Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today we visit with an old foe, tuberculosis. Dr. Richard Chasen, the director of the

Center for Tuberculosis Research at Johns Hopkins, speaks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about this

mycobacterium that still kills more than a million people a year. Now, there's a global

strategy to make historic progress. Let's listen.

Dr. Richard Chasen, thank you so much for joining me in public health on call to talk about

tuberculosis, a disease that's been around for a very long time and remains a public health threat.

Thanks for having me.

Happy to talk with you about tuberculosis.

As you say, it's a disease that's been around for a very long time.

It's a major continuing public health threat.

It's estimated that over the course of history, tuberculosis has killed more than a billion people,

just orders of magnitude more than any other infectious disease, including bularia, smallpox,

influenza. So it's a major public health problem. Prior to the COVID pandemic, it was the leading infectious cause of death, and it is once again

emerging as the leading infectious cause of death in the world, despite the fact that here

in the United States, it's declined to the lowest levels in our history, but it remains a big global problem.

And it's tuberculosis, but it's tuberculosis that continues to evolve, develop, drug resistance,

and threaten in new ways. Is that fair to say?

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