In the United Kingdom, tuberculosis (TB) is a disease you only hear about in history class. It is taught alongside lessons on the large cholera epidemics in the 19th century, the Black Death, or the Spanish flu pandemic.
Across the rich world, TB was once a huge killer, but it is a disease that is largely consigned to the past. Death rates are very low in high-income countries.
But TB is still very common in large parts of the world. It kills 1.2 million people every year, more than any other infectious disease.
Someone in Lesotho, the Central African Republic, or Gabon is at least 3,000 times more likely to die from TB than someone in the United States or Denmark. You can see these huge differences in death rates in the chart.
This inequality is unacceptable. We know what causes tuberculosis and how it spreads. We’ve known how to test and screen for TB for over a century. And we’ve had effective antibiotics to treat it for over 70 years.