Thomas Platts-Mills

speaker

97 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 17 Jul

Thomas Platts-Mills’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · Are You Really Allergic to Penicillin? (Update) · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

The LEAP study was a tremendous breakthrough.

A whole generation of doctors were trained thinking that penicillin allergy was very dangerous.

And very common.

And it isn't.

When I got here in 82, I already was saying things that, no, you don't need to worry about it as much as this.

You need to ask the question.

and take precautions and be sensible.

If someone had no history in 15 years, the chances that they're penicillin allergic are very small.

I'm waking my head.

People have been trying for a long time.

I can't tell you how many of the residents who apply for our fellowship have been doing a study on de-labeling penicillin.

So this is not something that people are ignoring.

Well, there's quite a lot of literature that says you can't quite rely on a blood test.

And that's what we should have is a simple blood test for IgE to penicillin that absolutely solves the problem.

Freakonomics Radio · 617. Are You Really Allergic to Penicillin? · 10 Jan 2025 podcast

Because the public doesn't decide which grants get funded.

This is Thomas Platts Mills. I'm a professor of medicine at the University of Virginia, and I've been studying allergic disease for a long time. And where does allergic disease fall in the pecking order of medical research? It's actually much worse than anything you imagine. Neurosurgeons are at the top, cardiac surgeons, and all these people fight with each other.

But they know that at the bottom, there are dermatologists and psychiatrists and allergists. I got very little from the university, a little bit in the first few years, but then basically in the last years, nothing. We've always had to get our own money, and I was getting NIH money, and the NIH has been very generous. This last time, I actually got a one on a grant.

It actually means you're in the top 1%. And then I got a merit award, and the merit award is absolutely wonderful because from 18 to 28, I'm funded by the NIH 10 years instead of five, tick bite research is hot.

that Congress voted $100 million for it so that we can get tick bite related grants for different aspects of our research. And that's been tremendously helpful.

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