Infectious disease has affected the human species for as long as we’ve existed, but in that time we’ve come a long way in understanding what they are and how they spread. In this episode of Crash Course Outbreak Science, we’ll introduce some of the core concepts that will help us throughout this series as we discover the effects of infectious disease, from the microscopic, to the societal level.

You may not realize it, but your body is like a fortress, designed to defend you from tiny foreign invaders known as pathogens. This seemingly small world is actually super diverse, and sometimes super dangerous too. That’s why in this episode of Crash Course Outbreak Science, we’re going to get familiar with all different types of pathogens like viruses, bacteria, fungi, and more!

We take it for granted that society gets better at tackling infectious disease over time, but when you really think about it the progress we’ve made in the last century is pretty amazing. How does that much progress happen so quickly? That’s what we’ll set out to answer in this episode of Crash Course Outbreak Science as we look at the theory of epidemiological transition.

We’re all susceptible to infectious disease of some kind or other, but not everyone is equally likely to be the victim of an outbreak. The fact is, inequalities both between and within communities mean that some people are at higher risk than others. In this episode of Crash Course Outbreak Science, we’ll look deeper at the factors that lead to this uneven distribution of outbreaks.

A sad reality that we have to face when studying outbreak science is that sometimes groups of people use outbreaks intentionally to inflict harm on another group. We call this "weaponizing an outbreak", and it's the focus of this episode of Crash Course Outbreak Science. In this episode we'll look at how different groups have weaponized outbreaks throughout history, and the consequences, and we'll discuss what we can learn from those cases to prevent bioweapon attacks in the future.