Do fungi kill three times as many people as malaria?

More or Less: Behind the Stats

BBC

Business, Mathematics, Science, News Commentary, News

4.6 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The smash hit TV show and video game ‘The Last of Us’ has spawned lots of curiosity about how worried we should be about the relatively unknown world of fungi. A figure in a recent BBC online article stated that fungal infections kill around 1.7 million people a year, about three times as many as malaria. In this episode we look at the both the global fight against malaria and David Denning, Professor of Infectious Diseases and Global Health at the University of Manchester explains the risks posed by fungal infections globally.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast,
0:02.7	where you're weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life.
0:06.0	I'm Charlotte McDonald.
0:09.9	If you aren't in this hope for the world,
0:13.4	where bother going on?
0:17.1	You haven't seen the world.
0:19.5	So you don't know.
0:22.8	This is a trailer for The Last of Us,
0:25.0	a smash hit TV drama set 20 years into a pandemic,
0:29.2	caused by a mass fungal infection.
0:32.6	It's based on a hugely successful video game
0:35.4	and has captured imaginations around the globe,
0:38.2	spawning a host of articles about whether such a scenario is realistic.
0:43.7	One of these articles was drawn to our attention by loyal listener Alex Davies,
0:47.7	who brought us shuddering back into the real world with a serious question
0:51.6	about the impact of fungal infections today.
0:54.4	Dear More or Less, as a loyal listener,
0:57.0	I thought of you when I read this stat on the BBC.
1:00.4	Fungi killed around 1.7 million people a year.
1:03.9	That's about three times as many as malaria.
1:07.2	This seems like a really big number.
1:09.4	Too big to be true.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.