John Green recently teamed up with Kurzgesagt for a video on one of the world’s deadliest diseases: tuberculosis.
The white death has haunted humanity like no other disease following us for thousands, maybe millions of years. In the last 200 years it killed a billion people — way more than all wars and natural disasters combined. Even today it’s the infectious disease with the highest kill count.
The maddening bit is that tuberculosis is curable…it’s just that the cure is not equally distributed around the world.
4,000 people died of tuberculosis yesterday, and we simply don’t have to accept a world where so many of us still die of a disease we know how to cure. The White Death has been with us for millions of years. It is time to continue our journey without it.
In this Crash Course video, author and “TB-hater” John Green takes a deep dive into tuberculosis.
This is the story of the deadliest infectious disease of all time. It’s been with us for 3 million years, since before humans were homo sapiens. We have evidence of it in the mummies of ancient Egypt, and it’s mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.
We’ve made extraordinary medical advances. Vaccines, antibiotics, and clean water have saved millions of lives. And yet despite that, in 2022, this disease killed more people than malaria, typhoid, cholera, homicide, and war…combined.
It has gone by many names. In ancient China, it was known as huaifu, meaning “destroyed palace.” In ancient Hebrew, “schachepheth,” meaning wasting away. The 19th-century term: “consumption,” for the way it seemed to consume the body. Today, we call it tuberculosis.
People are going whole-hog bananas today over a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, in which gay men arriving at hospitals and clinics in San Francisco and Boston were showing high incidences of truly nasty drug-resistant staph infections. Let’s panic! After all, Matt Drudge is teasing the story with an invented quote: “STRAIN OF SUPERBUG ‘MAY BE NEW HIV’…” But that language doesn’t actually appear anywhere, much less in the Reuters summary to which he links; it does not even appear in this story that uses that phrase as a headline. Mmm, fake horror! The study began sampling patients four years ago. If this was the new super-plague, we’d all be neck-deep in boils already.
Stay Connected