September 5, 2026
Essay
Project SUNSHINE’s Supply of Human Bones
How Project SUNSHINE built a supply of human bones to measure radioactive fallout, and what its correspondence reveals about the people and institutions behind the samples.
Writing archive
Published work from The Edge of Epidemiology
Essays on outbreaks, evidence, disease history, ecology, neuroepidemiology, and the public arguments that gather around health.
Archive
64 essays
Each entry keeps the essay connected to topic hubs, disease maps, and related work across the site.
August 27, 2026
Essay
College Football’s Century-Long Experiment in Injury Prevention
It’s college football season, my favorite time of year. Another year of rivalries, institutional histories, and loyal fans keeping ancient grievances alive. Not that you care, but I’m a UCLA fan.
August 19, 2026
Essay
Supplement Labels Should Be a Test Result
Why every supplement batch should be verified before sale
August 10, 2026
Essay
One in Six: The direct and indirect toll of Iceland’s 1783 Laki eruption
In June of 1783, a fissure broke open in southern Iceland and didn’t stop erupting for eight months.
August 2, 2026
Essay
The Rabies Denominator Problem
Clinical rabies is known to be fatal, but its human infection-fatality rate is still unknown
July 26, 2026
Essay
Before the Odyssey, Apollo Sent a Plague
The Iliad, a Hittite mortality-crisis, and the limits of diagnosing ancient diseases
July 19, 2026
Essay
The Group Prohibition Helped Most: What Prohibition did for the unborn before pregnancy came with an alcohol warning
The Prohibition of alcohol in early 20th century American history became the policy everyone knows failed.
July 11, 2026
Essay
Were the Dark Ages Really Dark? What Rome’s Collapse Made Harder to See
Across much of the West, thinner supply systems and weaker administration made bad years harder to survive.
June 28, 2026
Essay
The Public Health Evidence on Policing Is Stranger Than Either Side Admits
Policing is not one exposure. Homicide prevention, traffic stops, arrests, and police violence need separate causal accounting.
June 21, 2026
Essay
What Did Your Job Do to Your Body?
Occupational disease starts with a boring question that can change the whole diagnosis.
June 12, 2026
Essay
The Deaths We Can't Count
Some deaths pass through a bureaucracy. Others have to be reconstructed from fragments.
June 6, 2026
Essay
The Flesh-Eating Fly America Thought It Had Beaten Is Back
The U.S. spent decades pushing New World screwworm south. Now the old livestock nightmare is moving back into view.
May 25, 2026
Essay
The Ordinary Deaths of the Vikings
The saga version is raids and swords. The burial evidence points to infection, injury, childhood death, and ordinary premodern risk.
May 19, 2026
Essay
Ebola in DRC and Uganda: What Is Known So Far
What we know, what we don't, and why an outbreak in a conflict zone is so hard to read from the outside.
May 13, 2026
Essay
Korean War Hantavirus: Hemorrhagic Fever History
How Korean War trench warfare, rodent ecology, and Hantaan virus turned a mysterious military outbreak into hantavirus history.
May 4, 2026
Essay
MV Hondius Hantavirus Outbreak: What We Know
A source-first guide to the MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak, Andes virus, cruise-ship exposure, travel risk, and what investigators could know.
May 2, 2026
Essay
New Fungal STI: Epidemiology and Transmission Risk
A source-aware look at a newly reported sexually transmitted fungal infection, including MSM networks, case evidence, transmission questions, and reporting limits.
April 25, 2026
Essay
Ancient DNA and Disease Selection in West Eurasia
How ancient DNA, infectious disease pressure, immunity, and changing environments help explain genomic selection in West Eurasian populations.
April 11, 2026
Essay
Big Epidemiology: Disease at the Scale of Civilization
What happens when you stop treating disease as background and start treating it as one of history's operating forces.
April 4, 2026
Essay
1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever: America’s First Epidemic Crisis
The 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic as an early American public-health crisis shaped by urban ecology, politics, race, and mosquito-borne disease.
April 1, 2026
Essay
Did Vikings Spread Plague Across the North Sea?
A careful look at Viking movement, North Sea disease ecology, plague evidence, Norse voyages, and the limits of reconstructing medieval pathogen spread.
March 27, 2026
Essay
Is the White Plague Returning?
TB never really left. The question is why public health keeps giving it room to come back.
March 21, 2026
Essay
Disease in the American Revolutionary War: Who Died of What?
Disease mortality in the American Revolutionary War, including battle deaths, smallpox, camp disease, military medicine, and eighteenth-century survival.
March 16, 2026
Essay
Disease on the Oregon Trail: Cholera, Dysentery, and Death
Disease on the Oregon Trail, from cholera and dysentery to overland migration, sanitation, graves, and nineteenth-century westward travel.
March 7, 2026
Essay
Yellow Fever and Napoleon’s American Empire
How yellow fever, mosquitoes, Saint-Domingue, military failure, and disease ecology helped destroy Napoleon’s North American empire plans.
February 27, 2026
Essay
The American Revolution Was Nearly Lost to Smallpox
Before the Revolution was won on the battlefield, Washington had to solve a smallpox problem inside the army.
February 14, 2026
Essay
Disease in the Early Colonies: Pre-Revolutionary War Disease Ecology and Outbreaks
Before the Revolution, British North America was already being shaped by smallpox, measles, enteric disease, mosquitoes, war, trade, and settlement.
January 31, 2026
Essay
Why the Columbian Exchange Did Not Run in Reverse
The usual story breaks when you look at childhood exposure, vectors, cities, empire, and where Europeans actually died abroad.
January 18, 2026
Essay
Plague, Steppe Migrations, and the Diseases Written Into European DNA
Ancient DNA lets us ask what migration, livestock, plague, and immune trade-offs left behind.
January 11, 2026
Essay
When Worlds Collided: Disease and Population Collapse in the Americas After 1492
The collapse after 1492 was real, but the usual story is too flat. Ecology, labor, war, and institutions mattered too.
January 3, 2026
Essay
Scourges of the High Seas
Ships carried more than cargo. They moved crowding, hunger, rats, mosquitoes, bad water, and disease across the world.
December 30, 2025
Essay
Cocoliztli: Mexico’s 16th-Century Mystery Epidemic
Cocoliztli and Mexico’s sixteenth-century mystery epidemics, including retrospective diagnosis, colonial records, ancient DNA, and pathogen uncertainty.
December 24, 2025
Essay
Inherited Infections: What Our Oldest Diseases Reveal About Human Prehistory
Ancient pathogens killed people, but they also left clues about migration, settlement, immunity, and the disease history carried in bodies.
December 17, 2025
Essay
The Disease Ecology of the Pre-Contact Americas (Part 2: South America)
Altitude, settlement, parasites, animal reservoirs, and the limits of the evidence make South America harder than the simple version.
December 10, 2025
Essay
The Disease Ecology of Pre-Contact Americas (Part 1: North and Central America)
Before 1492, the Americas were not disease-free. Their disease ecology was different, uneven, and badly served by easy summaries.
December 3, 2025
Essay
When Did Syphilis Enter Europe? The Origins Debate
Everyone wants a clean origin story. The bones, genomes, and old chronicles keep refusing to give one.
November 19, 2025
Essay
Ancient Hookworm in the Americas
Ancient hookworm in the Americas, parasite geography, archaeology, migration, and why a tropical helminth complicates disease-history origin stories.
November 12, 2025
Essay
The Ghosts of Meals Past: What We've Learned from Fossilized Poop
It is fossilized poop, yes. It is also one of the better archives we have for diet, parasites, and ordinary life.
November 4, 2025
Essay
Oldest Diseases in the Fossil Record
A deep-time disease essay on the oldest known evidence for infection, cancer, parasites, and what paleopathology can reveal.
October 28, 2025
Essay
Humanity's Deadliest Companions: Checking the Till on the Deadliest Microbes in History
Ranking history's deadliest microbes sounds simple until the denominator, timescale, diagnosis, and archives start fighting back.
October 22, 2025
Essay
Islands of Affliction: Leprosy and Empire in the South Pacific
Isolation was never just medical. It was stigma, empire, surveillance, exile, and disease control forced onto islands.
October 14, 2025
Essay
The Night Staten Island Burned Its Hospital: Fear, Fire, and the Forgotten Quarantine War of 1858
In 1858, quarantine policy met local panic, and Staten Island answered with fire.
October 7, 2025
Essay
When Diabetes Drugs Start Treating Headaches: GLP-1 Agonists and the Migraine Connection
GLP-1 drugs keep escaping the box they were built for. Migraine might be another place metabolism and neurology overlap.
September 26, 2025
Essay
The U.S. Life Expectancy Gap Sounds Worse Than It Is and (Hypothetically) Easier to Fix Than You Think
America's life expectancy gap is real. The shape of the problem matters if you want to fix it instead of just despair over it.
September 18, 2025
Essay
Psychedelics for Anxiety: What the New LSD Trial Does and Doesn't Change
The LSD trial is interesting. The boring questions still matter: comparator, blinding, durability, harms, and who actually benefits.
September 11, 2025
Essay
Body-Snatching, the Doctors' Riot, and How Cadavers Built American Medicine
Anatomy needed bodies. Poverty, graveyards, the law, and medical ambition decided whose bodies were taken.
September 3, 2025
Essay
Heat Exposure and Unequal Aging Risk
Why heat exposure may not age everyone equally, including climate risk, social vulnerability, occupational exposure, and epidemiologic measurement.
August 28, 2025
Essay
Finding Risk Where History Put It
Some medical risk is inherited through DNA. Some is inherited through history.
August 21, 2025
Essay
Infectious Diseases on the Move
Disease ranges are changing, but not every outbreak is a climate story. The details still matter.
August 15, 2025
Essay
Does Lithium Lower Alzheimer's Risk?
The dementia signal is interesting. It is not strong enough to turn a trace exposure story into a prevention claim.
August 7, 2025
Essay
Paper Mills Are Poisoning Science
Fake papers clutter journals, poison reviews and guidelines, reward bad incentives, and leave trash in the scientific record.
July 31, 2025
Essay
Eric Topol's Super Agers and the Medical System We Ought to Build
The super-ager story starts with lucky biology and ends at a harder question: what would medicine look like if prevention were infrastructure?
July 23, 2025
Essay
Migraine Brain Fog and Cognition
Migraine brain fog, cognition, medication trade-offs, attack phases, and how cognitive symptoms complicate the lived burden of migraine.
July 17, 2025
Essay
Memetics After Memetics
Why the word memetics faded while viral ideas, imitation, information spread, and cultural transmission kept shaping public life.
July 10, 2025
Essay
Shrooms vs. Antidepressants: A Meta-Analysis Calls It a Tie
Psychedelic hype makes the results feel cleaner than they are. Design, dose, expectancy, and follow-up still matter.
July 5, 2025
Essay
The Poison Nobody Could Agree On
One French town got sick in 1951, and the diagnosis has been argued over ever since.
June 30, 2025
Essay
Migraine Epidemiology: Who Gets Hit Hardest
Migraine is disabling and unevenly treated. Here is what the data says about who gets it, who lacks help, and why uncertainty remains.
June 26, 2025
Essay
American Headache Society Conference Notes
A short migraine research note from the American Headache Society meeting, focused on clinical questions, evidence gaps, and field direction.
June 22, 2025
Essay
Snort This to Tan: The Bizarre and Dangerous Barbie Drug
A black-market peptide promises a tan and a libido boost. The evidence is messier and uglier than the marketing.
June 17, 2025
Essay
How Accurate Is Your Apple Watch?
Fitness trackers are useful. They are also only as good as the signal, algorithm, body, and question being measured.
June 10, 2025
Essay
Justinianic Plague and War Epidemiology
A War Epidemiology chapter draft on the Justinianic Plague, military stress, empire, logistics, and disease pressure in 541 CE.
May 31, 2025
Essay
Melatonin Is Misunderstood
Melatonin is treated like a harmless sleep switch. Timing, dose, circadian rhythm, and biology make it stranger than that.
May 21, 2025
Essay
When the Influencer's Claims Are Stronger Than the Evidence
Vitamin D has real biology behind it. That does not mean the dementia claim is as strong as the clip makes it sound.
May 17, 2025
Essay
Creatine Is Underrated
Creatine is not magic. It is just better supported than a lot of people still seem to think.