Last week’s episode of the radio program Science for the People focused on meningitis and legal issues surrounding parents and standards of care. The podcast featured three members of The Maiden Lab, a multidisciplinary group working on understanding the biology of bacterial pathogens, including meningitis: Martin Maiden, Professor of Molecular Epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford; Charlene Rodrigues, Wellcome Trust Clinical Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford; and Kanny Diallo, a Wellcome Trust Training Fellow working on her PhD at the University of Oxford, who studies ecology and molecular epidemiology in the African Meningitis Belt.

The program also brought on Nicholas Little, the Center for Inquiry’s Vice President and General Counsel, to discuss a recent court case involving the death of a young child from bacterial meningitis, and the parents who were charged with “failing to provide the necessities of life.”