Clinical Conversations

April 4th, 2018

Podcast 220: Mumps outbreaks — blame waning protection, not new viruses or bad vaccines

Mumps outbreaks keep happening, even among vaccinated groups. Why? Our guest, Joseph Lewnard, and his coauthor, Yonstan Grad, probed studies of mumps vaccine efficacy carried out over five decades. They show that the fault, dear clinician, is not in our vaccines or new viral strains, but in ourselves. Our bodies slowly lose their immune response […]

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August 7th, 2015

Podcast 181: Oral Contraceptives’ Role in Reducing Endometrial Cancers

(Running time: 15 minutes) A study in the Lancet Oncology gathered information from dozens of epidemiological studies to estimate that over 200,000 cases of endometrial cancer have been prevented in the past 10 years as a result of oral contraceptive use. A commentary in the journal offers a remarkable look at weighing the benefits and harms of […]

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July 18th, 2015

Podcast 180: A sketch of community-acquired pneumonia

The CDC’s Seema Jain is our guest, talking about a study she did with her team to characterize the causes of community-acquired pneumonia in U.S. adults. (They don’t mention finding Webster’s Micrococcus lanceolatus.) Medicine has come a long way since 1925, but Dr. Jain says that clinicians still need better diagnostic tools to pinpoint the […]

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April 14th, 2012

Podcast 151: Most people above age 10 have at least some cross-reactive antibodies to variant influenza

Influenza A (H3N2)v — a novel flu virus that emerged last summer and shows signs of being able to transmit itself from person to person — is our topic this week. The virus carries genes from swine and avian flu viruses, and the few cases found in the U.S. all made complete recovery. We talk with […]

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