2023-11-02
52 分钟Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.
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If I asked you to name the world's deadliest infectious disease, what would you say?
Covid-19 that was the biggest infectious killer for a few years, but not anymore.
How about malaria, influenza, HIV?
Those are all deadly, but not the deadliest.
So what's number one?
Actually, tb for the last 2030 years has been the number one infectious disease killer in the world.
Babek Javid is a physician scientist who studies tuberculosis, or TB.
You may think of TB as a 19th century disease.
When it was called consumption.
It killed John Keats, Anton Chekhov, and at least two of the Bronte sisters.
It killed the heroines of both La Boheme and La traviata.
And today it still kills around 1.5 million people each year, most of them in the developing world.
Tb is a disease of poverty.
It's really a major problem in India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, Nigeria.
TB is a bacterial infection.