A few years ago, when I wrote a post about the history of Smallpox, I… got a little obsessed.

I went DEEP down the rabbit-hole, learning everything I could about how smallpox affected people, families, and civilization. In the event that you and I had any long conversation during that time, I almost definitely spent some of that time talking your ear off about it.

(sorry, not sorry)


I thought that the story of smallpox and its eradication had to be one of the craziest stories in global medical history. As if no disease in history could have impacted the course of civilization more than smallpox.

Well… I’ve ended up going down another rabbit-hole…

And I was incorrect.


That title belongs comfortably with Tuberculosis.


Tuberculosis is… insane.

Besides being the most lethal disease in history, beating out smallpox, malaria, cholera, the plague, the flu, and AIDS, it also has been responsible for a shocking number of historical and cultural phenomena.

Tuberculosis killed over a billion people in the last 200 years.
Number of Deaths from Various Diseases the last 200 years.

Tuberculosis killed more than a billion people, leaving all other diseases far behind.(source)

It’s apparently the reason that cowboy hats were invented. It shaped women’s shoe fashion the early 1900s. It was apparently a big factor in deciding where the first nuclear weapons were tested.

Tuberculosis is everywhere.

And I do mean everywhere.


Over two billion people (1 out of every 4 people alive on earth today) are infected with tuberculosis right now.

And thousands of them will die from TB today.


The YouTube Channel Kurzgesagt recently put out a video about tuberculosis that I would highly recommend watching all the way through. It gives a really condensed, yet comprehensive overview of tuberculosis and how it has impacted humanity, through history up until today.



John Green sums up the insanity of tuberculosis in his YouTube short, explaining:

If you add up all the people who passed away in 2022 due to conflict, homicide, malaria, typhoid, and cholera combined, it is still fewer than the number of people who died from tuberculosis in 2022.

What makes that fact so crazy, of course, is that tuberculosis is curable!

So, in the 21st century, it’s not really accurate to say that serious illness and death from tuberculosis are caused by infection with the bacterium mycobacterium tuberculosis.

In fact, tuberculosis is caused by injustice. It is caused by inequitable access to health care.

And we know that, right? Because most of us living in rich countries never worry for a second that we will die of the world’s deadliest infectious disease.



Tuberculosis is curable.

Like smallpox, tuberculosis can be eradicated.

We should definitely do that.