S2E36 Because Mom Said So: The Infection Myths We Grew Up With

Put on a coat. Dry your hair. Don’t sit on that toilet seat. Green snot means antibiotics. And if food hits the floor, you have five seconds. But how much of the infectious-disease wisdom we inherited from our parents is actually true? In this episode of Infectious Dose, we put some of the classics under the microscope: whether being cold can really make you sick, what green mucus actually tells us, why fever isn’t a good measure of how sick someone is, whether public toilet seats deserve their reputation, what the five-second rule gets wrong, and why a case of head lice does not require decontaminating your entire house. It turns out many of these myths started with perfectly reasonable observations. The problem came when generations of parental anxiety tried to explain the biology. Mom wasn’t necessarily wrong about what she saw. She was just wrong about the rhinovirus waiting for you on the porch. Want to dig into the science behind this episode? You’ll find the full companion blog post, including annotated citations and links to the research, at InfectiousDose.com. While you’re there, you can also sign up for Field Notes, the free Infectious Dose newsletter, for more infectious-disease stories, outbreak updates, and curiosities between episodes.