Petrie Dish

The journey began with the story of the Spanish boar that saved Castro’s life.

Imagine one day your child bites down on something and the enamel on one of their teeth starts to crumble. That can happen in a condition called molar incisor hypomineralization — otherwise known as chalky teeth.

More than six-million American adults are experiencing heart failure right now.

Cancer care is about to experience a silver tsunami.

If you’re experiencing chronic pain, adjusting your diet might help.

Loneliness and social isolation can make you as sick as obesity or 15 cigarettes a day.

COVID’s winter wave has blanketed the nation, along with flu. After a brief decline, hospitalizations for both COVID and flu have increased again in Texas.

When people think about things they can do to stay healthy, they don’t think about their teeth nearly enough.

It’s a big moment, when someone — often dad — cuts a newborn’s umbilical cord. But before you cut it, you clamp it to stop blood flow, and UT Health San Antonio is involved in a study that’s trying to determine whether when you clamp the cord matters in babies with congenital heart disease.

When Bruce Willis, an action movie star known for his way with words, started to lose his language skills, it made news. He had aphasia.

“No study had been funded to really look at the needs of our Latino cancer survivors. We're the first study to be doing this," said Dr. Amelie Ramirez, chair of Population Health Sciences at UT Health San Antonio. "And they are so grateful to us because they said, 'nobody's bothered to ask me about my cancer journey.'”

Do you ever think about all that’s involved in just swallowing a bit of breakfast taco or a sip of coffee?

Selina Morgan holds a doctorate in physical therapy, a board certification in neurological physical therapy, and is an assistant professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at UT Health San Antonio. She believes that there are thousands of people out there in wheelchairs who don’t have to be.

What does the science say about ice baths and cold plunges? TPR's Bioscience and Medicine reporter Bonnie Petrie 'dives in'

Dr. Ginnie Abarbanell is chief of pediatric cardiology at UT Health San Antonio. She takes care of all kinds of kids, ranging from little ones with heart murmurs to children with congenital heart disease – which is more common than you might think.

Congenital heart disease can often be detected at the mid-pregnancy ultrasound, which dramatically improves outcomes. But too many people don’t get adequate prenatal care.

A UT Health Science Center San Antonio researcher has discovered something really interesting about Alzheimer’s disease.

Ozempic isn’t the only exciting diabetes medication out there on the market. Sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitorshave a multitude of potential health benefits.

For the last 25 years, the U.S. has required that grain and cereal products be fortified with folic acid — and the CDC is now urging manufacturers of products made using corn masa flour to add the B vitamin to minimize the risk of birth defects in the Latino population.

At the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, the brain bank is accepting deposits.

Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, chair of rehabilitation medicine at UT Health San Antonio, teaches her patients to practice what she calls pacing and other techniques to conserve energy.

If you’re in your 40s or 50s, there may be something you can do right now to fight Alzheimer’s disease. It involves Omega 3 fatty acids – the good stuff in fatty fish and fish oil, which has been linked to lower rates of dementia for a while.

We’ve heard a lot about artificial intelligence lately, and some of it is unsettling. But AI also has great potential to improve and even save lives.

Researchers have suspected that foods which cause inflammation speed up brain aging and cognitive decline, but UT Health San Antonio's Debora Melo van Lent wanted evidence.

Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, professor and chair of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, has been running two long COVID clinics since early in the pandemic, and she says every case is different.

The antibiotics that only 80 years ago turned TB from a voracious killer of an estimated 1 billion people to a treatable disease just don’t work anymore.

Did you know there is still one tuberculosis hospital in the United States? There is just one: The Texas Center for Infectious Disease in San Antonio. Host Bonnie Petrie takes us there.

COVID cases have been increasing for weeks nationwide, but a COVID expert says not to call it a surge just yet.

'We've seen women who have not gone outside the door in six months,' said Margaret Constantino, executive director of the Center for Refugee Services in San Antonio. 'How does anybody stay healthy in that kind of environment?'

Family members of a woman who changed modern medicine — without her knowledge and certainly without her permission — spoke at a gathering of scientists in San Antonio recently about ethics and equity in science and medicine.

While there are still tests, treatments like paxlovid, and vaccines in the national stockpile, those should remain easily accessible. Once the stockpile is depleted, though, all those things may become more costly to the consumer and more difficult to get.

Medical misinformation is killing people, according to the head of the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Robert Califf blames misinformation and disinformation about public health for the fact that life expectancy in the United States is between three and five years lower than it is in other high-income countries.

Can it turn us into murderous zombies? No, but it has killed between 30 to 60 percent of those it has infected.

Some are calling it the Kim Kardashian weight loss drug. Ozempic related videos have more than 1 billion views on TikTok. The medication is taken to help control blood sugar levels in type two diabetes, and it has taken off for an off-label use — as a treatment for obesity. Now, Ozempic is being studied for yet another potential use — as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

San Antonio researchers are getting the band back together, in a way. They’re reaching out to people who participated in a groundbreaking 1979 study on heart disease and diabetes in the Latino population to see if they’d like to enroll in a new study.

One of humanity's great quests made microscopic in the aging intestines of tiny monkeys.

Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez runs two long COVID clinics in San Antonio, is known for running marathons, and she partners in running a home as a mom to two children. But after recovering from COVID-19, she couldn’t walk around a mall. Host Bonnie Petrie speaks with Dr. Gutierrez about the realities of long COVID for millions of people three years into the pandemic.

The idea that there may be medicines already out there, safe and approved by the FDA and just waiting to be rediscovered is tantalizing for scientists, doctors, and patients.

Kids seem to be catching everything and getting sicker as the pandemic enters its third winter, leaving physicians and researchers to figure out what's going on.

Tens of millions of Americans take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — SSRIs — to treat depression by addressing what was believed to be a chemical imbalance in the brain. While new research debunks this theory, there are a number of factors people should consider before getting off these medications.

Flu. RSV. COVID-19. This three car collision of respiratory viruses as winter approaches is causing some health experts to worry about what they’re calling a "tridemic."

Whole genome sequencing is now becoming cheap enough that doctors will be able to order it for everyone if they want. That could lead to truly personalized medicine. But it could be even bigger than that.

The phrase 'mental health' has been used repeatedly in politics to avoid the gun control debate. But there was a significant lack of access to mental health care in Uvalde prior to the shooting.

The kids are not alright. A CDC analysis released earlier this year found that in 2021— the second year of the pandemic — more than 37% of high school students reported experiencing poor mental health, and 44% reported they felt persistently sad or hopeless throughout the year. Before the pandemic, mental health was already getting worse — according to previous studies from the CDC. Bonnie Petrie guest hosted TPR's The Source to talk to experts about this issue and the telehealth program in Texas that hopes to help solve the mental health crisis.

When Petrie Dish returns in September, we'll continue to bring you the latest on COVID-19 and also explore other topics with in-depth interview and reporting ... like a new study on depression that has people asking their doctors about their SSRI's ... or the idea that sequencing your genome may soon be affordable for almost everyone. Should you do it? And yes, we’ll dive into that other fast spreading virus: monkeypox. That’s all on Petrie Dish when we return in September.

As waves of omicron and its extremely contagious subvariants burn through previously uninfected populations, it has become clear that people with mild or asymptomatic cases aren’t immune from long COVID. Host Bonnie Petrie talked to reporter Pablo De La Rosa about his experience with long COVID over the past two years, along with Dr. Monica Verduzco Gutierrez, professor and distinguished chair of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. They discussed what we know about post-COVID syndrome and what we need to do to prepare for the decades of disability that may remain long after the pandemic is in the rear view.

COVID-19 testing clinics around the country are closing, and federal funding for free clinical testing is drying up. But wastewater surveillance could step in to play a crucial role in keeping track of where the virus is and just how much is really circulating out there. In this episode, host Bonnie Petrie takes us to a wastewater treatment plant in Converse, Texas and talks to scientists trying to build a surveillance and sequencing program in South Texas.

Ashley Savidge Hernandez, a Marine Corps spouse and mother of five, delivered a baby while critically ill with COVID-19. How did she and her healthy son Kyzon survive the worst that COVID has to offer?

Dr. Peter Hotez has become one of the faces of the pandemic. The bow-tied Texas scientist has been all over radio and television — and on this podcast, too — explaining viruses generally and COVID-19 specifically. Now Hotez and his partner, PhD scientist Maria Elena Bottazzi, have developed a vaccine that would be cheap and easy to produce.

In this episode, Bonnie Petrie guest hosts The Source on Texas Public Radio to put listener questions about long-haul COVID to two leading experts