches the film the next morning, and then, you know, boom.
This pizza’s tasting a little less good now.
Ha!
Yeah.
Shane, voice-over: It was time to walk off that pizza on what Bobby calls a rat safari.
We’re gonna cross over here, Shane.
There’s a park here.
Here we are, almost at the end of June.
You know, their breeding season is in full swing.
Love is in the air.
Love is totally in the air, and families are growing.
Narrator: We know that rats are the most prolific of all mammals.
A single pair of rats would become 360 million in the short space of 3 years.
As the sidewalks begin to deteriorate, the rats will move below the sidewalks for their burrows.
You’re literally sometimes walking right over the tops of the heads of rats.
Sometimes, rats will go right up the tree if there’s a bird nest up there.
They’re predacious on those birds.
Is the reason why you’re wearing the hard hat because a rat might jump out of the tree onto you, and is that something I need to worry about?
Actually, that would be cool if they would jump onto me.
I’d like that a lot.
[Laughs] Shane, voice-over: The longer rats live in our cities, the better they get at it… and the harder we try to keep them out.
Here we have something that’s very common: the bait box.
The rats will go inside that box and find the poison bait.
And 8, 9, 10 days later, they die.
Shane, voice-over: But no matter how much poison we throw at the problem, we’re also throwing rats a lifeline.
Bobby: The rats are gonna be where the food is easy to get to.
All they have to do– 50 feet away, right there.
Shane, voice-over: New York City has 25,000 restaurants– not counting the pizzerias– and millions of home chefs.
3 nights a week, every one of them puts their trash not in a dumpster, not in a can with a lid, but right on the curb.
Bobby: Food in a big city of high-density humans?
Extremely reliable.
So this becomes, like, basically the rat buffet.
It does.
Shane, voice-over: They say if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
And rats…well, they made it.
But how did they get here in the first place?
[Squeaking] Man: If we want to know the story of rats in New York City, we have to know what were they doing before they got here.
Shane, voice-over: This is Jason Munshi-South.
He’s a biologist who loves New York City almost as much as he loves rats.
[Ships’ horns blare] When the brown rat made it here, it sort of hit the jackpot.
Shane, voice-over: The brown rat, or Rattus norvegicus, probably originated in East Asia, where it was first drawn to human settlements by agriculture.
But as people around the world moved into dense cities full of trash, human waste, and safe hiding places, rat populations soared.
Without meaning to, we built a rat paradise.
Narrator: Rats don’t have to go to much trouble to find homes because we provide these for them, made to order, everything but the welcome mat.
It’s like, “Oh.
There’s this massive free food here now, and all I gotta do is hang around these people.”
Shane, voice-over: At the height of European imperialism, rats were already entrenched in cities and ports across the Old World.
So when European explorers sailed west into the unknown, rats did what they’ve always done and came along.
Where we are now is where the Dutch bought the island or stole the island.
I put my money on stole, but go ahead.
But the original… Shane, voice-over: By the early 1900s, it wasn’t just white human settlers who’d colonized all of North America.
It was also rats.
But not all rat habitat is created equal.
I’m gonna show you some different pressures in different parts of the city.
OK. We’re gonna go get that New York City tour.
Yeah, let’s do it.
All right, awesome.
[Engine revving] [Woman singing indistinctly] Jason: Yeah, as you’re driving from Battery Park, where the rats first came in, up to here, you know, this is one of the great rat neighborhoods of the world.
[Shane laughs] Shane, voice-over: But if you keep rolling north, the whole vibe changes.
And Jason’s got the data to prove it.
Jason: We got basically about 70,000 points where rats have been identified.
And this is the outcome of the map, where the green areas are really good rat neighborhoods, like where we are right now, right about there, near Tompkins Square.
But then see this red area here south of Central Park?
-Uh-huh.
-That’s Midtown, where there isn’t a lot of residential.
The companies pay extra money to have the streets cleaned up.
And it seems to create this almost, like, dead zone for rats.
Shane, voice-over: Jason can predict the size of rat populations in different neighborhoods by looking at data on humans.
Jason: Areas that are highly residential and mixed commercial that have a lot of restaurants, super predictive of rats, not surprisingly.
And older neighborhoods with older buildings, they really like that.
Shane, voice-over: The places where rats have food to eat and places to hide are the places they thrive.
On the flip side, take those things away and the rats disappear, too.
It seems so simple.
And yet, somehow… Bobby: Go to any city around the world and it’s plagued with rats.
We are not winning this war.
Shane, voice-over: Rodenticides, or rat poisons, have become a go-to weapon in the war on rats.
But rats are becoming resistant, pushing people to switch up the formula and apply even more rodenticides to keep rat populations in check.
And it’s not just poisons.
Our campaign against rats has grown into a $3 billion-a-year effort, involving legions of people around the world.
We’ve even conscripted other species into the war effort.
[Indistinct chatter] All right.
So this is our service center.
Shane: It’s like the gym, playhouse, sauna, exercise room, all together.
OK. All together, all together.
Shane, voice-over: When Scott Mullaney and his wife Angie aren’t cruising down a scenic highway… [Revving] …they’re training little dogs to do a big job.
[Engine revs, tires squeal] Instead of poison or traps, their company uses dogs to kill rats.
It’s actually nothing new.
As cities grew bigger and denser in the 19th century, rat populations exploded, and people created whole new dog breeds just to kill them.
We’ve worked them on top of 12-story buildings.
We’ve worked them in supermarkets.
We’ve worked them on airplanes.
We’ve worked them on trains, on trains, planes, and automobiles.
I mean, really, any environment you can think of.
Shane, voice-over: Over the years, Scott and Angie’s small team has killed more than 30,000 rats.
Scott: All right, you’re gonna leash up.
Here ya go, kid.
There ya go.
Dogs always give 100%.
They just love what they do.
We’re just gonna finish up so we can close up and go.
Last but not least.
[Engine starts, revs] [Distant siren] [Squeaking] OK, guys, so what we’re gonna do is, we’re just gonna take the leashes off the dogs.
I want to start right over here.
And you can see his kinetic energy.
He just– he’s on point right now.
He knows what the deal is.
Take the leash off and unleash them now.
Shane: It’s game time.
Scott: OK, we got something over here!
[Growling] Angie: Wooo!
Shane: Wow!
Scott: Good job.
This is bananas.
Shane, voice-over: It looks like chaos, but this is actually highly coordinated.
The dogs find the rats with their keen noses.
The handlers move dumpsters and pallets to expose them, and the dogs finish the job.
Yep.
Inside the bait box.
Shane, voice-over: Oh, and the hockey sticks?
Those are for cutting off escape routes.
Angie: Wooo!
Ohh!
Shane, voice-over: The dogs look like they’re having a blast.
The rats?
Well, not so much.
Scott: It’s still alive.
Hold on for a second.
Shane: Oh, my God!
Angie: Hey!
Scott: Yep.
Yeah, just make sure that nothing takes off the other way.
Angie: Good job, guys!
Scott: OK, we’ve got something over here, I think.
[Soft crunching] There are things that I have seen that I cannot unsee, and I will be having a whole different kind of nightmare from now on.
[Both laugh] What do you think our situation with rats says about us?
I think it’s pathetic.
As long as human beings continue with their sanita– poor sanitation habits, OK, and their lack of concern, we will never get rid of rats.
They’re here to stay.
Shane, voice-over: When people come together to live in cities, we create the perfect environment for rats.
They’ve been living with us for centuries.
When European settlers brought them to the New World, rats just had to keep doing what they were best at to thrive here, too.
But further south, in the Caribbean, another species is evolving before our very eyes to fit into an ever-more-urbanized world.
[Horn blares] Juan Ponce De Leon founded the settlement that became San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1508, making it one of the oldest colonial cities in the Americas.
500 years later, that tiny colony has grown into the third-largest city in the Caribbean Islands.
But amazingly, you can still see native wildlife here.
If you walk through the city, you’ll just see them on everything.
Shane, voice-over: Kristin Winchell is an expert in urban evolution.
She studies lizards called anoles, which live all over the American tropics.
For Kristin, anoles aren’t just a scientific inspiration.
They’re also her artistic muse.
[Foamer sputtering] So for you, I guess first of all, what is the greatest animal, and why is it anoles?
Ha ha!
I don’t know.
They’re just fantastic, little critters.
They’re so expressive and so charismatic.
And, I mean, they’re also great for scientific study.
Shane, voice-over: If you can’t tell, I’m a big anole fan, too.
I used to catch them as a kid in South Carolina and I’ve been studying them since grad school.
In fact, Kristin and I actually work together on anole research here in Puerto Rico.
So of all the places to study these lizards, why cities?
But I feel like most people, they’re like, “OK, I want to study them, like, in forests,” and things like that.
You decided to go study them in the city.
It was because I was looking for a species that might be adapting to urban environments.
I came across anoles and started reading about their rich evolutionary history and rapid change after you modify the environment.
Shane, voice-over: Anoles might seem like unlikely science heroes, but biologists have been studying them for decades and published literally thousands of papers on them.
There are more than 400 species of anoles that live throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the Southeastern U.S. And I just had this moment where I was like, “If this is happening, it’s in these guys.”
Shane, voice-over: Once you know what you’re looking for, anole adaptations can be easy to spot.
You see, species that live in different habitats have different traits: big toe pads that help them stick to leaves in the treetops; long legs that allow them to run fast on the ground; short legs that help them climb without falling on the tiniest twigs; and so on.
Kristin’s question was, which of these traits, if any, would help anoles survive in the city?
Kristin: All right, let’s find some lizards.
Shane, voice-over: Kristin and I study the Puerto Rican crested anole.
Step one is to find out whether urban and forest anoles are different from one another.
Kristin: Say it, and the lizard gods will deliver.
Yeah, there’s a female right there.
Shane, voice-over: So we hit the streets to catch some lizards.
Kristin: Oh, she’s squirrely.
Shane: You’re too slow, K. Stop embarrassing yourself on TV.
I had one and then I let–yeah, OK.
Thanks, Shane.
Ha ha ha ha!
That’s real nice.
Invite me on your show and then make fun of me.
Shane: Ha ha ha ha!
Shane, voice-over: Catching anoles is a delicate scientific process involving a fishing pole and some string.
Luckily, I came prepared… maybe a little too prepared.
Who comes out catching anoles in flip-flops?
This is how you catch urban anoles!
You don’t need those big boots.
[Laughs] You go out in your hiking boots and your field clothes, well, you’re gonna get a lot of looks.
You dress casual like you’re going out on– for a little walk, even bring a little boom box with you.
That helps a lot, ’cause no one walks around doing sketchy stuff listening to reggaeton.
Kristin: Got him first.
Shane: Ha ha ha!
Hey, bud.
We measure with a digital X-ray the–all the bones in the body.
And you can see that they have these enlarged toe pads on the fore and the hind feet.
And so if you were to zoom way in on those, you’d be able to see these tiny scales, and those let the lizards cling to the smooth surfaces.
Shane: So for the Puerto Rican crested anole, what did you find?
One of my initial findings was that in the city, the lizards had longer limbs relative to their body length, larger toe pads with more of these specialized scales on the toe pads.
OK. Shane, voice-over: These are exactly the kinds of adaptations you might expect to see in cities, based on what we already know about anoles living elsewhere.
Kristin: They’re clinging to things like glass and metal and even painted concrete, which is a lot smoother than anything you find in the forest.
And so there’s kind of this combined selective pressure on toe pads, making them able to cling better, and limb length, making them able to navigate the structural environment better.
OK. Shane, voice-over: The urban lizards were different, but the real test was whether they could actually outperform their forest-dwelling counterparts when facing a uniquely urban challenge.
So I set up a lizard racetrack, and I fitted the racetrack with different surfaces.
One was tree bark, one was metal, like fence post metal, and then one was painted concrete.
And then I took high-speed video of these lizards racing up the racetracks.
And what I found was– or what I expected, rather, I should start there, is that the urban lizards would be able to run faster on the concrete and the metal and the urban substrates.
Those are the environments that they were living in.
Yeah, exactly.
And so they’d be better at doing that than the forest lizards.
What I found, though, was that the urban lizard’s just faster overall.
On anything.
On anything.
Even, like, bark and stuff that’s in forests.
Yeah, even bark, no matter what angle, no matter what structure we put on the track surface, they were faster.
They’re just hot rods.
Mm-hmm.
Shane, voice-over: In grad school, I studied how anoles in Texas– where the Polar Vortex causes rare but intense cold snaps– were adapting to the cold.
When I found out about Kristin’s work in cities, I realized her urban anoles could be facing a different kind of extreme.
Kristin: When I came down and tried out this big idea of “are anoles adapting to cities,” one of the things that I measured was body temperature and air temperature.
Shane, voice-over: Cities create what scientists call “urban heat islands,” areas with much hotter temperatures than the surrounding landscape.
So a few years ago, Kristin and I decided to find out how urban and forest anoles responded to extreme heat.
Sure enough, urban anoles could take the heat better than forest anoles, and we even found a few of the genes that affect heat tolerance.
These adaptations aren’t unique to any one city.
We found the same differences between urban and forest anoles again and again, all over Puerto Rico.
We can think of cities as the big Petri dishes that are replicated on a much larger scale.
Shane, voice-over: No two cities are exactly alike.
But for anoles, all cities have some things in common.
To survive on the streets, crested anoles evolved longer legs, bigger toe pads, and better heat tolerance than their forest relatives.
And it happened fast.
Some of our urban study locations have only been cities for 30 years.
That’s evolution in overdrive, even in lizard time.
So is this a feel-good story of animal adaptability?
Kristin: I think it’s a big mistake for us to think that all animals are gonna be able to adapt their way out of this.
We still are going to lose a lot of species as urbanization progresses.
OK. Shane, voice-over: Only two of Puerto Rico’s 10 anole species are found in cities, and just one, the crested anole, is really thriving.
So yes, some species can adapt, but the ones that don’t get squeezed out.
Kristin: I mean, that’s another reason why we should be studying the plants and animals that are doing well here, so that we can maybe engineer cities to be a little more favorable to wildlife.
Shane: So typically, when we think of ecosystems, right, we think of things like forests or deserts.
Should we consider cities as ecosystems as well?
Yes, absolutely.
And we should consider them as distinct ecosystems, just like we do all those others.
Shane, voice-over: Some folks aren’t as comfortable as Kristin with calling cities ecosystems.
But the more I learn about urban biology, the harder I find it to think of them as anything else.
Still, San Juan is no Serengeti.
For one thing, I don’t see any big predators in the streets.
But in major U.S. cities, that’s beginning to change.
With the second-highest population density in the U.S., right after New York City, San Francisco doesn’t seem like the ideal place for a large, wild predator.
But coyotes are full of surprises.
Just ask Officer Stephanie Pone.
One of the many things that I really love about this job is that every single day is a surprise.
Yeah.
It’s different.
There’s never a shortage of ways for animals to get themselves into conundrums.
OK. Nate Rose: Don’t you ever come up out the cracks And try to tell me how to get it Shane, voice-over: Stephanie’s sopapillas are the stuff of legend.
Rose: Spending any time just talking with me Shane: When she isn’t practicing her culinary craft, Stephanie patrols the streets for San Francisco’s Department of Animal Care and Control.
Rose: Tell me how to get it poppin’ really Stephanie: The most succinct way to describe it is that we are responsible for public safety as it relates to animals.
One time, I had a coyote call at Fisherman’s Wharf where the coyote was just chilling but being kind of a weirdo.
And I tried to approach to see if maybe there was something wrong, and the coyote got so scared that it jumped into the bay.
Oh, wow.
And then I had to do a boat rescue to rescue the coyote out of the bay.
And I was like, if I had just stayed out of it, the coyote would’ve been fine.
So it wasn’t like, “You’ll never get me, copper!”
And then he jumps into the– I mean, maybe.
I wouldn’t blame him.
[Laughter] Shane, voice-over: Stephanie’s department gets quite a few calls about coyotes.
I get it.
There’s something about seeing a predator walking down your sidewalk that would be very alarming.
Shane, voice-over: Coyote sightings are becoming increasingly common here, and not just in the city’s green spaces.
We see a lot of coyotes here.
We get a lot of reports in this area, but also in the neighborhood, which is part of the issue.
Shane, voice-over: It’s rare that a coyote actually harms a human or pet.
Still, public opinion of these predators is… let’s just say mixed.
Just like our beautiful city, the response is very diverse.
We get people that on one end, love animals, but they treat them like dogs, and that is terrible for the coyotes and it’s terrible for public safety.
And then we have the complete other end, where people think that they have no business being here and that they should all be killed.
Most people are somewhere in the middle.
Speaking as myself and not as a representative of the city, I’m quite fond of them.
I think it’s magical.
I never get tired of seeing them.
I also am a dog owner, and I have a teeny-tiny little dog who would be the perfect size for a coyote snack.
Shane, voice-over: For many people, it’s fear for their pets that tips the scales against coyotes.
It was 2015 when we started having coyote attacks.
Shane, voice-over: Karin Hu has lived in this neighborhood for 30 years.
I understand why people want coyotes in the city.
We love to look at wildlife, you know?
Maybe teaching people to appreciate the other types of, you know, things we have, like…
This last winter, I saw over 25 species of mushrooms.
I mean, that’s fascinating!
Shane, voice-over: When Karin isn’t teaching a course on psychoactive drugs at the local university, she’s out walking her dog.
And where coyotes are concerned, Karin’s vote is a “no.”
At least, not in her neighborhood.
Is your main concern the safety of your dog, or do you have other concerns as well?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, it’s– It’s all–OK.
If I didn’t have little dogs, I wouldn’t– this wouldn’t be my issue at all.
How do you go about deciding what belongs and what doesn’t belong?
It’s all values.
So my pets, the small dogs in this neighborhood, the cats in the neighborhood, are very high value.
And, yeah, there is value to having, you know, wildlife like coyotes around, but that’s a lower value, as soon as you start being a risk to our family members.
Some people feel uncomfortable and they try to, like, make a rationalization.
I just say, “No, that’s how we are.”
It just is what it is.
Yeah, we’re speciesists, you know?
We value some species more than others.
OK. Shane, voice-over: Historically, we’ve never valued coyotes much in the U.S. To this day, we kill almost half a million of them every year.
But it doesn’t seem to faze them.
Today, coyotes inhabit more of the continent than ever, including thriving populations in major cities.
So researchers want to know, what’s the secret sauce?
Why are coyotes so good at living in the habitat we’ve built for ourselves?
Woman: A big part of what I’ve done is walk around the city looking for coyote scat.
Scat, which is poop, just to be clear.
It is poop, yep.
OK. When I had you to myself Shane, voice-over: This is Tali Caspi.
If she isn’t playing one of my all-time favorite tunes on her upright bass, you might find her scouring the sidewalks for scientific treasure.
You ever have somebody walk by and just look at you like you’re an absolute maniac?
All the time, but actually, San Francisco is full of weird people.
So a lot of people just walk by and they’re just like– Makes sense.
Normal day, yeah.
Sometimes, you just gotta pick up some poop.
Totally, but when I do have those conversations with people, what’s really cool about it is everyone has something to share or contribute.
Yeah.
It’s pretty hard to be a resident of this city and not have had some kind of interaction or story with an urban coyote.
It’s so foggy.
Ha ha!
At this point, I’ve walked around 950 kilometers of urban trails in the city over the span of two years– Your Fitbit must be lighting up!
Tali: Oh yeah, it is.
Basically walking around, trying to find signs of coyote activity to help me find scat that I then pick up and bring into the lab.
And speaking of the devil… Shane: It’s coyote poop!
Tali: Fresh coyote scat right here.
Shane, voice-over: In the last two years, Tali has collected more than 1,300 scat samples.
In the scat are clues about the urban lifestyle of coyotes.
Everything they eat leaves trace evidence behind in the form of DNA.
It’s the DNA of the coyote, but then everything that the coyote ate as well.
Can you tell from the work that you’ve done, you know, like, how much cat DNA or, you know, Chihuahua DNA is in a coyote poop?
Yeah, so unfortunately, I can’t tell how much Chihuahua DNA is in a coyote poop, because coyotes and dogs are actually pretty similar, but I’ve definitely found some cat reads in the scat, but it is by no means the majority or most significant component of their diet.
OK.
The parts of their diet that have come out thus far as sort of the biggest contributors are pocket gophers, pigeons are pretty common, and then these livestock breeds.
so cow, chicken and turkey, pig.
And these are obviously not animals that the coyotes are hunting in San Francisco.
God, I hope not.
Yeah, these are either foods that people are giving to the coyotes or are sort of foraged from garbage bins, from trash, or from cat food and dog food that people leave out.
OK. Shane, voice-over: So coyotes are doing some hunting in the city, but like the rats I met in New York, they’re also making use of what we leave behind.
It may just be that city life is easy living if you’re a coyote.
From somebody who has been studying these animals, what is your take on coyotes in the city?
They’re here.
They’ve been here.
And they’re going to stay here.
Let’s say, tomorrow I could snap my fingers and take all of the coyotes out of the city.
They’d come back, because in all the surrounding areas, there are so many coyotes ready to just colonize an open territory.
The best thing we can do is think about coexistence with coyotes and how can we coexist with them as neighbors in our cities.
Shane, voice-over: That can be hard, because we build cities for ourselves.
These places are supposed to be for us, but coyotes shatter that illusion.
Maybe that’s why so many people have strong feelings about them, both negative and positive.
[Howling] Man: I love them to death.
I think they’re– they–yeah.
They are such a fantastic species.
Yeah.
They give us so many lessons.
Mm.
Shane, voice-over: Meet my friend Chris Schell.
This man can grill up a mouth-watering rack of ribs.
He’s also a professor at UC Berkeley, where he studies how coyotes and other animals live in cities.
How do you go about studying coyotes in this kind of environment?
We use techniques that we use in traditional ecological studies.
Everything from camera traps to fecal transects to GPS collars on the animals.
Shane, voice-over: This camera trap is one of dozens that Chris and his team have placed to observe wildlife in the city.
Chris: So we want to try and put the camera in places where we know wildlife are likely going to be, even though we know people are in the general area.
So let’s go ahead and just go out and view out and see, OK, did we get anything that is for us noteworthy?
Now, we’re super biased.
We’re always thinking about the carnivores.
OK. Chris: And here I already see we got a gray fox.
Shane: Oh, yeah!
Chris: If we continue to scroll, more skunks, another person, more deer.
Man, it’s a higher density of animals than I would expect.
Like, this is just over the course of a few days.
Right.
Wow.
Shane, voice-over: Here in the lush Berkeley Hills, carnivores like foxes and coyotes flourish.
But cities aren’t monoliths.
Just down the hill in Emeryville, the habitat– if you want to call it that– doesn’t look as inviting.
Chris: There’s a lot of concrete here.
Mm-hmm.
As we’re driving through, I’m seeing more built structures.
I’m seeing less vegetation.
I’m seeing less ways for animals to get from point A to point B. Shane, voice-over: But Chris’ team set up a camera anyway…just to see.
Shane: Are you getting coyotes in as dense a number here as you would elsewhere in the city?
So no, we’re not.
And the only species we’ve really caught on that camera have been ground squirrels or raccoons.
OK. OK. And that’s it.
So a good chunk of the wildlife that we saw up at some of the other sites up in the hills, gray foxes, for instance, they aren’t here.
Shane, voice-over: Animals know good habitat when they see it, and wealthy neighborhoods can be brimming with the things wild species need– trees, water, safe places to hide.
Chris: So property values can positively correlate with the likelihood that you’re going to see a coyote or other wildlife species in an area.
And that’s called the luxury effect.
Oh, OK.
So urban species trying to live bougie, too, is what you’re saying?
Oh, yeah!
Right, they’re trying to make it work, like, “Oh, but this neighborhood over here, though?”
So many of the historical processes that have happened in cities… think residential segregation via redlining, or urban renewal programs that then led to displacement, gentrification also, leading to socioeconomic disparities in and across this urban landscape, right?
This entire landscape is constructed, and when we understand how its construction leads to amenities and disamenities therein, we start to understand that we aren’t the only organisms that are being affected by this.
Mm.
That history, right, you’re talking about things, the discrimination, racism, redlining.
Basically, what you’re saying is, more than social, more than economic, they’re tangibly biological.
Right.
Simply put, the past is present.
Shane, voice-over: The noise, the air pollution, the heat, the toxic byproducts of industry, the impacts of urban living hit harder in some places than others.
Chris: Even cities as close as San Francisco and the East Bay or Berkeley and Oakland are so separate from each other.
And the animals, they give us these lessons through how they move, through what they do, through what they eat.
Some organisms, like raccoons, for instance, if they eat too many human foods, develop diabetes.
They develop diabetes!
Oh, wow.
Right?
Just ’cause they’re there doesn’t mean that they’re doing well.
Yeah.
So does the way that animals interact with their environment in a city teach us anything new about how we exist in a city as a species?
They serve as the beacons.
The “bioindicators” is the term we often use.
They are the conduits to allow us to better understand that many of these disparities that hit communities of color, low-income communities really hard are also the same things that are destroying the natural world.
The policies that separate us from us are also those same policies that separate us from the natural world.
Shane, voice-over: Many animals living in our cities don’t know anything else.
So they learn to survive against all odds, even if they can’t really thrive.
It kind of makes me wonder: What if we humans are the same way?
We are impoverishing ourselves, and that’s just the hard truth, that we are hurting ourselves and we don’t know it.
Shane, voice-over: This is Peter Kahn.
When he isn’t serenading the wild on his homemade flute, he studies our species’ shifting relationship with nature.
Peter’s interest in cities dates back to the nineties, when he asked kids in Houston, Texas a couple of simple questions.
We just asked this kind of preliminary question, “Do you know what air pollution is?”
And they said, “Yeah, yeah,” all of them.
Then we asked the second question, which was, “Does Houston have air pollution?”
And the significant number of children went from, “Yes.
Yeah, I understand what air pollution is,” to “No, Houston doesn’t have air pollution,” which completely blew us away.
Because, at the time, Houston was the most polluted city in the United States.
How could these kids growing up in the most polluted city in the United States, how could they not know about that their city was polluted?
And that’s the start, for me, some 30 years ago, in thinking about this issue, about environmental generational amnesia.
That the children are coming of age, and they’re constructing a baseline of what normal is.
Shane, voice-over: That mouthful of a phrase, “environmental generational amnesia,” refers to the way that each generation grows up thinking that their experience of the world is normal.
So in our urbanizing world, the less nature we experience, the less we think we need.
With each generation, nature becomes smaller.
Wilderness becomes a city park and then a row of trees in a median and then…nothing at all.
And thanks to this so-called amnesia, most of us never notice.
Peter: I think we’re building urban prisons.
I think we’re imprisoning ourselves.
Shane, voice-over: Peter’s concerns are rooted in real data.
Depression and anxiety are more common in cities than outside them.
And some studies show that exposure to nature can help, not just with mental health, but physical health, too.
It reduces stress, reduces obesity, helps eyesight, reduces depression.
I mean, the list is on and on.
Can modern cities be transformed into something that allows us to sort of reconnect in that ancestral way with our environment while still having all of the functional components of a city?
Yeah.
There’s some marvelous parts of cities, and I think we both appreciate them so much.
And it’s the coming together of different groups and different energies, different knowledge.
The creativity is so amazing in cities.
We can make them better and we should make them better.
Yeah.
Um… but here’s the thing.
They can get a lot worse, and unless we push back, try to make them better, they will get worse.
Shane, voice-over: We haven’t reached “peak city” yet, not even close.
By 2050, 2/3 of us will live in urban areas.
So as cities continue to grow, how can we create a less dystopian urban future?
Halfway around the world, architects and urban planners are pushing back and reimagining what city living can be, for us and the rest of nature.
In every city I’ve ever lived in, green spaces felt like an escape.
They were in the city but not of the city.
Singapore is different.
Here, nature is never more than a few blocks away.
Everywhere you look, buildings are exploding with life.
[Rooster crows] It feels like a miracle.
Woman: Is it your first time in Singapore?
Shane: It is.
Man, this place, it’s– I’ve never seen anything like it.
It’s incredible.
Shane, voice-over: If you ask Pearl Chee, she’ll tell you it’s no miracle.
It’s all part of the plan.
Pearl: We are challenging ourselves as architects whether we can design better.
We are creating a lot of concrete buildings, it’s like a concrete jungle, but we really want to bring the jungle in.
Shane, voice-over: Pearl is the architect who designed the Kampung Admiralty, the building we’re standing in now.
Pearl: Our design concept, it’s a very unique combination.
We actually have elderly housing, public housing, combined with healthcare, which is a medical center, commercial and some social programs, and a food court, yeah.
Shane: Oh, wow.
So that’s why it’s not gated.
It’s very open.
Anybody can actually come in and use the facilities here.
Shane, voice-over: Singapore is the third most densely populated city in the world.
The entire country is an island with only 281 square miles of land, but 5.5 million people live here.
In a city this dense, you wouldn’t expect much room for nature.
But it’s like they say: where there’s a will, there’s a way.
And by will, I mean law.
Legislation enables it to happen.
The building took the land.
So we need to do replacement.
The legislation actually requires a building to give back 100% landscape.
Oh!
100% of the site footprint has to be replaced into the building.
Every square inch of, like, green space that you take up, you have to put back in…
Put back in, yeah.
into the building somehow.
Into the building.
Shane, voice-over: A few years after completing the building, Pearl’s firm surveyed the animal life in Kampung Admiralty’s gardens.
50 different species had moved in.
Pearl: The species in this building is higher than the species on the ground park.
Oh, really?
Yeah, which is right nearby.
So…
Wait, so there’s more species within this construction than in, like, a natural space of the same amount of greenery?
Yeah, correct.
That’s incredible.
Thinking about an entire city built like this, basically, you’re talking about reforestation and urbanization as sort of one and the same.
Correct.
[Crows] Shane, voice-over: This development is a microcosm of what’s happening all over Singapore.
It’s not just one building or designer or architecture firm.
The whole city is teeming with life.
Narrator: It’s hard to believe that not so long ago, war surged around it and even in it.
Singapore, cosmopolis of the East.
Malays, Chinese, Indians, and British have taken time by the forelock, and the shops and market stalls dazzle the eye and make our mouths water.
As you sort of, like, move around the city now, you know, do you, you know, like, do you go to places and you’re like, “Oh, this is my baby”?
Yeah, yeah.
All the time.
[Laughter] Shane, voice-over: Professor Cheong Koon Hean is a music lover and life-long Singaporean.
She’s also a legendary urban planner.
A lot of folks credit her with shaping Singapore’s singular urban landscape.
BAER: Raise a toast to the GOAT, yeah Cheong: This is one of my favorite neighborhood centers in a public housing estate.
Because in Singapore, 80% of the people live in public housing in estates like this.
Oh, wow.
In highly affordable housing.
Shane, voice-over: Kampung Admiralty, the building Pearl Chee designed, is public housing, too.
And these places are cush.
The apartments are modern and clean, the amenities are incredible, and most developments are a 10-minute or less walk from public transportation.
And, of course, everything is draped in greenery, from the street level to the tops of the skyscrapers.
Where I come from, when we say “public housing,” basically, like, we call it “the projects.”
And I was actually raised a lot in public housing.
And that public housing and this public housing are not the same thing.
Well, you can’t believe it when you come to Singapore today, but, say, about 60, 70 years ago, actually, Singapore was a nation of slums and squatters.
It was also polluted and lots of traffic congestion.
Shane, voice-over: When Singapore gained its sovereignty from Britain in 1959, it was a city of 1.5 million people and massive, unplanned sprawl.
Tens of thousands of people had no place to live.
So the newly elected government created the HDB, or Housing and Development Board.
Cheong: And within 5 years, the HDB, they already built 51,000 units of flats.
It started from very basic housing, but now, of course, the quality is a lot better, as you can see around you.
Yeah.
Shane, voice-over: And public housing is just the beginning.
Singapore is a very small city-state.
It’s actually only half the size of metropolitan London.
Oh, wow.
But we are a country.
We’re not just a city.
So everything you need about a country, whether it’s for water, power generation, ports, airports, plus housing, shops, offices, industry, all has to be built within this tiny island city-state.
And so biodiversity and ecological balance became really quite an important concept.
Now, as we developed the land, of course we start to lose space for planting.
So what did we do?
We decided to move the greenery upwards into the sky.
And so, what you did is you just created new space.
And suddenly, you bring back all the biodiversity.
Back in the States, urban areas and wildlife are sort of like oil and water.
They don’t mix very well.
But what you’ve done here is something very, very different.
Over the years, we moved from being a garden city to a city in the garden because we started to plant so extensively.
And in the last decade or so, we moved from a city in a garden to city in nature.
In a place where you have limited space and you have this growing population that there are two very sort of competing needs.
Shane, absolutely, there’s always competing needs, right?
So it’s really this very important balancing act of allocating the right amount of land for different uses to create this type of an environment.
Shane, voice-over: And who orchestrates this balancing act?
It’s the Singaporean government, with their comprehensive “Master Plan” for managing the city-state’s ongoing growth.
By centralizing the control of urban development, Singapore paves the way– you see what I did there– for projects that fuse function and form.
Cheong: If you look behind us, the Punggol Waterway is actually a man-made river.
We dammed up two rivers to become freshwater reservoirs.
Now, the engineers wanted to connect the two reservoirs with a pipe– very functional.
But then the architects and the planners say, “Why do a pipe?
Why don’t we make a river?”
And so, this river connected the two reservoirs to balance and optimize the storage of water, but at the same time, it became a leisure facility.
So Punggol has a nickname.
It’s the Venice of Singapore.
Oh, that’s amazing.
Because we brought in water, right?
It has its aesthetics, but everything also serves… Function, yes, a function.
a very specific function.
Even the Punggol Waterway, there’s a family of otters that have come back.
Oh, that’s incredible.
They live on the Punggol Waterway.
Shane, voice-over: Singapore challenges a lot of what I thought I knew about cities.
No one’s saying that we should all be like Singapore, or even that we could be.
This place is unique.
90% of Singapore’s land is publicly owned.
The government determines what gets built and where.
And with everyone sharing the same tiny island, by definition, they’re all in this together.
Most places don’t have all that.
But I’m not sure we need it to re-imagine what cities can be.
I think the thing that stands out to me about Singapore is the intentionality.
I’m not sure if this specific model can be applied anywhere or everywhere, but I think they’re doing things that I think other cities can learn from.
We have to get our act together to make cities effective.
Creativity, innovation, and that will to survive and to want to do well are very, very strong drivers.
That’s human beings, right?
That’s what we are.
Shane, voice-over: Cities might just be humankind’s most remarkable invention.
Because we thought we were building ourselves a place to live, but we were really creating a new ecosystem, a place where nature has to adapt to live alongside us and some of our urban neighbors are more welcome than others.
City living brings challenges– for us and all the species that share our urban spaces.
But we shouldn’t forget that cities can also help us flourish.
In Oakland, Chris said something that stuck with me.
We are a communal species.
So for folks to think, “Well, if you just get outside the city, you’ll be OK,” nah, nah, nah, it doesn’t work like that.
We need to be able to have connection.
Shane, voice-over: That’s why cities aren’t going anywhere and why we need to make them better.
With a little creativity and vision, they can deliver that connection– to each other and maybe to the rest of our incredible planet, too.
Human Footprint is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.
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