Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and you are about to hear the fourth and final episode of our series How to Succeed at Failing, which was first published in 2023.

If you missed any of the earlier episodes, they should be right there in your podcast app.

For this version, we have updated facts and figures as necessary.

As always, thanks for listening.

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 Chekhov, and at least two of the Bronte sisters.

It killed the heroines of both La Boem and La Traviata. And today, it still kills more than a 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 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. There is no Hollywood star that gets TB that puts it in the public mind in

everyday people's thoughts.

One of the reasons I was attracted to this field is I felt that infectious diseases in general,

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