Five years and nearly 50 episodes in, the CDC Foundation has given its “Contagious Conversations” podcast a makeover.
The organization, a nonprofit charity established by Congress to mobilize philanthropic resources to support the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced this week that the audio show will take on a new format as it begins its next season.
The podcast, which is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and its own website, began in early 2019. The 47 episodes released roughly once a month since then have largely followed the same structure, centering around a Q&A interview between host Claire Stinson, the foundation’s communications officer, and an expert on a particular topic. Past episode subjects have included the ongoing mpox epidemic, health disparities facing Black women and the opioid crisis, among many others.
Moving forward, however, “Contagious Conversations” episodes will sound a bit different. Rather than a simple back-and-forth conversation, they’ll follow more of a narrative story arc, with multiple experts weighing in and adding more context to the public health issue at the core of each segment. According to the foundation, the additional voices and context will help “paint a broader picture for listeners.”
The first episode to follow the new format went live on Wednesday. “The Costs of Getting Sick” dives into the economic effects of disease, looking broadly at how the CDC and other public health leaders’ work to prevent illness also saves money—and homing in on the response to a recent measles outbreak in Chicago for a real-world example that further illustrates the concept.
Throughout the episode, Stinson talks to Alexander Sloboda, M.D., medical director of immunization and emergency preparedness programs for the Chicago Department of Public Health, and to Dan Filardo, M.D., medical officer on the CDC’s measles, rubella and cytomegalovirus epidemiology team, about the progression of the outbreak and the fast-moving public health response. From there, she brings in Michael Osterholm, Ph.D., director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, to speak further about how disease preparedness can prevent economic disaster.
Stinson closes out the episode by noting, “You may have noticed we’ve expanded the way we do things on today’s show beyond the single interview format. We plan to keep doing that.”
To keep up the more multifaceted approach to its series, the foundation said in the announcement that episodes will come out quarterly, rather than the previous monthly-ish schedule, giving the team more time to put together the newly narrative-rich segments.
“Through this new approach to our Contagious Conversations podcast, we’re also working to illuminate stories that convey the lifesaving work of public health that take place around us every day, helping to keep us all safe and providing us, our friends and our families with the information we need to make decisions about our health,” Pierce Nelson, the foundation’s chief communications officer, said in a statement. “Public health is about protecting us all—everyone, in every community, in every part of our nation and world.”