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 20, 30 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 Chekov, and at least two of the Bronte sisters.

It killed the heroines of both Labo M and Latraviyata.

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.

There is a vaccine for it, but it's not always effective.

It can be treated with antibiotics, but it's a long and fairly complicated course of treatment.

And as deadly as TB is, it doesn't draw the attention or the funding that flow to other

diseases.

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