Something's in the Air (The Airborne Transmission Error)

Public Health is Dead

How a mixup about airborne transmission led to one of the biggest public health errors in history. 5 years since the COVID pandemic began, public health has yet to clearly address it. A lot of disease spread happens through the air we share. And most people don’t know.

Over the last century, our growing understanding of pathogens and the ways they spread allowed public health to mitigate, eliminate, and even eradicate diseases in many parts of the world. We thought we knew it all. But pride comes before a fall. Public health has been missing a big part of how diseases like COVID spread and it's cost us a lot.

Join your host, Daniella, to learn how a group of aerosol scientists teamed up with Dr. Katie Randall, a medical rhetorician and historian, and toppled the house of cards holding up the idea that sprayed droplets are the main route of respiratory disease transmission. Small aerosols that we constantly breathe out can be suspended in the air and carry pathogens that cause disease. This is airborne transmission.

How did public health leaders dismiss airborne transmission for so long even though we've known about it for TB, measles, and SARS for decades? And, now that scientists understand much more about how diseases spread, how can public health adapt to protect us? Dr. Al Haddrell, an aerosol scientist, walks us through how aerosol works and how we can interrupt disease transmission with new knowledge. Something’s in the air... and it might be a paradigm shift.

RESOURCES

• WIRED article by Megan Molteni: "How a 60-year-old screwup helped COVID kill" (archived version)
• Learn more about aerosol on Dr. Al Haddrell's YouTube channel (some ft. Transformers. IYKYK). I like this 5-minute video he made about why we can see cigarette smoke but not exhaled aerosol.
• Ambient carbon dioxide concentration correlates with SARS-CoV-2 aerostability and infection risk. A. Haddrell et al (2024)
• How did we get here: what are droplets and aerosols and how far do they go? A historical perspective on the transmission of respiratory infectious diseases. K. Randall et. al (2021)
• Dr. Katie Randall's TEDx talk The tiny COVID mistake with deadly implications
• Get your free respirators from the global directory of MaskBlocs

CREDITS
Public Health is Dead is created, hosted, produced, written, and edited by Daniella Barreto.
Music, mixing, and sound design by Alexandria Maillot.
Fact checking, guest booking, and production support from Anika S.
Content editing support from Kevin Ball, Sophie Kohn, Anika S and Lauren M.
Thank you to Tom J. for the archive of COVID press conference footage.
Episode art created by Daniella from Hendrik Goltzius, after Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem: Icarus, from "The Four Disgracers" (1588) and CDC image of H5N1.
Thank you to all Public Health is Dead supporters!
N.B. It’s a bad idea for you to take medical advice from podcasts. Good thing this show does not offer medical advice! The point of Public Health is Dead is to share experiences and information that might help public health as a field and increase our collective knowledge.

This is an independent, listener-supported show. If you like what you hear, and you'd like to support production costs for more of Public Health is Dead, visit publichealthisdead.com!