The Return of a Forgotten Killer

Feb 21, 2018 Bjørn Lomborg                

In the last two centuries, tuberculosis has claimed more lives than any other disease: an unprecedented and unsurpassed death toll of one billion. And, despite a compelling economic and moral case for investing more in controlling the disease, it has quietly resumed its position as the world’s leading infectious killer.

Thanks to the advent of a vaccine and cheap drugs, TB kills very few people in the developed world nowadays. So it has quickly been forgotten in rich countries – thought of as a relic from the Victorian era. TB not only gets scant attention, but also a fraction of health funding. Around 3.4% of total development assistance for health is devoted to TB, compared to 27.7% for maternal and child health and 29.7% for HIV in 2015..........To Read More....

My Take - Drug resistant TB is a very real problem in many parts of the third world, but I've thought there was no disease that killed more people than malaria.  In fact, it's been my impression malaria killed more people over the centuries than all other diseases combined.  Maybe that view is wrong. 

Either way - drug resistant TB is going to be an issue in the first world also because of all the immigration.

We here in the first world have the tendency to think all this good health is a right.  Well, it's not.  It came about from research, pharmaceutical drugs and vaccinations.  If "All Natural" remedies were so effective why did anyone need pharmaceuticals in the first place?  Because All Natural is deadly.  At the end of WWII the world's population was approximately two billion people.  It took thousands of years to hit that number, and yet, in less than seventy five years the world's population soared to around seven billion.  Why?  Research, pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs and vaccinations.