2025-05-21
52 分钟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.
Babak 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 Boheme and La Traviata.