S2E35 Campfire Curiosities: The Can, the Crabs, and the Note

Somebody's roommate's cousin definitely knows the person this happened to. This month on Outbreak After Dark, pull up a chair for an evening of infectious-disease urban legends. Heather investigates the infamous “Welcome to the World of AIDS” story and infected-needle scares, whether you can really get crabs from a toilet seat, and the long-running warning about fatal leptospirosis from rat urine on soda cans. Each story gets a Campfire Verdict as we separate genuine biology from folklore and ask what happens when something that could happen gets transformed into a story people swear happened. Then Heather and her unusually quiet cardboard cohost, CK, play Construct a Contagion, building an infectious-disease urban legend from scratch and testing their creation against real microbiology. Because possible, plausible, and proven are three very different things. Citations and resources can be found in the companion blog post at Infectious Dose.