Contagion tells the true stories of the epidemics that shaped human history and the people who learned to fight back. Each episode, host Nirob takes one disease, one outbreak, or one breakthrough — the plague ships that emptied medieval Europe, the London water pump that a doctor shut off and thereby invented a science, the flu that killed more people in two years than the Great War, the last case of smallpox on Earth — and rebuilds it: the world before, the terror of the outbreak, the fumbling and the brilliance of the response, and what it left behind.

From the quarantine village that sealed itself off to save its neighbours, to the mosquito wars fought over a canal, to the strange proteins that fold the wrong way and eat the brain, Contagion is a history of medicine told through its hardest cases — respectful to the dead, honest about what was known and when, and clear about how much of modern life exists because of lessons paid for in lives. Cinematic but accurate. Serious but never ghoulish. Clean, with content notes where needed. A new story every week